How do you fairly compare players across different levels of sporting competition?
New research by PhD candidate, Dave Matteo, published in the International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, tackles this challenge in Australian Rules Football.
“The study addresses the challenge of objectively measuring and comparing player skill across different competition tiers in Australian Football,” he explains.
Traditional measures, like Champion Data Ranking Points, are often skewed by factors such as league difficulty, player age and position.
“This makes it hard to compare players fairly across tiers or track their development over time. There is also a need for methods that account for these factors to aid recruitment, player development and long-term player assessment.”
To address this, Dave offers a new modelling approach that adjusts for contextual factors.
“This enables objective cross-league comparisons and helps track player skill over time. It also has the potential to support recruitment, contracting and team selection.”
Dave says the methodology offers significant value to professional sporting organisations by enabling objective cross-league player comparisons.
“The next step is to expand this methodology to measure player skill across multiple specific facets of Australian Football. These specialised metrics will enable more fine-grained, objective assessments of player strengths and provide deeper insights into how players develop across different aspects of the game.”
Dave Matteo is completing an industry funded PhD with Essendon Football Club supported by the National Industry PhD Program, under the supervision of Dr Matthew Varley and Dr David Carey from La Trobe University’s Sport and Exercise Science discipline.
