The Giants head into the new season boasting a relationship between the age and experience of their list the likes of which football has never seen before. And it's a marriage the experts think can see them in the frame for a flag not just this season, but for perhaps the next decade.

Analysis of AFL clubs' age and games played numbers usually sees a close correlation between the two rankings. But a huge core of still-young players with another season of senior football under their belts has thrown the old rules out the window.

In 2016, GWS had the second-youngest list in the competition, older only than the Brisbane Lions, and were also the only club with an average games per player more than the Lions.

But heading into the new football year, that average has soared from 57 games to 75, making the Giants, in terms of games played, now the fourth-most experienced side in the competition, behind only seasoned finals campaigners West Coast, Hawthorn and Fremantle.

Experienced list manager Chris Pelchen says that is indeed uncharted territory, and as close as AFL football will ever come to the perfect list scenario – a still-youthful playing group, but one with plenty of experience.

"There's never been, in the history of the game, I could say confidently, such a big change in one year," Pelchen said.

"We certainly see significant changes in the other direction such as this year with North Melbourne [the Roos having gone from the second-oldest and most experienced list to 14th and 15th in those respective categories after their exodus of veterans].

"But to go from 17th most experienced to fourth-most experienced, that's just never happened before. And I'd suggest it's unlikely to ever happen again in the future."

The influx of seasoned talent such as former Richmond star Brett Deledio (29 years old and 243 games), along with Fremantle pair Matt De Boer (26) and Tendai Mzungu (30) has also pushed the GWS age average up from 17th to 12th.

But it's the core group of youngsters from the Giants' beginnings in 2012 whose gradual development over the course of five AFL seasons has taken them into premiership-list-profile territory Pelchen is convinced they're going to be occupying for a very long time.

The GWS list headed into round one will have 10 players who have played 100 or more AFL games. But that number will rise substantially should a large core of the Giants' best 22 have reasonably uninterrupted seasons.

Co-captain Phil Davis, All-Australians Jeremy Cameron and Toby Greene, along with Devon Smith, are all on track to reach the 100-game mark in the first two months of the new season. And by finals time, they may well have been joined by Dylan Shiel, Stephen Coniglio and potentially even Adam Kennedy.

That would give GWS no fewer than 17 100-gamers, which along with an average list age of 24 years and 53 days headed into the season, puts them squarely in the place traditionally occupied by premiership teams, according to Pelchen.

"In terms of ideal premiership-winning profiles, you're looking for your list age demographic to be between 23 and 24.5," he said. "And to give you sustained success, you're looking for games experience somewhere between 80 and 110. The Giants are getting into those categories now."

Few AFL-era premiership teams have defied the rule of thumb. Pelchen says Essendon of 1993 and Hawthorn in 2008 were two obvious examples, while the Western Bulldogs last year also defied those odds, Luke Beveridge's team the fifth-youngest and fourth-most inexperienced list in the competition last year.

The Bulldogs, after the Giants, are the only other team going into 2017 to have substantially increased their average games experience, their ranking having improved from 15th to ninth.

"They [the Dogs] certainly broke the mould," Pelchen said. "But I think there's scope for the Giants to actually shatter the mould. We're talking about a side which, as we know, has had far and away more high draft picks than anyone in history.

"I said last week I'd never seen a greater discrepancy in a talent base of club compared to the rest of the competition, and that includes Hawthorn of the 1980s and Brisbane of the early 2000s.

"I think this discrepancy is even greater. And now you can see it with this differentiation in experience and age to the rest of the comp in terms of that pro-rata ratio."

Another reason the Giants' current price of $4.50 for the 2017 premiership might keep shortening even before we reach round one.