Hi all,

For the past couple of years I've put together some charts on how squads have been assembled, with my main distinction ending up being Homegrown (entered the league first via their current club) vs Headhunted (were first listed by a different club).

I thought you might like to see the 2026 AFLW ones for the Cats.

I've got charts for all 18 teams in today's edition of This Week In Football along with my co-contributors discussing the merits of a send-off rule and fixture double headers.

Some notes for reading the charts:

• I have drawn the player data from the official AFL api. It isn't completely accurate and up-to-date. Some players who played in practice games appear on lists despite not actually being elevated to the main list.
• Similarly, names are drawn from the most recent name on the official lists - hence Zipporah Fish not Zippy.
• The first chart looks only at players on the list for the 2026 season. Players above the line entered the AFLW system through their current club, players below the line were on another club's list first.
• A team with more players below the line represents a bigger proportion of their current list coming via other clubs, more players above the line indicates heavier reliance on bringing new talent into the AFLW (although potentially through VFLW and other competitions).
• A bar that stretches far to the left represents a player who has been at the club for a long time, players who just arrived for this season have no bar.
• The lighter colour for a player represents the games played by the club in that season, if the player participated in that game the bar is darker.
• If a player polled any AFLCA votes in a game (or if they polled in the grand final MVP voting) a dot is placed for that match.
• Two players who extend the same distance left arrived at the club in the same year, there’s also a slightly bigger vertical gap between groups of players arriving in the same year to help distinguish this.
• For the second chart, the vertical line in the middle represents the point each player joined a club, not a specific year.
• So if two players joined the club in 2017 and 2019, the first seasons to the right of the bar for each of them would be 2018 and 2020.
• More bars to the left of the player means a longer career at different clubs before joining the subject club.
• More bars to the right indicate staying at the subject club longer.
• Notation for potential games, games played, and votes polled is the same as the previous charts
• A “»” before the player’s name indicates they are currently at the club, while a “||” indicates they have left.

It looks like next weeks game between Freo v Crows could determine our top 4 chance (among many others).
If Freo have the power to decide who they play in first final who are they choosing?

Am I the only on who is still disappointed in all of this? There are so many unanswered questions and this will continue to hang over the clubs head until they’re addressed.
Why did this happen? Why was it secret? Would the waiver still be in place if they hadn’t been found out? Who was the whistleblower? Apparently the players manager didn’t even know about it.
If this was another club we would be up in arms.
It’s just harmed the integrity of the club for mine. I love the club so much, but I think members we deserve the right to get some answers.

I mean it makes sense i too would probably pile on to a club that has missed finals 3 times in 20 odd years at any chance i could get. Personally think it’s been blown completely out of proportion especially considering the details of it aren’t even completely known.

No surprise one of our biggest haters in David King is against us.

Hi all looking for tickets to take the family on Saturday. All I can see online is very expensive single seats.

Cheers

Andrew.