Geelong broke the AFL record for most possessions by a team again last week, racking up 498 against Melbourne.

Yet so often has this been happening - the top 10 highest total disposal counts for games have all occurred in the past two years - there is mounting evidence that the way statistics are traditionally measured has become irrelevant.

Much like soccer, where a player may pass the ball 70 or 80 times in the course of a match, individual possession statistics now appear to be devoid of meaning unless broken down into sub-groups.

The clubs, of course, have known this for some time, as Cats coach Mark Thompson remarked in 2008 after another game in which a disposals record was broken.

"I don't really count possessions," he said.

"Someone told me we had 460 (against Adelaide in round 14). It's almost irrelevant. It might be important to some football clubs, it's not important to Geelong.

"We try to measure other things that are important to us. Sometimes we have big possessions and big victories and we think the football is good. That's what we look at, not the stats; is it good football to watch?"

Thompson's opponent that night, Crows coach Neil Craig, said there still needed to be some further education of the public and the media about how to read the stats - citing the example of questions about why he did not tag a player who notched 35 touches without giving thought to where and how they were gathered.

"It's going to be an education process, because we've all been brought up statistically measuring people in terms of possessions, haven't we?" Craig said.

"That's the obvious one and it's easy to see, and easy to record. What you won't see is you won't see the running power of Richard Douglas off the ball that creates a space for Bernie Vince to drop into that gets a possession and gets recorded.

"If Douglas doesn't make the right movement ... I'm saying that's probably worth a stat, because if he doesn't run, Vince doesn't get it.

"A lot of stats are (meaningless) in terms of possessions they are, for example if we wanted to have a really high-kicking efficiency we'd kick the ball around all day and not miss one, but we haven't scored.

"It's just education about reading the stats an analysing them correctly."

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