2025 Season Progress Update
With the 2025 season properly in flight now, it's time for a progress update on the Roadmap to July 2025.
Tier 2 Competitions
We continue to add Tier 2 competitions to the AFL Platform. We are still broadly on track to have them implemented into the production environment by mid-year. The following competitions have been completed along with their 2024 seasons:
- VFL - League Id 5, Level Id 1
- VFLW - League Id 6, Level Id 1
- U18 Championships - League Id 8, Level Id 5
- Coates Talent League Boys - League Id 10, Level Id 5
- Coates Talent League Girls - League Id 11, Level Id 5
Being an API, these competitions' match data are delivered near identically to their Tier 1 counterparts, so their inclusion in the API doesn't come with any specific guidance beyond using their league and level ids accordingly.
We prioritised these competitions because of the challenges each one presented to the AFL API. This proved effective as it highlighted a few concerns which we have addressed "behind the scenes", having zero impact on the AFL Premiership and AFLW leagues already in place. This included:
- Handling the variability in Tier 2 venues' current sponsorship names (some have them, some don't, some change frequently)
- Handling when a Champion Data capture operator enrols a player into a Tier 2 match minutes before the match starts
- Improving metric generation, or indeed bypassing it on more advanced metrics that aren't supported by Tier 2 matches
- A single cancelled match in the Coates Talent Boys League last year that resulted in both teams being awarded a draw result
What's next for Tier 2?
Multiple Level Leagues
We are currently adding SANFL to the API. This will be the first league that has multiple levels, as we capture U18, U16 and Reserves SANFL matches.
Here's the table of levels each league can contain. Up to this point all API calls have been based around using the same level id (primarily Id 1), now querying will involve understanding which level you are targeting.
| Level Id | Level Name |
|---|---|
| 1 | Seniors |
| 2 | Reserves |
| 3 | Under-16 |
| 4 | Under-17 |
| 5 | Under-18 |
| 6 | Under-19 |
| 7 | Under-20 |
| 8 | Under-21 |
| 9 | Schools |
So this will be applied to both SANFL and WAFL as follows:
-
SANFL
- SANFL League - Level Id 1
- SANFL Reserves - Level Id 2
- SANFL U16 - Level Id 3
- SANFL U18 - Level Id 5
-
WAFL
- WAFL League - Level Id 1
- WAFL Reserves - Level Id 2
- WAFL Colts - Level Id 5
The API will be improved to list the competition name alongside the league levels so it describes the WAFL U18 Level as 'WAFL Colts' for example.
Tier 2 Live Match Ingestion
While we have committed to delivering matches to the API after they've been played this year ("post-match"), we are currently testing live match ingestion in the same manner as Tier 1 matches as we'd prefer to ingest all matches as they happen, regardless of tier. This in of itself is no challenge, but much of the work revolves around ensuring the AFL Platform handles the additional load in live matches and that none impact one another. To this end, we've taken the decision to logically isolate Tier 1 matches from Tier 2. This will have no impact on your use of the API and will ensure that should some issue occur with a Tier 2 match, its impact to the Platform will be limited to Tier 2 only.
Advanced Data Queries (ADQ)
We have selected Snowflake as the core technology for powering Advanced Data Queries and we have begun principal development. We have recently formed a team with a focus on data engineering and we are looking to grow the team as we scale for delivery.
First Release July 2025
The first release of ADQ will provide a queryable dataset that replicates the capabilities of CIA's Dimensional Custom report. This will initially cover Tier 1 leagues (AFL Premiership, AFLW), then later in the year expand to include Tier 2 leagues once they are available from the AFL API.
ADQ does not deliver static reports like CIA - instead providing access directly to the dataset to build you own reports or extract the data to use elsewhere.
Metric Glossary API Endpoint
The /metadata/metrics/glossary endpoint provides detailed information about each metric, including how it is aggregated and a technical description. It is undergoing a last-minute polish to standardise terminology and will be available in the next few weeks.
Match Metric Events API Endpoint
Work has begun on implementing a new API endpoint that returns when each instance of a metric occurred, along with which player(s) it applies to, its location and accompanying information such as pressure. Initial work revolves around looking at how to structure the API response - conventionally by period and period seconds or grouped by metric/transaction.
Head Start Report Metrics
We have identified a shortlist of metrics that are currently only available via the suite of Head Start reports and have begun documenting them for implementation into the AFL API. We will be in touch soon with the final list we'll be working on between now and July.