2025 Draft and Trade Explainer/Confuser

Football Discussion Trade week Duursma head in
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What?

This is the annual attempt to try and get all the rules around trading and drafting in one place. I’m going to split it across a few posts to make it somewhat navigable.

If there’s anything wrong, let me know and I’ll update it. I’m just a nerd who tries to keep up with this stuff and reads what I can find when I’m not sure, I could easily be wrong.

The List

The Groups

The list is split into 3 parts: the senior list, the rookie list, and category B rookies. This can be 36 senior and 6 rookie, 37 senior and 5 rookie, or 38 and 4 rookie. On top of this a team can have 0-2 category B rookies.

The Differences

From a football perspective, there is no difference between the lists. Anyone can get picked to play at any time.

From a salary cap perspective, the minimum payments paid to a rookie or category B rookie don’t count. Anything above the minimum does count.

Players can only be on the rookie list for 3 years. Unless they’ve played less than 10 AFL games, at which point the maximum is 5 years. Then you either have to promote them or delist and re-draft them.

Note: there used to be differences around selection and such. There aren’t any more.

How does someone get on the senior list?

  • Get drafted in the national draft
  • Get drafted in the pre-season draft
  • Get traded. Players cannot be traded onto the rookie list, even if they were on the rookie list at their old club
  • Get taken as a free agent. Restricted, unrestricted, and delisted free agents all need to be added to the senior list

How does someone get on the rookie list?

  • Get drafted in the rookie draft
  • Get drafted in the mid-season draft
  • Get selected in the supplementary selection period

How does someone get on the category B list?

  • Be an overseas resident who’s never played football
  • Be an Australian resident who hasn’t been registered in any football competition for at least three years
  • Be a player in an “elite” non-football competition (eg NRL, NBA, etc, etc)
  • Be an Academy or NGA player who didn’t get drafted in the national draft

Note: there used to extra specific rules about Ireland, but they no longer exist. Irish players are covered under the generic international player rules.

We’ll get onto what all those things are later, but them’s the rules.

The Inactive List

A player who’s on the list can be moved to the inactive list. The most common reason for this is injury, but it can be retirement, or I suppose if a player got arrested or whatever. A player on the inactive list cannot play football at any level while on the inactive list. No AFL, no VFL, no EDFL, nothing.

When a player on the inactive list gets replaced (we’ll get to how that happens), they cannot be taken off the inactive list unless and until someone else gets added to the inactive list. If Adam does his knee, the club brings in Bob in the mid-season draft to replace him, and then Adam makes a miraculous recovery, Adam cannot play football again unless Chris gets a long term injury. Then you can take Adam off the inactive list, and move Bob over to be covering Chris instead.

Note: this used to be called the LTI (long term injury) and lots of people still call it that. Technically it’s the inactive list.

Moving between lists

A player can be moved from the rookie list to the senior list at the end of the year by their team filling out a form. This is normally called getting promoted.

Technically, a player cannot be moved from the senior list to the rookie list. What happens in this scenario is that the player gets delisted, nominates for the draft, then gets drafted in the rookie draft by the same team. This is normally safe, but other teams can draft them (Hugh Greenwood had agreed to this process with the suns, but then got picked up by north).

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The Salary Cap

The salary cap (technically total player payments) is the maximum amount of money a team can pay its players in a given year, around $17.6m in 2025. There are an additional few million dollars called the ASA (additional services agreement) which covers club-linked player sponsorships. So if a player gets any money that is dependent on them playing for a specific club, that comes out of the ASA. In both cases, teams also have to pay a minimum amount, the floor, which is 95% of the maximum.

Banking Cap

If a team pays less than 100%, they can carry up to 5% over for a few years. So you could pay 95% one year, and then 105% the next year.

As mentioned above, the minimum payments made to rookies don’t count to the salary cap.

