678,319 player-game performances. One formula. Seventeen box-score fields, open weights, published formula, re-computable from source.
That’s what this site is built around.
KICK Rating is a single score between 0 and 100 for an individual player in an individual match. We’ve computed it for every AFL game in our database — 16,883 matches stretching back to 1897 — and the formula that produced every one of those scores is on a public methodology page you can check, argue with, and re-run with your own weights if you think ours are wrong.
Every other AFL rating we know about is either paywalled (Champion Data), optimised for something other than on-field performance (SuperCoach), run by a three-judge panel with a coaching bias (Brownlow), or unpublished and subject to quiet back-catalogue edits (the ratings column in your Monday paper).
KICK Rating is the opposite of all that. Here’s what it is, how to read it, and — importantly — where v1 falls short.
Start with what’s in the number.
What’s in the number
It’s built from box-score stats — the kind you can find on AFL Tables, or the AFL’s own match centre, or the back of the Monday paper. Kicks, handballs, marks, tackles, clearances, contested possessions, inside-50s, goals, behinds, hit-outs, one-percenters, frees for and against. Seventeen columns in total. Each column has a weight; the weights multiply the stats; we subtract a penalty for clangers; we divide by a constant to land the typical elite performance near 80. That’s it.
You can see the exact weights, formula, and normalisation constant on the methodology page. Every number on this site that says “KICK” was produced by that formula running over the publicly available box score for that game.
The headline number on a player’s profile is their rolling 40-game KICK Rating — the average across their most recent 40 games in which they played at least 50% of the match. We picked 40 games rather than a calendar window for two reasons: a player on a hot run doesn’t drop overnight when the season ends, and a player coasting on old form can’t rest on it forever. Forty games is roughly one season and a bit.
The profile also shows a current-season average (if the player has played in 2026) and a career average. Three numbers, three different questions:
- Season average — how are they playing right now.
- Rolling 40 — form over the last ~18 months.
- Career — how good have they been, all up.
The leaderboard ranks by rolling 40. The homepage top 10 ranks by current-season average.
A number means nothing in isolation, though.
Reading a KICK Rating
The bands below come from running the formula across every game we have. They aren’t imposed — they’re what the distribution produced — but they map cleanly onto how AFL writers and coaches describe players.
| Band | Range | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Elite | 90+ | An All-Australian season. A handful of players at a time. |
| Star | 80–89 | A clear best-22 player on a contender. Brownlow contention. |
| Quality | 70–79 | A genuine first-choice selection every week. |
| Solid | 60–69 | A consistent best-22 player on a mid-table side. |
| Average | 50–59 | A back-half of the 22 player. Rotated in and out. |
| Below average | 40–49 | Fringe player. Usually the first dropped. |
| Depth | <40 | VFL-adjacent. Limited game time when they play. |
A single game KICK Rating isn’t capped at 100 — it floats. We’ve seen scores above 140 in elite individual performances (the Gary Ablett monster games in his prime, or the Marcus Bontempelli 2022 preliminary final). Rolling 40 averages and career averages compress, because nobody sustains monster-game output every week.
The bell curve for a full-length AFL career, averaging across all qualifying games, centres around 50. Retire with a career KICK in the mid-60s and you were a genuinely good player. Mid-70s, you were a star. 80 and above — elite, top of profession.
A rolling 40 of 85+ in any given window means right now, this week, that player is the best in the competition at playing football.
Every rating has holes. Ours has at least three.
Where v1 is wrong
This section is here because every rating system has holes, and we’d rather talk about ours openly than wait for someone else to find them.
Hit-out-to-advantage is missing. Public box scores give you total hit-outs but not whether they went to your midfielders. In 2026 reality, a ruckman who wins 30 hit-outs and gives every one to the opposition is a weapon for the other side — but KICK v1 treats all hit-outs equally positive. This undervalues ruckmen with genuine craft (prime Max Gawn, Stefan Martin, Nic Naitanui) and overvalues ruckmen who just touched the ball in the air.
Contested marks in traffic aren’t distinguished from uncontested marks on the last line of defence. A forward taking a pack mark at full forward and a full back taking an uncontested mark in the goalsquare score the same. Champion Data sees the difference; public box scores don’t.
Pre-2000 data is patchy. Clangers, contested possessions, one-percenters, and inside-50s aren’t consistently in the historical record. KICK v1 treats missing fields as zero rather than extrapolating, which means pre-2000 KICK scores are systematically lower. Bob Skilton’s career KICK in our data is not directly comparable to Lachie Neale’s. We’ve flagged this on the methodology page and on every historical player profile.
Defensive value is under-counted. A spoiling defender who kills 12 contests a game scores via one-percenters, which is weighted at 1.0 — low. The forward on his opposite number scores via marks, goals, and inside-50s. The defender shuts the forward out and gets less credit for it. This is a genuine weakness of a box-score-only rating and we don’t have a clean answer yet.
If any of these hit your pet peeve — that’s the point. Argue with us. We’ll print the best rebuttals.
There’s a reason the list of problems is public.
Why we published it anyway
Every other AFL rating we know of is either proprietary, paywalled, or unreproducible.
Champion Data won’t publish its formula. The Age’s player ratings algorithm isn’t documented. Brownlow votes are a three-judge panel with an unaudited process. SuperCoach scores are a fantasy product whose rules change when the publisher’s product team wants them to.
KICK Rating is the opposite of all that. The weights are published. The formula is on the site. Every per-game score we compute can be reproduced from the box score on AFL Tables. If you think we’ve over-weighted contested possessions, you can download the data, re-run the formula with your own weights, and tell us where we’re wrong.
More importantly — if we change the formula, the version number changes. The current formula is KICK Rating v1.0. Every historical score on the site was produced by v1.0. When we ship v1.1 (probably in the 2026–27 off-season, after we’ve seen a full season), every score gets re-computed from source and every player’s number updates simultaneously. No quiet re-scoring of the historical record.
We think this is how public stats should work.
What we’re doing next
One signature piece a week in-season. KICK Rating trend reads, players whose rolling 40 is doing something interesting, tactical explanations of why the numbers move. No tipping, no hot takes, no “five things we learned.”
Off-season, we go historical — Brownlow re-reads, era-by-era KICK context, data-driven HOF cases. v1.1 of the formula lands when we’ve got a first cut at hit-out-to-advantage.
Every number on this site links to the match it came from. Click Max Gawn on the homepage top 10 and you’ll see his five 2026 games, the box score for each, and the KICK that came out.
That’s the whole idea.