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You’ve probably heard the term ‘moneyball’ in an AFL context a lot over the past few years. We aren’t there yet, not even close. But with Emma Quayle’s career-change, the critical thinking revolution is one step closer.
In case you missed it, The Age announced, via one of the easiest exclusive stories they’ve ever had to win, that veteran AFL journalist Emma Quayle was joining the Greater Western Sydney Giants as a recruiter. Quayle had forged a well-earned reputation as one of the best Australian rules journalists in the land, with her specialty coverage of the annual draft.
This is a momentous move, for more reasons than one. Most obviously, Quayle becomes the first female recruiter in the AFL, forking off a road which has seen the game add its first female goal umpire, female coach and female field umpire in the past few years. While women have been represented in administration for many years, Chelsea Roffey, Peta Searle, Eleni Glouftsis and now Quayle have taken on roles that until recently had been the exclusive domain of men: football roles.
Diversity is great. These women have been appointed on merit, and many more will follow. In five years time, this won’t be a newsworthy happening.
It is a great development for the code. But it is not my main point of interest here.
According to the piece penned by Caroline Wilson, Quayle had been courted by clubs for some time. Her journalistic skills, displayed in ample volume across more than a dozen drafts, will be a unique skill set for the Giants.
From Quayle’s writing, and the stories she can elicit from her subjects, it is abundantly clear she has a gift for conversation. Her phantom drafts and draftee profiles are digital lucre, one of the most eagerly anticipated standalone pieces of content on the Australian rules interweb. She has consistently been among the best phantom drafters since phantom draft tracking became a thing.
Now, instead of us lazy people getting to pretend we know what we’re talking about by reading her pieces, all of that IP will form a critical part of the Giants’ recruiting strategy for the next however long. We’re all much poorer for it as consumers of critically thought AFL scratchings, and the Giants are all the richer.
This is where the story piques my (admittedly peculiar) interest. Quayle joins GWS’ now five-strong list management team with a journalistic skill set. Her colleague, Adrian Caruso, is the team’s National Recruiting Manager with a statistics background. Football statistics, but statistics nonetheless. He was with Champion Data for eight years and spent 12 months feeding David King the good oil in 2013. As best as I can tell, the Giants have the most diverse list management team from a skills perspective in the game.
As an aside, according to the personnel list on their website, the Giants have four permanent performance analysts on staff as well as two interns. From recent job ad activity, I understand many other clubs are looking to catch up.
The Giants current situation is important, because this is what I imagine a typical AFL list management committee meeting looks like.
Ok not quite as ridiculous as that scene from Moneyball. But with the profession mostly made up of ex-footballers of varying vintage, it is probably more real than clubland veterans would admit.
The Giants have seen value in appointing two people with non-playing backgrounds in roles that decide who will play for their club. Director of Football Wayne Campbell said it himself: “We feel like we’re a club that likes to do things differently”.
Caruso has been with the club for three drafts now, although in an opposition analyst role prior to taking on the National Talent Manager position this year. Quayle’s track record will begin to establish itself this season. We will know soon whether the outsider path is one which leads it to sustained excellence.
It is not unusual at all for these kinds of skills crossovers to occur in global sports – particularly in the United States, where the moneyball revolution began. Dozens of contributors to the website Baseball Prospectus, one of the first sports analysis websites to build a following for its wares, now work for Major League Baseball teams. They began as hobbyists, like the fictional Peter Brand from Moneyball the movie, and have ended up playing central roles in real sports organisations.
This kind of crossover likely happens in Australian rules, albeit it would be the more anonymous analysts of Champion Data making their way into and out of AFL clubs.
You’ve probably heard the term ‘moneyball’ used in AFL circles in recent years, in an attempt to legitimise analysis that uses numbers. There is nothing I have seen that suggests critical thinking and questioning of foundational conventional wisdom is happening at a large scale in AFL clubs. There are tactical innovations, and gaming of the rules, and Alastair Clarkson’s annual wizardry, but clubs still play follow the leader.
Look no further than this first weekend of the AFL preseason competition. The use of the handball – the weapon of choice of the Western Bulldogs, last year’s premiers – was up 16 per cent on the first week of the 2016 preseason. Teams were much more content to run the ball and ping it around with short handballs than last season; this also happens to be the calling card of Luke Beveridge’s premiership Dogs.
Part of this is because the driver of the Oakland Athletics’ adoption of sabermetric analysis – moneyball to non-weird people – was born from their miserly means with which to purchase players. The franchise was forced to think about things differently.
We’re a ways off being in a position where we can call the moneyball revolution as having swept through the corridors of AFL clubs. It might never happen; the community of AFL “fanalysts” – people poking and prodding conventional wisdom from outside of the four walls of a club – are doing their work with one hand tied behind their back. We do our best with what’s available.
Emma Quayle’s career switch from scribe to scout means there’s one more different perspective affecting the outcomes of our game. It may also bring the critical thinking revolution that has so far eluded the AFL one step closer.