Player Contracts

Top 20 draft picks have a standard 3 year contract, other national draftees have a standard 2 year contract, and rookies have a standard 1 year contract. The exception to this is players over 23 or players who have been on an AFL list before, they’re allowed to define minimum terms for whatever team drafts them. Mid-season draftees can nominate either 6 months or 18 months (i.e. end of the current year or end of the next year).

There’s lots of stuff in player contracts, but the relevant parts are just really how long and how much. Teams can move around how the money’s paid, with the player’s consent, which is what people mean when they say “front-loaded” or “back-loaded” contract. For example, a player might have a 4 year contract worth 4 million dollars, but they get paid 1.5 million in years one and two, and 500k in years three and four. The important thing to know is that this isn’t just shuffling around the contract amounts in the salary cap spreadsheet, it is the actual amount the player gets paid. If a player wants to break a front-loaded contract in its last year or two, they have already received all that early money.

Delisting/Paying Out

Delisting is when you remove a player from the list, most commonly when their contract runs out and you don’t give them a new one. A team can delist a player with years left on their contract, which works as follows:

  • They are removed from the list
  • They get paid the remaining amount of their contract as if they had played every week (so 23 lots of match payments plus any other matches played bonuses)
  • The amount paid out is counted against the salary cap in the year they’re paid out. So if a player has three years to go on a contract in 2025 and you delist them, you need to be able to afford to pay all three of those years in 2025.
  • If another club then picks them up, the payout is reduced by the size of their new contract (“no unjust enrichment”)

Players can agree to negotiate a reduced payment, typically if they retire unexpectedly, but they’re not obliged to do so.

The notable exception to this is if a player gets medically retired by the AFL, normally for concussion issues. In that case the club can get some funds from the AFL to cover the payout, and apply to have it not count against the cap.

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Free Agency

A free agent is a player who, for one reason or another, can go to a club without being traded. Free agency status is decided at the start of the year (e.g. if a player isn’t out of contract, they can’t agree in August to renegotiate their current contract so that they are out of contract and become a free agent)

Note: being out of contract is a prerequisite to be a free agent, but not all out of contract players are free agents

Restricted Free Agent (RFA)

  • At least 8 years at their current club
  • Out of contract
  • In the top 25% paid (9 players) at their club in the current year

Note: the top 25% is only guaranteed money, not match payments or incentives. Also it is in the current year. A player might have very valuable contract and be top 5 in $/year, but if it’s heavily front-loaded, they might not be in the top 9 in that final year

Unrestricted Free Agent (UFA)

  • Not a RFA
  • Out of contract
  • At least 8 years at their current club (not in the top 25%)
  • At least 10 years at their current club, regardless of pay

Delisted Free Agent (DFA)

  • Out of contract and delisted (this needs to be real delisting. Refusing to sign a contract doesn’t count)

Rookie Free Agent (rare)

  • Out of contract
  • Offered a third year on the rookie list, but refuses

Note: once a player has become a free agent, they are then an unrestricted free agent every subsequent time they come out of contract.

Contract Matching

This only applies to RFAs. During the free agency period, the player can accept one contract offer from one club and submit it to the AFL. While there are presumably all sorts of negotiations and back and forths going on all year, the process starts with a single offer and it can’t be modified afterwards. Their current club then has 72 hours to decide whether or not to match the offer. They are only required to match the terms of length and average per year guaranteed payments, not any incentives or weird front/back loading. If the club matches, then the player can either stay on that amount, or ask to be traded via the normal rules.

Despite it not being the rules per se, the club losing the player is typically given an “indication” (i.e. told outright) what compensation they will get if they don’t match the offer.

At any point during the process the player can agree to completely different contract terms with their current club, the FA contract is not the only contract they can accept. Matching is uncommon but not unprecedented, but no RFA has ever had a bid matched and stayed at their current club.

Compensation Picks

The Theory

What’s supposed to happen is that the free agency period occurs, after which teams which have lost players to free agency have their compensation picks calculated. If a team, for example, loses a high value free agent and brings in a high value free agent, they will get no compensation pick for the player they lost. If they lose a high value free agent and bring in a middling free agent, they might still get a compensation pick, but it won’t be as good. If they lost three middling free agents and brought in one middling free agent, they’d likely get two middling compensation picks, etc. Yes, this incentivises clubs who lose free agents to not bring in free agents.

