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If none of you have read the new book Footballistics by the excellent James Coventry, you absolutely should.
Im going to be using this rather a lotIf none of you have read the new book Footballistics by the excellent James Coventry, you absolutely should.
https://shop.abc.net.au/footballistics
This is an excerpt of a chapter on travel and home ground advantage. They use disposals as a proxy for performance, for all players post 1987 who played for teams in one state for their career.
"The results are striking. Players' career trajectories are broadly similar across borderlines until they approach the 200-game mark. Western Australian and Victorian players, for example, follow a virtually identical arc up until that point. But beyond that, the average disposal counts for Western Australian- and Queensland-based players fall off a cliff, while those of their South Australian and Victorian counterparts barely decay at all. Players from New South Wales decline a little later and from a higher level than the Western Australian and Queenslanders. The picture looks much the same if we restrict the comparison only to those who play at least 200 games. The average output of Western Australian and Queensland players declines earlier and more rapidly than that of their counterparts from the other states, particularly Victoria and South Australia.
....
It is possible that the tendency for Western Australian players to have shorter careers, and for their performance to decay more quickly, is just a quirk or statistical anomoly that will eventually work itself out. But with more than 30 seasons of interstate competition now in the AFL/VFL history books, it seems more likely that the late-career woe of Western Australian players is real, and that travel is the probably culprit."
If none of you have read the new book Footballistics by the excellent James Coventry, you absolutely should.
https://shop.abc.net.au/footballistics
This is an excerpt of a chapter on travel and home ground advantage. They use disposals as a proxy for performance, for all players post 1987 who played for teams in one state for their career.
"The results are striking. Players' career trajectories are broadly similar across borderlines until they approach the 200-game mark. Western Australian and Victorian players, for example, follow a virtually identical arc up until that point. But beyond that, the average disposal counts for Western Australian- and Queensland-based players fall off a cliff, while those of their South Australian and Victorian counterparts barely decay at all. Players from New South Wales decline a little later and from a higher level than the Western Australian and Queenslanders. The picture looks much the same if we restrict the comparison only to those who play at least 200 games. The average output of Western Australian and Queensland players declines earlier and more rapidly than that of their counterparts from the other states, particularly Victoria and South Australia.
....
It is possible that the tendency for Western Australian players to have shorter careers, and for their performance to decay more quickly, is just a quirk or statistical anomoly that will eventually work itself out. But with more than 30 seasons of interstate competition now in the AFL/VFL history books, it seems more likely that the late-career woe of Western Australian players is real, and that travel is the probably culprit."
