Champion Data has named Marcus Bontempelli its first ever Diamond Club player, placing the Western Bulldogs captain in a class of one after 13 seasons in the system. The new benchmark recognises the first player in the company’s dataset to tick off all five categories across a career.
Hoyne said Bontempelli had been in the system for 13 seasons and had finished as a top 10 player in the competition in 11 of them, a run he said no player in history would match across his first 13 years. He added that Bontempelli was the third-best player in the game in year two, while Gary Ablett jnr spent five years as the number one-rated player, Nat Fyfe did it twice and seven other players have reached that spot once each.
The Diamond Club is built around five measures: carat, cut, colour, clarity and certification. Champion Data used career ratings and big-stage performances to argue Bontempelli had done enough to clear every one of them, with Hoyne pointing to his two grand finals as part of the case.
Those finals carry their own weight in the argument. Hoyne described Bontempelli’s 2016 grand final as the most underrated grand final in Champion Data’s history and ranked it the fifth-best grand final it has on record, before calling his 2021 decider phenomenal. That mix of elite season-long output and decisive final-day impact is what lifted Bontempelli above everyone else in the dataset.
Hoyne also offered a glimpse of the kind of detail Champion Data now counts when it grades players. Referring to the small taps some supporters dismiss as unrecorded, he said the stat sheet captures them as contested knock ons, a reminder that the Diamond Club is built on the sort of work that can disappear in plain sight. Bontempelli’s recognition turns that invisible craft into a permanent statistical marker.
There is no second member of the club yet, and no timeline has been given for when another player might join him. For now, Bontempelli stands alone as the first name on a list that did not exist until Champion Data found someone who had done enough across every corner of its game model.
