Only one can win, but there are 10 sides contending for the premiership

The 2025 AFL season promises more mystery and less certainty than any other of recent times. If you’re looking for a theme that captures the even, unpredictable nature of this year’s competition, the best might be from the current Bob Dylan biopic: it’s a complete unknown.

Only two or three teams can’t aspire to play finals, and there are close to 10 sides who would consider themselves premiership hopefuls, including at least three that missed the finals last year: Collingwood, Fremantle and Melbourne.

In a competition in which many results are decided by a kick, and the margins between first and 14th aren’t what they were, it will be the availability – not just ability – of each team’s best players that determines who rises and falls.

The Brisbane Lions enter this season as the standard-bearers, having shattered a number of previous conventions in their rampaging run to the 2024 flag. One was that a team couldn’t recover from an 0-3 start, another that to win the flag from the lower reaches of the eight is harder than gaining admissions of umpiring blunders from the AFL.

They will be the topweights again in 2025, having gained a kid that many recruiters rate as the best youngster in the draft – a second Ashcroft (Levi).

GWS, shamed by losing the unlosable semi-final to the Lions (blowing a 44-point lead), are my pick to play off against the Lions, and I fancy that the Dockers and Demons will come in to the top eight, at the expense of Port and the now-injured Bulldogs.

It is a measure of the rice paper-thin margins between clubs that Carlton and Collingwood are being discussed as both flag contenders and teams that can miss the eight.

Hawthorn, whose rise from 0-5 to a kick from a preliminary final berth astonished everyone, are the best-placed Victorian team, due to acquisitions and momentum and the good health they enjoy.