A sports data analytics company headed by a former Wallaby has forecast a gloomy year ahead for Collingwood fans.
Ben Darwin, who played 28 tests for the Wallabies between 2001 to 2003, heads up GAIN LINE, who have developed a metric – the Team Work Index (TWI), that can help predict the future fortunes of sporting teams all over the world.
“It’s the long-term philosophy of a club. Are they a club that buys, or are they a club that creates?” Darwin explained.
“What we find is, with clubs that create their own players, or draft young players through the system, is that those players with the stability the clubs have, they learn much faster.
“Whereas when players are coming in from other clubs, they try to influence other guys into the way to play, and often at times that could be quite disruptive.”
“The biggest thing that we’ve found is that the talent coming into the system is nowhere near as important as how the system is built,
“Its not so much about the who, it’s the house and how they build the house.”
The metric successfully predicted the rise of the Western Bulldogs – who they rated in the top two in each of the past three seasons, and has forecast that Collingwood will drop away the most this season.
“There is a huge amount of excitement around Collingwood about what they can produce – and we’ve seen that excitement with a lot of other clubs,” he said.
“The difficultly that comes here is that can’t find any coach in the world that can function above TWI – we’ve never found anyone that can be so good that they can overcome it.
“Wayne Bennett went to the Newcastle Knights and they underperformed dramatically, but we actually thought he did a brilliant job given what he had.
“The hard part with a club like Collingwood is that there is so much pressure from their fans for them to be successful, that sometimes they take answers in different ways and there is a lack of patience there.
“When you have that lack of patience there, you get churn, and when you have churn you get a lack of stability, and a lack of stability tends to creates a fault.”
Of the clubs down the ladder, Darwin said that Melbourne is the club who the metric favors most to rise up the table.
“We aren’t talking about winning titles, we are talking about coming up two or three places,” he said.