What actually happens is that once a club says they’re done with free agency, the AFL immediately gives them their compensation pick(s), if any, so the club can get on with trading. So if, for example, Draper left on day 1 of free agency and Essendon wasn’t planning on bringing anyone in, the compensation pick would be assigned on day 1 of free agency, not day 14.

The “Formula”

Compensation picks are dependent on the length, value, and age of the free agent. The AFL insists it’s a formula that they just plug the numbers into, however they have never actually released the formula, and the general public perception is that it’s heavily vibes based. A player can produce at most one compensation pick, and low value older players often don’t generate one at all. More details are in the draft picks section.

Shenanigans

An obvious trick here would be to offer a RFA a huge contract so that his current team can’t match and get good compensation, then as soon as he shows up at the club you renegotiate to a much more sensible contract. You can do that, but the AFL might choose to investigate and punish you for it if they don’t like it. The most basic thing they do is require that the original contract be counted against the salary cap if it’s negotiated down post signing. They can also fine teams, ban them from trading, strip them of draft picks, whatever. Whether that’s worth the gamble is for a team to decide.

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Draft Pick Basics

More on the drafts later, but before we can discuss trades, we need to know about draft picks. Picks in the national draft are assigned as follows:

1st round

1 - 18th
2 - 17th
…
10 - 9th
11 - lowest finishing loser of elimination finals
12 - highest finishing loser of elimination finals
13 - lowest finishing loser of semi finals
14 - highest finishing loser of semi finals
15 - lowest finishing loser of preliminary finals
16 - highest finishing loser of preliminary finals
17 - loser of Grand Final
18 - Premiers

2nd round

Repeat, starting with 19 for the 18th finishing team

Infinite Rounds, Infinite Picks

Every team is assigned one pick in each round, and there are an infinite number of rounds. Very rarely does anything after the fifth round matter, but the picks do still exist. If a team traded out their first through fourth round picks and then traded every player on their list for no return, they would be able to draft a whole new team using their fifth through forty third round picks. As long as a team has a senior list space available, they have a draft pick available.

Draft Pick Slightly Less Basics

Free Agency Compensation picks

Free agency compensation picks fall into one of 5 bands:

  1. Immediately after the club’s natural first round pick
  2. End of the first round
  3. Immediately after the club’s natural second round pick
  4. End of the second round
  5. Immediately after the club’s natural third round pick

By “natural” here, what I mean is the pick that the club was assigned in that round according to finishing order. It’s not a term in general use, I just need some way to talk about it. So if a club finished 14th, they have pick 5. If they had traded that pick away the previous year and instead have the first round pick of the premiers (pick 19), the band 1 compensation pick would still be pick 6.

By way of example, let’s take the current draft order:

  1. eagles (natural)
  2. richmond (natural)
  3. richmond (traded from north)
  4. Essendon (natural)
  5. Essendon (traded from melbourne)

Let’s say the eagles and north both lose a free agent worth band 1 compensation, the new draft order would be

  1. eagles (natural)
  2. eagles (band 1 compensation)
  3. richmond (natural)
  4. richmond (traded from north)
  5. north (band 1 compensation using their natural pick position)
  6. Essendon (natural)
  7. Essendon (traded from melbourne)

If multiple teams get “end of xth round” compensation picks, they are placed in natural draft order (an eagles end of first round compensation pick would come before a brisbane end of first round compensation pick).

Priority Picks

Bad teams can apply to the AFL for assistance packages, which may include extra draft picks. These picks can be whatever and wherever the AFL likes. End of round, middle of round, pick 17 because it’s Andrew Dillon’s favourite number, whatever. As with compensation picks, they are inserted wherever and push the rest of the picks down.

