Economists call it the 80/20 rule, a simple formula that describes what happens in competitive environments.
In football, we might call it the One Percenters principle.
Essentially it explains how the appearance of dominance by one group in a population (say, Hawthorn in recent years) boils down to just one or more slight advantages.
What may look like a striking discrepancy in ability or circumstances turns out to be the result of a few one percenters compounding over time. That’s because in football, as in life, small competitive advantages produce outsized dividends.
The Olympic champion is only fractionally faster, or more determined to prevail, than his rivals, but he wins all the gold medals.
The difference between good and great is marginal. And sometimes it’s hard to know which one percenters are the most important.
Hawthorn, as it languished in the lower realms of the ladder through the first month of this season, seemed to encapsulate this principle perfectly. The Hawks’ rise and decline raises two related questions.
In AFL football, what separates great from merely good?
And can legislating a level playing field ensure that every club enjoys an equal share of the rewards?
In 2013 — on the eve of the first of Hawthorn’s premiership hat-trick — then CEO Andrew Demetriou declared the AFL’s commitment to a competition in which all clubs were equal.
He said: “In your lifetime, if you’re a player, if you’re a coach, if you’re a supporter, you want your team once every 18 years to win a Grand Final, and that’s not an unreasonable expectation.”
This worthy aim is simply naive.
The AFL can legislate towards equal financial opportunity, but 18 different premiers in 18 years?
That is an unreasonable expectation.
Hawthorn’s story — and the 80/20 rule — illustrate why.
In the late 19th century, the Italian economist Wilfred Pareto was tending his vegie patch one day, so the story goes, when it occurred to him that a handful of his peapods were producing the majority of his peas.
Pareto wondered whether his garden’s productivity reflected a broader principle that applied in other walks of life and turned his mind to investigating. He knew that the same pattern occurred in the Italian economy, where 20 per cent of the population owned 80 per cent of the wealth.
When he looked at other countries, he found that although the 80/20 percentage was inexact (in Britain the wealth distribution was 70/30), the general principle held.
Those who studied other fields — the worlds of business (20 per cent of merchants capture 80 per cent of the market), nature (small numbers of tree species predominate in a forest) and sport (20 per cent of clubs win 80 per cent of the titles; 20 per cent of players win 80 per cent of the awards) — found the same phenomenon repeated over and over.
Indeed, Pareto’s 80/20 rule applies as a law of competition anywhere that involves a winner-take-all environment.
In nature, a lion that can run marginally faster than the rest of the pride (or that figures out a slightly better way to run the angles) gets the overwhelming majority of the kills.
She gets more food, grows stronger and becomes increasingly dominant.
A fine sporting example is horse racing, in which a handful of trainers invariably end up with the biggest stables, the best horses under their care and winning the bulk of the richest races.
You might even think about this in terms of the dynamic that underpins every competition: momentum.
Once a competitive advantage has allowed one party to gain the impetus — and plunged its rivals into negative momentum — it’s one-way traffic in that contest. In most walks of life, even sport, such momentum is hard to reverse.
The advantage may be tiny, but it compounds into disproportionate success.
Suddenly a football club has won four premierships in eight years.
The question is, however, what has been Hawthorn’s advantage?
For a long time the AFL has sneered at the English Premier League, where the lack of a salary cap allows a handful of rich clubs to secure the cream of available talent and shut out the rest of the competition (until last year).
The AFL’s equalisation measures ensure no such gulf in financial advantage exists here, and it certainly wasn’t Hawthorn’s edge.
However, until the Western Bulldogs’ breakthrough premiership last year, greeted with unbridled delight by the AFL hierarchy, the competition was stubbornly refusing to play ball.
A handful of clubs, led by Hawthorn, were dominating the premiership list.
Now that the Hawks are in apparent decline, the reasons why should be clearer to see.
First, some facts and figures on the cut-throat AFL and the distribution of premierships over the years.
Most analyses of this topic consider two separate eras: the former VFL (1897 to 1989) and the modern era (1990 to present) that began with the creation of an independent AFL commission committed to level the playing field via the reverse-order draft, player salary restrictions and compensation payments to disadvantaged clubs.
In the VFL — from 1897 to 1989 — the most successful 33 per cent of clubs won almost 60 per cent of the premierships.1
More tellingly, the bottom 33 per cent of clubs won only 7.5 per cent of the premierships.
During the 20th century the VFL often tried to even things up.
In 1915 it introduced recruiting zones. In 1930 it imposed a salary cap of sorts (the Coulter Law capping individual player payments at three pounds a game). Then in 1945 it announced the split of gate receipts between the competing clubs.
None of these measures had a measurable effect on the balance of power, according to a 2013 study by the University of Adelaide’s School of Economics.
Using the possibly dubious assumption of winning margins as a measure of competitiveness, this study found that of eight policies adopted over the previous century, only two had a positive impact: the minimum spend requirement on players’ wages under the Total Player Payment policy, and the priority draft picks policy deployed in various iterations since 1993.
The other measures — including the reverse-order draft — were ineffective at evening things up. Some were possibly even counterproductive (such as revenue sharing), the economists claimed.
Their study pointed out that while it’s generally accepted in the US that the NFL’s equalisation policies have been positive, not every analyst agrees.
The NFL has supposedly exemplified the “any team can win on any given Sunday” principle, so much so that in 2013 Demetriou led an AFL delegation to study this world’s-best practice.
However, the fact remains that in the NFL, the top 20 per cent of franchises have won 57 per cent of the Super Bowls. Thirteen of its 32 clubs have still never won one.
Worse, in the 17 years since 2000, 12 per cent of franchises have won 64 per cent of the Super Bowl titles (the Tom Brady-led New England Patriots accounting for five of them).
