In this exclusive op-ed, Manifest co-founder and managing director Isabel Thomson-Officer looks at why winning on the field and mattering in culture are two very different games.
You can’t buy a footy club’s culture with one good September. New Cultural Velocity data shows almost no relationship between where AFL clubs finished and where they sit in culture. Tigers fans, you may now gloat. Brands paying for the logo on the guernsey, you may want to keep reading.
Richmond won three games this year. Three. They finished 17th, a game clear of the wooden spoon, and spent most of winter being the punchline.
They also finished first.
Not on the ladder, obviously, but in culture. When Manifest’s insights team ran all 18 AFL clubs through an audit at the end of the 2026 season, the Tigers came out on top. Collingwood, who spent September at home, came second. Essendon, who collected the wooden spoon, came fourth.
Meanwhile Fremantle, minor premiers and merely kicks away from a first flag, came fifth. Melbourne played finals footy and finished dead last.
If you’re a brand trying to work out where to put your sponsorship dollars, this should make you sit up.
What are we actually measuring?
I can already hear some of you reaching for the comments section, so let me explain.
Culture doesn’t move like a scoreboard. Part of it is a stock, built up slowly over years. Can people find you and trust you? (And increasingly, can the AI models who are the ones answering their questions?) Are you distinct enough that they’d actually choose you? The rest is flow. Is attention moving your way right now? Are you expanding into new territory, or standing still? The stock is slow to build and slow to lose. The flow can swing in a single September.
To measure that, we use a diagnostic we built at Manifest called Cultural Velocity, the same one I used a few weeks ago to look at Novig and that Sydney Sweeney ad. It scores each brand on those four forces and rolls them into a single number, using 55 verified signals calibrated per category with a variety of prompts across a cohort of brands. Here, the cohort was the 18 AFL clubs.
Once the season wrapped, we ran every club through it and scored each club relative to the other 17. Then we laid that culture table next to the final 2026 ladder to see whether the two told the same story (see below).
I’ll be upfront about the limits. It’s one season and one cohort, and a club’s score only means something next to the other 17. It shows correlation, not cause. It tells you where clubs sit, not why. The why is where I come in, and where you’re very welcome to disagree with me.
Two tables that don’t talk to each other
Here’s the number that turned our heads. Rank all 18 clubs by where they finished on the ladder, then rank them again by where they sit in culture, and the relationship between the two lists is effectively zero. Only seven of 18 clubs land within two places of each other on both lists. Richmond’s gap is 16 places.
What that tells you is that culture in the AFL moves like a stock with a slow drip, not a scoreboard. Trust and preference, the mass the heritage clubs have built up over generations, sit almost untouched by a season’s results. Winning registers only faintly, and only in the flow: attention, and a bit of expansion. A flag nudges the flow. Position in culture gets built, and spent, on a decades-long clock.
None of which will surprise anyone who grew up in Melbourne.
Often you don’t pick a footy team. You’re handed one.
My son is three. He has opinions about a lot of things, mostly snacks, but he hasn’t picked a team yet. And when he does, I can tell you now it won’t be because he’s weighed up list management or admired a coach’s game plan. Odds are he’ll go for whoever we all go for, at least if my dad and brother (the footy fanatics among us) have anything to do with it. I’ve been wearing red and black since the day my mum saw a chance to get me out of the house, and yes, I made my dad multitask between a game at the G and playing Barbies on the bench.
That’s how footy tends to work in this town. Support gets handed down like a surname. Which is exactly why Richmond, Collingwood and Essendon hold their gravity through seasons that would sink a brand in almost any other category.
Richmond scores on being distinct and preferred, the highest in the league, off three wins. Essendon scores higher than any club on being found and trusted, with the wooden spoon sitting right next to it. Small comfort for a Bombers fan like me, but I’ll take the win where I can get it.
Generations of the same family in the same seats, in the same scarves, don’t disappear because of one bad year. Or two. Or, as any Essendon supporter such as myself will tell you through gritted teeth, quite a few more than that.
But (and it’s a big but) inheritance isn’t automatic. The data is pretty clear about that too.