Round definitions

It used to matter more when more rules were defined in terms of rounds, but the second round begins with the second pick assigned to the wooden spoon team (or the 17th team if that pick is used in a matched bid, and so on). Everything before that is the first round. So while in theory the first round is 18 picks, it can easily end up as 25 or more.

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Trading

We’ll come back to how the drafts actually work later, but we needed that information so that we can talk about trades. Why? Because when players are traded, it is for other players and national draft picks. The AFL has floated the idea of being able to trade for salary cap or other considerations, but for now it’s just picks and players.

Pick Trades

Teams can trade picks for picks, no players have to be involved

Future Pick Trades

Up until this year, teams have been able to trade picks up to one year in advance. As of this year, it’s now up to two years in advance, so in 2025 a team could trade in or out 2026 and 2027 picks. Future pick trading has the following restrictions:

  • if you trade out your future 2nd, 3rd, or 4th round pick in a given year, you cannot trade out your future first. You can trade 2nd, 3rd, and 4th if you want to though.
  • obviously the inverse of this is if you trade your future first for a given year, you cannot trade out other future picks in that year. This only applies to 2-4, nobody cares about future fifth+ round picks
  • the caveat to the above is that you can trade out picks if you’ve brought in other future picks as good or better (based on round, not ladder position). So if you have traded out you 2026 3rd, but brought in a 2026 2nd, you would be able to trade your 2026 1st
  • You can only trade future firsts if you have taken at least two first round picks in the preceding 4 years. This may be ignored if you’ve traded for sufficiently young and sufficiently good players (e.g. port trading for JHF as a second year pick 1 would functionally count as drafting a first round pick for this rule)

You cannot future trade players. I don’t think it’s ever been suggested, but we couldn’t agree to trade Merrett at the end of 2026 for a first round pick this year or similar.

Three Party Agreement

You cannot trade a player to the highest bidder, you can only trade them somewhere they’re willing to go. This is very basic, but something some people seem unable to grasp. Every trade that is done requires the agreement (however grudging it may be) of the club the player is currently at, the club the player is going to, and the player. You cannot trade a player without his consent. You cannot trade a player to a club that doesn’t want them. You cannot trade a player from a club that wants to keep him. That third one is slightly more complicated, so I’ll explain that, but for the people up the back you cannot trade a player to the highest bidder, you can only trade them somewhere they’re willing to go.

With regards to trading a player from a club that wants to keep him, there are two cases.

  1. The player is contracted. The club can just keep the player. There is no avenue for a trade to actually be forced. If Merrett has two years left on his contract and he wants to go to another club, Essendon can just say no, end of story.
  2. The player is out of contract and not a free agent. Their current team can refuse to trade in this scenario. The player is removed from the list (not delisted for the purposes of free agency or SSP) and can then only get onto a new AFL list via the drafts. It’s rare, because the club loses the player for nothing, but it does happen occasionally.

Salary Dumps

Salary dumps are not an official rule, but refers to when a player is traded and the player’s current contract has a significant negative effect. For example, if you have a player with a $1m salary who you want to get rid of who might be pick 20 quality in terms of on field performance, you might trade him for pick 60 just so you’re not paying him $1m any more. Salary dumps are something the AFL considers when assessing if a trade is fair(ish).

There is nothing stopping that player renegotiating his deal at his new club of course. So you might dump a $1m contract and his new club signs him to a $500k deal.

Paying Traded Players

Similar to salary dumps, agreeing to pay some portion of a player’s contract when they move can improve their trade value. For example maybe a player is worth pick 40, but you agree to pay $300k a year of his new contract, and get pick 25 instead.

AFL Approval

Any trade needs to be ticked off by the AFL. They’re pretty laid back about it, but if you have some idea for some kind of tricky loophole where both teams make out like bandits, the answer is probably the AFL wouldn’t approve it.

