Was Richmond Doing Football Analytics Before Football Called It Analytics?

Read the full RTSSG investigationBefore Champion Data, Richmond Already Had Bill took the visible story and followed the question underneath it.

Long before data departments became standard AFL infrastructure, Bill Meaklim was helping Richmond record and preserve match information with extraordinary care. The interesting story is not nostalgia for notebooks; it is what the club understood about evidence before the industry had a fashionable name for it.

The question beneath the story

How early did Richmond begin treating football information as something that could be systematically recorded, compared and learned from?

This public companion keeps that question discoverable while deliberately withholding the resolved member conclusion.

What RTSSG investigated

How did Bill Meaklim become involved in Richmond’s match-day statistics?

What information was the club trying to capture in the 1970s?

Why did this work matter before computers made data easy to collect?

What does Bill’s archive tell us about Richmond’s institutional memory?

Where does the line run from handwritten records to the modern football department?

Those questions matter together because the surface event is rarely the whole Richmond story. The full RTSSG investigation connects them through evidence, cause and consequence; this public page stops before that final answer.

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