Meanwhile, back in the AFL, even taking into account the 36 years of football socialism since the introduction of the draft in 1981, premiership statistics have trended stubbornly towards 80/20.
Since the establishment of the national competition in 1990, 22 per cent of the clubs have won 52 per cent of the premierships.
That’s actually a worse ratio than in the
VFL era. (It’s a poorer result for equalisation if one uses premierships as the measurement of success. The AFL argues that the more even distribution of preliminary final appearances, and that fact that all but Richmond and the two expansion clubs have played in a Grand Final since 1990, demonstrates greater fairness.)
And the club most responsible for maintaining this unequal distribution of ultimate success? Hawthorn.
The Hawks have won five flags since 1990. In a truly equal competition, in which any club can win in any given September, that should take a club 90 years, not 27. (It’s 2098 until they’re due to win their next one.)
Geelong, West Coast and the Brisbane Lions have each won three AFL flags, which is exactly double their theoretical due.
So between them, four clubs have won just over half of the available AFL premierships.
Yes the draft-TPP system has been impure, with concessions appearing to confer advantages on some clubs.
The cost of living allowance to the Brisbane Lions and Sydney Swans, and the priority draft picks that gave a leg-up to Collingwood and Hawthorn, among others, became lightning rods for discontent for this reason.
But despite the AFL’s constant striving, to date it has not produced a different premier every season, or looked much like doing so.
One of Hawthorn’s advantages when entering its four-premiership era was arguably structural in the shape of the priority pick that allowed it to claim Lance Franklin as well as Jarryd Roughead at the 2004 National Draft — an undeniable coup. (It also received a priority pick in 2005, but the first-round yield that year was Xavier Ellis plus Beau Dowler, so it turned over that free kick.)
However, the Franklin bonus in ’04 hardly seems a decisive explanation for the four premierships to come, since he was at Hawthorn for only two of them (’08 and ’13) and the Hawks received nothing but salary cap space upon his free-agency departure. They won the 2014 Grand Final while Franklin starred for the opposition.
No, Hawthorn’s edge seems to have been in other, less obvious factors that helped it to grasp and maintain momentum, especially in the biggest games. In the small advantages that separate the great from the merely good.
How important, for example, were Hawk qualities such as these:
• The hard-edged competitive streak of Luke Hodge (an AFL version of Tom Brady) that made him a standout leader in clutch moments and helped foster a ruthless, “unsociable” attitude in his teammates.
• Cyril Rioli’s low-volume, but high-energy involvements that often triggered or magnified momentum swings and turned matches.
• Jack Gunston’s exquisite finishing under pressure.
• Brian Lake’s willingness to risk flying for his marks at crucial junctures of big finals.
• Jordan Lewis’s deftly weighted left-foot kicking to advantage.
• Sam Mitchell’s core strength and finely honed ability to get the ball swiftly to a teammate in space.
A lot has been written about Mitchell, Hawthorn’s former midfield champ now at the West Coast Eagles. In a fascinating interview he gave with Sunday Age columnist Timothy Boyle, Mitchell described the way he worked on honing one advantage he believed allowed him to disrupt opponents.
“I do short, lateral movements,” Mitchell confided. “In American sport they call it quickness.
“They have speed, which is straight-line, and clearly I’m poor at that. But they also have quickness, which has nothing to do with speed.
“If you set up cones and ran us one to the other I’d be one of the last. But if we were to move in and out of them I’d be first, or nearly first. It’s my point of difference, so it’s what I’ve always worked the hardest on.”
Game after game in the brown and gold, Mitchell’s lightning sidestep allowed him to find the metre of space necessary to then use his polished skills to find a teammate. His ball retention rate runs at 75 per cent — all the more impressive for the congestion he works in.
In 2015, the third year of the Hawthorn hat-trick, he was the most effective disposer of the ball in the AFL (average 22.8 effective possessions a game).
Last year at Hawthorn he was one of only four AFL players that Champion Data rated as elite for disposals, metres gained and score involvements.
When Mitchell departed to West Coast, the Hawks replaced him with a namesake, Tom Mitchell, an honest grafter capable of similar possession numbers as Sam.
Coach Alastair Clarkson may have hoped the exchange would not disadvantage his team.
Tom, however, is not Sam, whose exquisite delivery is now West Coast’s gain.
It seems a perfect example of a small edge that when combined with other like advantages compounds into wins, finals appearances and premierships.
It illustrates how well clubs should understand their actual advantages before they begin to dismantle winning combinations and pension off established players.
One wonders the extent to which even coach Alastair Clarkson, thrashing around for explanations for the Hawks’ decline while threatening “catastrophic change”, appreciates the real reasons for Hawthorn’s extended periods of positive momentum under his reign. Perhaps coaches are so close to things, and so inclined to believe their own bulldust, that they overlook the obvious.
Most importantly for the AFL, these small advantages that separate good teams from great cannot be legislated against.
No matter how well the AFL caps club finances, it will never be able to equalise the sort of performance advantages Hawthorn developed (apart from when they are achieved by players bending the rules, such as by inducing over-the-shoulder contact).
And that’s why this competition won’t produce a different premier every year.
The next Hawthorn will come along soon enough. The One Percenters principle says so.
Footnotes 1 Five clubs dominated the VFL for long periods of those 93 years: (Carlton, 15 flags), Essendon (14), Collingwood (13), Melbourne (12) and Richmond (10).
2 Dubious because winning margins are meaningless as measures of the relative ability of teams, as margins vary dramatically according to the pendulum swings of in-game momentum. For example, in 2010, were Collingwood and St Kilda evenly matched (as evidenced by the drawn first Grand Final) or was Collingwood nine goals superior to St Kilda (as in the replay seven days later)?
This article appeared in the May issue of SEN Inside Football.