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Drafting

The Midseason Draft

The midseason draft is the first one that happens within a given year, during the middle of the season. Any team with players who have been put on the inactive list can participate. The draft order is simply the reverse ladder order from the previously completed round, no trading allowed. Nominees can nominate for either a six month (end of the season) or 18 month (end of the next season) contract. Clubs can sign them to a longer deal if they want to, but that’s the minimum.

Midseason draftees are added to the rookie list.

Nominating For Drafts (National, Pre-Season, Rookie)

A player who will be 18 by the end of the year and meets the requirements of having played enough football can nominate for the draft. Players who have not previously been on an AFL list cannot nominate for the Pre-Season or Rookie drafts without also nominating for the National Draft. Players who have been on an AFL list can nominate for just the National, just the PSD, or all three.

The National Draft

The national draft is what people are referring to when they say “the draft”. There’s a whole separate section below for the bidding system, because it’s a lot. This is what the national draft would look like if there was no bidding.

The national draft takes place over two nights, with the first night being the first round, and the second night being all the rest.

Draft Picks

Regardless of how many draft picks a team has accrued during the trade period, they can only start the draft with as many picks has they have open list spots. For example, if Essendon had four open list spots but also had picks 5, 7, 8, 25, 27, 29, 30, 48 and 51, when the draft started picks 27, 29, 30, 48, and 51 would disappear.

Draft Night Trades

Teams can do pick trades on the night of the draft, with the same rules as normal pick trades (future picks, etc, etc). Players cannot be traded on draft night. This includes existing listed players, and players who have just been drafted (this is different to the NBA or NFL if you’re familiar with those leagues).

The Loophole

While teams are not allowed to have more picks than open spots when the draft starts, as soon as it starts, that stops being true. So a team could organise a trade with another team, then do it as soon as the draft starts and have 10 picks with 4 open spots before the first pick is even taken. Read the bidding rules as to why this might be useful.

Drafting Players

The AFL calls out the pick and the team name, the team then has a few minutes to call out a player’s name, club, and draftee number (to avoid confusion with multiple players with the same name, etc), then onto the next pick, and so on. Once per draft, a team can ask for extra time in case unexpected things happen. In theory if time runs out, the team loses that pick and it moves on to the next team. This has never happened, in part because the AFL don’t enforce it very strongly.

A team can pass on their pick if they wish to, but if they do they cannot then draft another player. The only exception to this is that a team which has passed can still match a bid on a player they have priority access to.

National draftees are added to the senior list.

The Pre-Season Draft

The pre-season draft (PSD) occurs between the national draft and the rookie draft. There are rarely more than a handful of players taken, and it’s really a vestige of older rules from decades ago. The order is determined the same way as the national draft, but with no trading allowed. Players who are eligible for the PSD can set their terms in terms of contract length and year by year payments, and whoever drafts them has to meet those terms. In addition, any team who says they intend to draft them has to prove to the AFL they can afford the contract. Mostly the PSD exists now as a fallback for uncontracted AFL players whose trades fall apart.

PSD draftees are added to the senior list.

The Rookie Draft

The rookie draft occurs the day after the national draft, and almost immediately following the PSD. The order is determined the same way as the national draft, but with no trading allowed. Rookies get a one year contract on less money than a national draftee. Clubs can sign rookies for longer if they wish to and both parties agree.

Rookie draftees are, unsurprisingly, added to the rookie list.

(The Supplementary Selection Period)

For a club to be able to add players to the list via the SSP they either need to have open spots on the rookie list, or have moved a player onto the inactive list.

There are rules about having played a minimum number of games at the appropriate level (state league, U18s, etc) so that teams can’t hide players away and then just grab them in the SSP. Any player who has been on an AFL and subsequently delisted can nominate for the SSP without having nominated for the drafts. Any other player must have also nominated for the draft.

A team cannot SSP a player that retired from that team or was delisted by that team the same year, unless that player also nominated himself for the draft. This is to avoid teams opening up list spots without running the risk of losing the player.

SSP players are added to the rookie list.

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The Bidding System

There are several reasons why a team might have priority access to a player at the draft.

