AFLW ELO Rankings - Round 10
Hi everyone. Inspired by the AFL reddit power rankings, I decided to create an ELO ranking for AFL. For those that don't know what ELO is, it's simply a rating applied to each team, where if you win you steal points from the loser, and if a lower ranked team beats a higher ranked team they'll steal more points depending on how big the gap is. Considering how well the North girls are doing I thought this was something we'd all be interested in.
For this AFLW model, each team started the 2022 (s7) with 1500 points, and I ran it for every game from then until now. At the end of the season, teams get scaled towards 1500 a little bit to account for off season changes. I especially like this for AFLW as teams don't play every other team, so I feel like it's a better representation of how good teams actually are independent from the real ladder. I've also been doing this for the mens too and come up with some meaning for what a teams current ELO actually is:
>1800: Historically Dominant
>1700: Likely Premiers
1650-1700: Typical Contender
1550-1650: Typical Finalist
<1550: Likely to miss finals
<1300: Spoon Territory
<1200: Historically Terrible
With all that info: Here's the current ELO ratings for the AFLW. The North girls are not just above 1800, with the win over Adelaide they're almost at 1900! (1891)
Posted Oct 20, 2025, 11:47 PM UTC