This is the third in a series of blog post that started with this one where we created a self-organising map of current AFL players based on publicly available game statistics, and overlaid the positions to which those players had been assigned on the AFL Player Ratings site.

In today’s post we’ll be looking at 2018 team profiles, using the same map (which appears again below) as we did in the second post, though for purposes of legibility we’ll use a darker green when labelling Small/Medium Defenders in the team views, and a red instead of a yellow for labelling Rucks.

Included in the maps for each team are any player that took the field in 2018 for that team and that has at least 10 games of experience (for any team) since 2015.

In reviewing these, it’s instructive to consider:

• The similarity of players filling particular roles (indicated by their proximity on the map).

• The typicality of players filling particular roles for a team compared to players who generally fill that role. You can assess this by comparing where a player is placed in comparison to the all-player map above.

As usual, the images can be clicked on to access larger versions.