(Northern) Academies

The Club Academies, normally referred to as northern academies because they’re the academies tied to the NSW and Queensland teams, cover every eligible player in their zone. Roughly speaking the lions and suns each get half of Queensland, and the swans and giants each get half of NSW.

Once a player is in an academy, it’s the club’s decision whether or not to nominate them for priority access, the player agreed by joining the academy.

If an academy player is not bid on, he may be added to the category B rookie list.

Next Generation Academies

The Next Generation Academies (NGAs) are academies for teams in traditional football areas (i.e. not northern states) but only apply to indigenous and multicultural players. Indigenous is defined as someone who identifies as and is reocgnised by the relevant indigenous community as indigenous. Multicultural is either born overseas, or one or parent born in Asia or Africa, or both parents born outside a main English speaking country (UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Canada, USA). It seems as though this is also being expanded to include the Pacific Islands on par with Asia and Africa, but it’s not in the official 2025 rules.

There aren’t any purity tests on this stuff. If your mum and dad are born and bred Melbourne but were on holiday in Hong Kong when you were born, you’re NGA eligible.

Essendon’s NGA covers roughly the same zone as the Calder Cannons, plus Tiwi.

Northern clubs also have NGAs, but I think the giants’ is the only one where it’s not the same territory as their club academy. The NSW parts of the Riverina area are giants NGA but not giants club academy. Like northern academies, clubs have to provide some basic evidence that they’re actually doing some work with the players in order to be given priority access.

Once a player is in a NGA, it’s the club’s decision whether or not to nominate them for priority access, the player agreed by joining the academy.

If a NGA player is not bid on, he may be added to the category B rookie list.

Father/Son Players

A player is eligible as a FS player if his father played at least 100 games at a club. If his father played 100 games at one club and 100 games at another club, he’s eligible with both clubs. There are additional SANFL/WAFL rules for players in those leagues prior to the teams entering the AFL but those are increasingly irrelevant, and totally irrelevant to Essendon. A FS nomination requires both the player and the club to agree.

If the player is not bid on, the team may automatically add that player to the rookie list

Note: this is a change from previous rules where a player who was nominated FS had to be taken with the last pick in the ND if no bid was made.

Note: teams used to have to nominate either national draft or rookie draft for FS, but that is no longer true.

What if Both?

Every player in northern states must be enrolled in an academy. NGA eligible players do not have to be enrolled in an NGA. In either case, if a player is enrolled in any sort of academy and is also eligible as a FS player, it is the player’s choice which one gets priority.

Magic Fairy Dust Points

Each pick in the draft is assigned a points value, starting with 3000 for pick 1, down to 14 points for pick 54. Any picks after that are worth nothing. The theory is that these points reflect the value of that draft pick to a team. The theory. The result is that there are a lot of trades that can be win-win where one team needs points to match a bid while the other team intends to use the pick they get to draft a player.

Note: the points values have been overhauled this year, with the intention of making it more difficult to match bids

Bidding

The bidding process is simple. On draft night, when it’s a team’s turn to pick, they read out the name of a player that another team has priority access to. That team is then given the opportunity to match the bid. If the matching team chooses not to match, then the bidding team gets the player, everything continues as normal. If the matching team chooses to match, then the go through the process below. Once they have matched the points, they get the player, and the bidding team gets to take the next pick in the draft. For the purposes of points values, etc, the player that was bid on is considered to be the player taken with that draft pick. For example, if Essendon has pick 4, bid on Daniel Annable, and brisbane matches then the draft order is

  1. Daniel Annable (brisbane)

  2. Essendon (next player)

The bidding team could then bid on another player, get moved down the order by one, and do that over and over again until either a team doesn’t match, or they run out of players to bid on.

Matching

Easy part first: if a bid comes from pick 37 onwards (the nominal start of the third round), the bid can be matched with the team’s next available pick, regardless of its points value.

