The competitive imbalance reshaping AFLW Season 10 is now bigger than expansion alone, with AFLW Weekly co-hosts Sarah Bert and Georgie Parker warning the gap between the league's elite and its strugglers is the largest the competition has produced.
Four rounds in, North Melbourne's percentage has ballooned to 492.1, more than three times the typical AFL men's leader. The Hawks, Demons and Sydney are all undefeated alongside the Kangaroos with percentages above 150. At the other end of the ladder, six clubs are sitting on a percentage of 60 or less.
"The chasm that's emerged between the best and worst teams is large and larger than we've seen," Bert said on the show. "You compare that to the men's, it's 140 is the top. They're one of four undefeated teams, Melbourne, Sydney, Hawks are all sitting 4-0 with percentages all over 150. Again, too high."
Parker, a former Collingwood player, was particularly blunt about the GWS Giants, who suffered another loss to Gold Coast despite winning the inside-50 count.
"They've just lost to Gold Coast, a very under-manned Gold Coast," Parker said. "They had more inside 50s, I think it was seven more inside 50s, still wasn't able to win. So my concern is, I don't see them getting better. So that's my big L: if you can't beat a very under-manned another bottom side, what does that look like?"
Both hosts pointed to draft inequities baked in from the league's expansion phase as a structural cause.
"It's been uneven since the start because the first eight teams, they all went for the best talent," Bert said, paraphrasing women's football analyst Shiloh Curtis. "Maybe it's stretching out a little bit now, but once the other teams came in, those best players were already part of that established team. Adelaide had pick of the lot in Adelaide. Fremantle had pick of the lot in there. Brisbane had pick of the lot before Gold Coast came in."
Bert summarised one of Curtis's proposed fixes from her recent appearance with Fox Sports' Ben Waterworth: "Tally up wins and performances from three years and average it out, and that's how you work out the draft. It's quite a complex sort of system that she has devised. There needs to be something like that because otherwise the talent pool is too stretched."
Parker added that the AFLW's low-scoring nature exaggerates the impact. "There's more massive blowouts in this compared to the men. If you're North Melbourne, you want a hot competition. It's like what Mibate said last week: happy we won, but no one wants to watch a low-scoring, boring game of footy. So it's not great for the league in general."
The pair argued that, unlike the AFL men's competition where North Melbourne and West Coast have shouldered most of the wooden-spoon burden in recent seasons, AFLW's struggle is broader. "In the men's, the middle ground can match it with the top," Parker said. "Whereas here, the lower ground is way bigger."
With expansion now complete and AFLW eyeing a longer fixture in coming years, the conversation about how to redistribute young talent and elevate scoring is moving from peripheral debate to central league priority.