AFLW has been played for ten seasons. Until today this site rated none of it.
That is now fixed. KICK-W rates every AFLW player in every game since the competition began in 2017 — 710 matches, 29,884 player-games — using the same formula, the same seventeen weighted box-score fields, and the same published methodology as the men’s rating.
Not a simplified version. Not a second-tier product. The compute literally imports the men’s scoring function rather than copying it, so the two cannot quietly drift apart. One thing differs, and it is the one thing that has to.
The scale is different, and that is deliberate
An AFLW game is not a men’s game. Shorter quarters, fewer possessions, a different distribution of everything the formula counts. Feed AFLW numbers through the men’s normaliser and every AFLW player looks worse than every men’s player, which would tell you nothing except that you had made a category error.
So KICK-W has its own normaliser, calibrated on AFLW data.
A KICK-W of 70 and a KICK of 70 are not the same achievement. They each describe an excellent game for that competition. They are never ranked together, never averaged, and never compared in anything we publish. If you see the two side by side somewhere, that is someone else’s mistake.
Calibrating it turned up something we did not expect. AFLW’s best players sit roughly 2.8 times above the median AFLW player; the men’s best sit about 2.0 times above theirs. Talent is more concentrated at the top of a ten-season competition than a hundred-and-twenty-nine-season one — which sounds obvious said aloud, but it has a consequence: no single scaling factor can match the men’s distribution at both the middle and the top. We anchored on the top, so nobody hits the ceiling and gets stuck in an unrankable tie.
Who comes out on top
| Player | Club | Games | KICK-W | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ebony Marinoff | Adelaide Crows | 107 | 92.7 |
| 2 | Jasmine Garner | North Melbourne | 102 | 89.4 |
| 3 | Kiara Bowers | Fremantle | 61 | 82.9 |
| 4 | Ash Riddell | North Melbourne | 85 | 78.9 |
| 5 | Charlie Rowbottom | Gold Coast SUNS | 51 | 77.9 |
Four of those five have won a league best-and-fairest.
Career KICK-W ranks on a player’s best 40-game window, not her most recent 40. That distinction matters more in a ten-season competition than it does across a century. Ranked on recent form alone, Erin Phillips — two-time best-and-fairest, and on most reasonable lists the greatest player the competition has produced — came out 55th, because her last 40 games were her decline rather than her prime. On peak 40 she is 20th. A rating that scores retired greats on their worst football is measuring the wrong thing.
The check we failed
The AFLW league best-and-fairest is umpire-voted 3-2-1 after every home-and-away match — structurally the same award as the Brownlow, and therefore a real external test rather than a mirror.
KICK-W passes it convincingly. All eleven winners across ten seasons rank in the top 30 of their own season, at a median rank of 4. Nine of the eleven rank top ten.
One check did not pass, and we are publishing it rather than tuning it away.
KICK-W under-rates defenders. It is a box-score rating: spoils, intercept positioning, the contest that never happens because someone stood in the right place — none of it accumulates the way possessions do. Across AFLW the average midfielder rates about 14 points above the average defender.
Emma Kearney is the clearest case. She ranks 21st overall — and first of 176 defenders. She is, by this rating, the best defender in the history of the competition, and she still misses a top-20 list that four midfielders with shorter careers make comfortably.
We could have fixed that by reweighting. We did not, because the weights are the entire reason this is the same rating rather than a lookalike. The honest options were to change the formula or to state the limitation plainly, and the second one is the one that leaves the numbers meaning what they say. It is the same blind spot already documented for men’s KICK, inherited here by design.
Read the defender rankings against each other, not against midfielders.
What is missing
There are no AFLW positional ratings. KICK-M, KICK-D, KICK-F and KICK-R are built from advanced fields — pressure acts, ground-ball gets, intercept marks, hit-outs to advantage — that the AFLW statistical feed does not carry in any season, including the current one. Not in 2017, not in 2026. That is a limit of what is published, not a decision we made, and it is why the AFLW pages carry the headline rating only.
It also means the phrase we used to run on every page of this site — that AFLW coverage would arrive at “full parity” — was never achievable as written. Full parity would require data that does not exist. What is achievable is the same formula, the same depth of history, the same open methodology, and an honest account of where the data stops. That is what shipped.
The history, in one place
Ten seasons is short enough that the whole thing fits on one page, and long enough that it has already produced some genuinely strange records.
Brisbane have played in seven grand finals and won two. No club has appeared in more; none has lost more. North Melbourne are back-to-back premiers — 2024 and 2025, the second by 40 points. 2020 has no premiers at all: the season was cancelled at the finals, so the ladder simply stops. And 2022 contains two complete seasons — Season 6 finished in April, Season 7 started in August as the competition moved to a spring window — which is why nothing on this site is keyed to the year alone.
The ladders go back to the first eight-team season in 2017. The leaderboard covers every player with 20 games or more.
This is a pilot
Fifty player profiles, not nine hundred. The top 30 by career KICK-W, the top 30 this season, and every best-and-fairest winner, deduplicated. If people actually read it, it expands; if they do not, it stays as it is and we will say so.
The methodology explains the normaliser, the peak-40 window, the shrinkage applied to short careers, and the defender limitation in more detail than most people will want.
The 2026 season is eleven rounds from its grand final. The ratings update weekly.