2023 AFL Player Ratings: Who Are the Best Players in the AFL?

The 2023 AFL season is almost upon us which means it is time for the Stats Insider player ratings.

Our rankings are completely objective and utilise Stats Insider's powerful, ever-evolving computer technology to tell you which AFL players stand out from the rest.

Let's take a look at the AFL player ratings for 2023.

READ: The Full List Of Stats Insider's 2023 AFL Player Rankings

Who Is AFL’s Top Rated Player Heading Into 2023?

Melbourne's Clayton Oliver is Stats Insider's top ranked player heading into the 2023 AFL season.

The three time All Australian enters the new season as the number one AFL player in the eyes of the Stats Insider model, which has him at 99.7.

Touk Miller is rated as the second best player in the Stats Insider AFL player rankings at 99.1 while Marcus Bontempelli and Christian Petracca are locked together in third on 98.8.

Brisbane ball magnet Lachie Neale rounds out the top five at 98.5, while reigning Brownlow Medallist Patrick Cripps' stellar 2022 season sees him jump into eighth position at 96.3. 

Who Are the Top 10 AFL Players for 2023?

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How Does Stats Insider Calculate Its Player Ratings?

The Stats Insider AFL player ratings are the result of hard work of our data experts who pore across every possession of every quarter of every single game.

It's a three step process to formulate the AFL's top ranked players:

Component 1: Game Rank

After the data from every AFL game has been collected, a score out of 100 is given to each player. To score a full 100, the player would need to be unanimously considered the best player on the field. From here, each player is given an in-game rank from 1^st to 46^th. A rolling average of the players’ game rank is built into the final model, disregarding a player’s lowest 20% of performances to account for unknown factors such in-game injuries, as well as to give players in less consistent positions some room to move.

Component 2: Collating Awards' Votes

This part of the model I’ve named after the ‘A Tribe Called Quest’ song of the same name.

It solely looks at a player’s total score from every game over the last 40 matches of AFL. The key difference here is that it ranks each player against their current position, and turns it in to a league-wide percentile (from 0 to 99.9). This is built to stop midfielders filling all the top rankings like they have with the Brownlow Medal over history. With our system, there is no difference between being a Harris Andrews or Nat Fyfe as long as they’re both atop their positions in total score over that period.

Component 3: Star Power

In keeping with the theme of scoring out of 100, the last part of the model is also a positional percentile. Taking a longer look back, we find the average of a player’s best 20 games over their last 40 AFL games, and rank them against the other players in that position.

Who Is the Top Ranked AFL Player for My Team?

Here's the top ranked AFL players for each team heading into the 2023 season.

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