Clang a gong, we are on

This piece was originally published on ThisWeekInFootball.com

Last week I wrote about the three-year clangiversary of Hawthorn setting the record for most clangers in a match.

I wanted to provide a bit of a broader overview of the clanger. We have data on clangers going back to 1998. Ted Hopkins, who co-founded Champion Data, is the one who popularised what has since become an integral part of the footy lexicon.

I’d wager however that many of us (and even many broadcasters and journalists) don’t have more than a general sense of what a clanger is, so let’s bring out the virtual whiteboard.

Now, how many clangers happen per game?

If you look at just the numbers you’ll see a massive uptick in clangers since 1998. I don’t have a definitive answer on this, but I strongly suspect this is partly due to improvements in data capture and categorisation. Some of those actions above weren’t collected in the early days of Champion Data.

We can see that since 1998 the average clangers per game has tripled. If we move to the second slide we can see that free kicks have stayed relatively stable, while other sources of clangers have grown significantly.

From 2021 onwards we can see that the majority of clangers are disposals gone awry.

We know what a clanger is, and we know how often they occur, but we haven’t addressed the key question – do they matter?

Let’s look at the profiles of winning teams from 1998 onwards: 

We find that over the last 5 years, a lower clanger rate (clangers / disposals) is a meaningfully better win predictor than a positive disposal differential.

Having a lot of clangers doesn’t necessarily mean you’re performing poorly – some of the best players in the league frequently top the count. What matters is why you’re getting them – is it because you’re getting a lot of the ball, or is it because you’re being far less efficient with it than your opponent.

Before we get to our top (bottom?) list, let’s take a quick look at the clanger profiles of each team.

And finally, here’s the 20 worst clanger counts, clanger differentials, and clanger rate differentials.