Geelong, Carlton and St Kilda all score high on being found and trusted. That’s heritage-grade. All three still sit mid-table on culture, because what they’re missing is preference, the pull that turns history into conversation. Every club in the cultural top five pairs its trust with a preference score above 62. From tenth place down, nobody gets past 55. These are clubs people know and respect far more than they choose to talk about.
Heritage is the asset, which is handballed down.
Brisbane: where the tables finally meet
There’s only one club where the two tables properly agree, and it’s Brisbane. Third on the ladder, third on culture, and then a third straight flag.
They’re also the only club near the top where no single force is doing all the heavy lifting. All four are moving together. Three years of sustained winning appears to be seeping out of the flow and into the stock itself, which is exactly what it looks like when results start turning into culture.
Some of that is the actual football. Some of it is the story. Chris Fagan never played a game at AFL level and came up purely as a coach, and there’s something about that slightly rebellious, outsider path that people love to retell.
And some of it is history a lot of people forget. The Lions are what became of Fitzroy after the 1996 merger, so there’s a whole generation of Victorian families who carried that loyalty north with them. As a colleague pointed out to me, most of those fans would be older now. True. But they took their kids to the footy. And their kids are taking theirs.
Brisbane, in other words, did the thing. They won for long enough, gave people a story worth repeating, and plugged into an inheritance that was already there.
‘Wharfie time’ is now
Freo had the best season in the club’s history and came fifth on culture, sitting somewhere in the middle on all four forces.
To be fair to the Dockers, when it comes to cultural relevance, fifth isn’t nothing. They’re ahead of Geelong, Carlton and Hawthorn. But they’re still behind three Victorian clubs who won 17 games between them this year. Combined.
Interstate clubs play a different game to the Melbourne ones. They have their diehards, absolutely, but a big chunk of the following comes and goes with form. Everyone suddenly cared about Freo in September. Before that, they were just too far from the centre of the national conversation to own any of it.
A Grand Final run sends a huge rush of attention your way. What it doesn’t give you, automatically, is a reason for those new fans to stick around, let alone hand the club down to their kids. That’s the conversion job: turning flow into stock. It gets won or lost in the off-season, while the moment is still warm.
The finals sides nobody’s talking about
Now flip it around. Hawthorn finished fourth on the ladder and 14th on culture, with the lowest score in the league for expanding into new territory. Adelaide finished sixth and sits 16th. Melbourne played finals and sits at the very bottom. They bought themselves a September of exposure. On this evidence, it isn’t turning into standing.
There is one flicker worth watching. Adelaide has the second-highest expansion score in the league (70), behind only Sydney (80). If that kind of movement eventually drags trust and preference along with it, and we’d need to run this again to know, those are the two to keep an eye on next year.
So what does this mean for brands?
On-field exposure and cultural position are two completely different assets, and neither table prices the other. If you sponsor a heritage club, you’re buying into something that holds its value through losing seasons. If you sponsor a club that’s winning without the cultural weight to match, you’re buying a moment. Moments are great. Just know which one you’ve paid for.
That’s the opportunity for anyone willing to look past the ladder. There are clubs whose cultural value is running well ahead of their football, and clubs whose football is miles ahead of the story being told about it. Both are mispriced, and that’s exactly where a smart partnership can add something rather than simply rent a logo
It’s the same thing we landed on with Novig, in a very different context. Attention is easy to measure and pretty easy to buy. Position is slower. You have to earn it.
AFL’s relevance problem is a heritage problem
There’s also a bigger question in here for the AFL itself. It’s a conservative organisation by nature, and I’d argue that’s because so much of its cultural power lives in its heritage. Every time it tinkers with the rules, fans push back, hard. So how do you stay relevant to young people without trashing the thing that made the game matter in the first place?
I don’t think you sell them the shiny new thing. I think you teach them why the old thing matters. The heritage clubs do this almost by default, because there’s a parent or grandparent in the stands doing it for them, every single week. The newer and interstate clubs don’t get that for free. They have to build it on purpose.
Because culture can’t be handed out by a league office, or a marketing department, or even a premiership. It’s held by the people in the stands, and passed down by them, one kid, one Auskick session at a time.
Richmond won three games this year. Their supporters will be back in March anyway, and they’ll be bringing their kids.
That’s the end game.
Isabel Thomson-Officer is co-founder & managing director of Manifest.
