Original study · 630 wet games · free to reuse (CC BY 4.0)
What rain really does to AFL football
Everyone knows rain changes footy. Almost nobody has measured it. We took a 206,722 player-game archive covering 2000–2023, kept every match with recorded weather, and measured what actually changes when it rains — scoring, accuracy, margins, skills, crowds, venues and teams. Some of it confirms the folklore. Some of it doesn’t.
Method, up front. Source: per-player match statistics for every AFL game 2000–2023 (206,722 player-games; 4,670 matches), with recorded match weather available for 2,819 matches (2008–2023). “Wet” = rain, thunderstorms or wind-plus-rain at the recorded match weather: 630 games. “Dry” = sunny/mostly sunny/clear/overcast: 2,139 games. Roof-closed (19) and windy-only (31) games are shown separately and excluded from wet/dry comparisons. Every figure below states its sample. Nothing is modelled — these are counts and averages from final statistics.
The headline: rain takes 10.7 points off the game
−10.7 ptsaverage combined score, wet vs dry (162.2 vs 172.9)
−4.4 ptsaverage winning margin in the wet (30.8 vs 35.2) — games get CLOSER
−7,051average attendance in the wet (19,688 vs 26,739)
182.4 ptsaverage score with the roof closed — 20 points more than a wet day
The counterintuitive one is the margin. Rain doesn’t just lower scores — it compresses the gap between good and bad teams: average winning margins drop by more than four points in the wet. A wet forecast is an equaliser.
The skills: fewer marks, more mistakes — but the folklore oversells it
Per player per game, wet weather means 4.2% fewer marks (3.89 vs 4.06), 8.8% more clangers (2.44 vs 2.24), slightly more tackles (2.90 vs 2.85) and fewer uncontested possessions (9.69 vs 10.00). But disposal efficiency falls less than a percentage point (71.3% vs 72.2%), and goalkicking accuracy drops only one point — 52.0% of shots become goals in the wet against 53.0% in the dry. Professional footballers handle a wet ball far better than pub wisdom says; the game gets more contested rather than dramatically sloppier.
| Per player, per game | Dry | Wet | Change |
|---|
| Marks | 4.06 | 3.89 | −4.2% |
| Clangers (errors) | 2.24 | 2.44 | +8.8% |
| Disposal efficiency | 72.2% | 71.3% | −0.9 pts |
| Tackles | 2.85 | 2.90 | +1.8% |
| Uncontested possessions | 10.00 | 9.69 | −3.1% |
| Shot accuracy (team level) | 53.0% | 52.0% | −1.0 pts |
Sample: 94,906 dry player-games vs 28,158 wet.
The modern game has halved the rain penalty
From 2008–2015, rain cost 8.9 points a game (172.1 wet vs 181.0 dry). From 2016–2023 the penalty shrank to 4.6 points (160.1 vs 164.7). Two decades of professionalised skills, drier ball-movement patterns and indoor training have made elite footy substantially more rain-proof — even as overall scoring declined.
| Era | Dry avg | Wet avg | Rain penalty | Wet games |
|---|
| 2008–2015 | 181.0 | 172.1 | −8.9 | 109 |
| 2016–2023 | 164.7 | 160.1 | −4.6 | 521 |
The wettest grounds — and the team the rain built
GMHBA Stadium in Geelong is the league’s wettest venue — 37.6% of its weather-tagged games were rain-affected, ahead of Marvel Stadium (28.9%) and the MCG (28.6%). And here’s the story inside the story: the team that calls the wettest ground home is also, by a wide margin, the best wet-weather team of the era. Geelong win 75.9% of wet games (87 games since 2008) — ahead of Richmond (65.4%), Collingwood (61.5%) and Sydney (60.3%). The rain built the Cats.
| Wettest venues (min 100 games) | Games | Wet | Wet rate |
|---|
| GMHBA Stadium (Geelong) | 109 | 41 | 37.6% |
| Marvel Stadium | 609 | 176 | 28.9% |
| MCG | 661 | 189 | 28.6% |
| SCG | 136 | 35 | 25.7% |
| Metricon Stadium | 165 | 34 | 20.6% |
| Gabba | 185 | 38 | 20.5% |
Marvel Stadium figures are as-recorded; the roof means “rain” there reflects the day’s weather, not always the playing conditions — a known limit of the tagging, stated rather than hidden.
| Best wet-weather teams (min 40 wet games) | Wet games | Win rate |
|---|
| Geelong | 87 | 75.9% |
| Richmond | 81 | 65.4% |
| Collingwood | 91 | 61.5% |
| Sydney | 78 | 60.3% |
| Port Adelaide | 49 | 59.2% |
What it means if it rains on Grand Final day
History’s expectation for a wet decider: roughly 10 fewer points on the scoreboard, a margin about four points tighter, four per cent fewer marks and nine per cent more errors — but only a one-point dip in goalkicking accuracy. If you’re watching the sky in September, watch the margin markets more than the accuracy folklore.
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