Close games have been somewhat rare in VFL/AFL history, with most seasons producing them at a rate no greater than about 15%, and with more recent seasons producing them at even lower rates, as the chart at right depicts.

The most-recent season, 2015, saw only about 7% of games finish with such a margin, the lowest percentage since 1986 when only about 6.5% of games would have been classified as "close".

Close results though, like periods of good fortune, have not been distributed equally, with teams participating in vastly different proportions of them during different eras. Melbourne, for example, played in no "close" contests at all across the entire 1916-1920 Era, while Carlton's fate was for about 27% of its contests to finish as "close" games across the 1911-1915 Era. That must have made being a fan a slightly harrowing affair, though you would have had the consolation of seeing them win almost two-thirds of these close games.

(Note that we analyse using eras rather than individual seasons in an effort to reduce some of the small-sample variability evident in teams' season-to-season close game data and that eras are defined as 5-year periods except for the first which we define as running from 1897 to 1905.)

The chart below shows the proportion of close wins and close losses for each team in every era, where draws are counted as half a close win and half a close loss. Each cell is shaded based on the total proportion of close games that a team played in during the era, the overall shading pattern revealing the general decrease in the proportion of such games in more recent times as seen in the chart above.

That said, some teams have still found themselves playing a lot of close games even in the 2011-2015 Era, with Geelong and Essendon both notable examples. For both, about 19% of their games in this era have finished with such a margin, 11% as close wins and 8% as close losses. In contrast though, only about 2% of GWS' games have finished with such a margin in this era, and only about 6% of Gold Coast's.