For earlier bids, the team needs to provide a number of points equal to the value of the bid, with a 10% discount (e.g. pick 1 is worth 3000 points, so a pick1 bid requires 2700 points to match). Teams can match with as many picks as they want, but they must match with the highest picks they have. If a team has pick 10, pick 29 and a bunch of picks in the 30s, if a bid comes in at pick 6, then they must use pick 10 first, then pick 29, etc.

Teams are allowed to try and do trades when a bid comes in before they opt to match or not, they are not restricted to the picks they have at the moment the bid is made.

Note: the discount used to be 20% but was reduced this year to 10%

When a pick is used to match a bid, it doesn’t actually disappear, it has as many points removed as used, and is then moved to be directly after the next draft pick worth at least as many points. Typically this is zero points and the draft pick is pushed to the very end of the draft, but sometimes you might see a team use, say, pick 42 in a match and it slides back to 51 or something like that. This means that a team doesn’t actually lose any draft picks when they match a bid, they end up with picks at the end of the draft.

Note: there have been all sorts of rules in the past about how many players you can match, what part of the draft they were bid on, etc. Those are all gone.

Debt

If a team doesn’t have enough points to match a bid, they can choose to go into debt to match the bid. The debt is taken off their picks for the next year, starting with their pick in the round the bid comes. So, if a team wants to match a first round pick but don’t have enough points, they spend all the points they do have, and then lose the remaining points off their next year first round pick. The maximum amount of debt is 1167 points, which is the sum of pick 18, 36 and 54, the least points a team can have. This number is reduced if the team has traded out their future picks.

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delet

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Honestly, if I didn’t have to repeat the father son rules 47 times in the draft thread on draft night it just wouldn’t feel right.

Edit: I do wish that the “quick version that covers the questions that come up all the time” wasn’t a document twelve ■■■■■■■ pages long, but AFL’s gonna AFL I guess.

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And finally, the documents.

AFL CBA

League Rules

Magic Fairy Dust Points
Calculator

Table

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So 95% of the ~20m? Is there any point to separating those two buckets of cash (e.g. clubs have more flexibility to change who gets to feed from the trough without re-contracting?).

Does the trough bucket get included in any restricted free agent bids — i.e. could you lower the nominal amount being paid to ensure the team you’re nicking the player from gets lesser compensation?

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I’ve had this argument on here before and I can’t remember the outcome but is there not a rule that a club can only pay a portion of an in-place contract when it’s transferred to a new club?

e.g. we all know Treloar was on (say) $700kpa with 3 years to go at the Pies, and they were paying (say) $300kpa of that for the 3 years that the WB took that on.

But it’s not possible for us to (say) trade Merrett who has 2 x 1m pa left with us but have him sign for 4 x 1.2 at Hawks and Essendon pays 4 x $500kpa. (is it?)

Or to take an even more extreme example, could we trade Shiel to say Geelong, and pay all of his $600kpa x 3 for Geelong in the interest of them giving us a 2nd rounder? Ignoring that he can walk via FA.

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More broadly, informative as usual SR.

Serious - this should be a Wiki/Blog post hosted on Blitz that you can just amend now and then as rules get changed/made up/revised in real time.

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Thanks @SplitRound, as informative and thorough as each year. Appreciate the work you put in to simplifying what can be a somewhat detailed and confusing set of processes.

I look forward to it being regularly ignored throughout the trade and draft period.

Edit: if you weren’t finished I will relocate this post

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15

Yeah, the floor applies to the cap plus ASA as far as I can tell. There didn’t used to be a floor for the ASA, but much like the cap the AFL told the poor teams they had to pony up to stay competitive (lolnorth). Restricted free agency specifically refers to Guaranteed Payments, which does include ASA:

Guaranteed Payments: payments under a Contract of Service (excluding incentives
and match payments) and payments (including any deemed payments) under
Additional Services agreements.

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16

Don’t mind either way. The final post is just the reference documents.

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17

It felt impolite.

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18

:heart:

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19

Yeah but I heard this is a week draft.

20

It only feels like it takes that long…

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