Current Sydney Captain Callum Mills with former Sydney Swans coach John Longmire at the 2015 AFL Draft.
It’s that time of the year, the 2025 Telstra AFL Draft. As each club looks ahead to welcoming fresh new talent, there are plenty of complexities to know ahead of the three-day event.
AFL.com’s Martin Smith details everything you need to know ahead of this week’s 2025 Telstra AFL Draft.
What is the Telstra AFL Draft?
First held in 1986, the AFL’s national draft is the main way clubs add players to their lists, alongside the trade period and free agency.
The bulk of the players picked up in the national draft are school leavers who have or will turn 18 this year, who are ready for their first shot at the big time. But any player 18 years or older can nominate for the draft, meaning some players nominate multiple years in a row before finally being drafted.
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When is it?
This year’s national draft will be held over two nights on Wednesday, November 19 and Thursday, November 20, with the rookie draft and pre-season draft (more on them later) to be held the following afternoon on Friday, November 21. The first night of the national draft will be an in-person live event at Marvel Stadium.
How can I watch?
The 2025 Telstra AFL Draft will be broadcast live on Fox Footy and Kayo from 7pm AEDT on Wednesday, November 20 and Thursday, November 21.
You can also watch AFL.com.au and the AFL Live Official App’s Draft Night Live show from 7pm AEDT on both nights.
The draft order
This year the Sydney Swans picks are 31, 32, 42, 60, 71.
In basic terms, the draft order is determined by reverse ladder position. The team at the bottom of the ladder – which this year was West Coast – gets the No.1 pick, the second-last team gets the No.2 pick, and so on. Once each club has had one pick – theoretically after 18 picks – it all starts again, with the bottom-placed team picking again.
Each block of 18 picks is called a ’round’, which is where terms like ‘first-round pick’ and ‘second-round pick’ come from. The rounds continue until clubs no longer want to draft players.
However, the final draft order doesn’t quite reflect reverse ladder position and can change quite significantly based on compensation picks, bids matched on Academy players and deals done both in the trade period and on draft night – more on all of these later – so it ends up looking quite different. You can check out the current draft order here.
Rounds of the draft, particularly the first round, also end up being much longer than 18 picks due to a number of factors …
Free agency compensation picks
In 2012, the AFL introduced free agency, which is a way for players to move clubs without having to be traded. If a club loses a free agent to another club, they don’t receive anything back in a trade. But that club is entitled to a free agency compensation pick in that year’s draft, which is determined by the AFL. You can read more about free agency and the compensation method here.
When a compensation pick is awarded, the picks after it all move back one spot. For example, West Coast received pick 2 in this year’s draft as compensation for losing Oscar Allen to Brisbane. It meant Richmond’s pick 3 became pick 4, and so on.
In 2025, there were six free agency compensation picks that pushed back every other pick in the draft order: West Coast (pick 2 for losing Allen), Carlton (pick 9 for losing Tom De Koning, pick 19 for losing Jack Silvagni), Essendon (pick 20 for losing Sam Draper), Hawthorn (pick 39 for losing James Worpel) and Melbourne (pick 41 for losing Charlie Spargo).
Making/matching a bid
The other factor that extends the length of rounds in the draft is when clubs match bids on father-son, Northern Academy and Next Generation Academy (NGA) players. You can read more on the father-son rule here and the NGA and Northern Academy rule here.
When it is a club’s turn to pick on draft night, they are able to select any player available, even those tied to a rival club via the father-son or Academy rules. This is known as ‘making a bid’. Once a bid is made on a player who is tied to a club via father-son or Academy rules, the club with that priority access must decide whether to ‘match the bid’.
To match a bid, a club must give up draft picks that are of the equivalent value to the pick of the club that made the bid. Every pick in the draft is allocated a points value through the Draft Value Index (DVI), which you can see here. Under the current DVI, pick No.1 is worth 3000 points and it goes all the way down to pick 54, which is worth 14 points (every pick after that is worth nothing).
Clubs also get a discount on the points required to match a bid, which also needs to be factored in. There is a 20 per cent discount for matching bids in the first round and then the discount is fixed at 197 points.
If a club makes a bid with pick 1, which is worth 3000 points, the other club needs to give up picks worth a combined 2700 points (3000 points, less 10 per cent) in order to match the bid and secure the player. This could come in any number of combinations: picks 5 and 15 (worth a cumulative 2768 points) would be enough, as would picks 10, 20, 30 and 41 (worth 2707 points)
Next Generation Academy changes
The NGA bidding system was changed in 2024 to allow clubs to match bids on NGA players at any stage of the draft.
Under the previous rule, clubs were only able to match a bid on an NGA player if the bid came outside the top 40 selections. If a bid came inside the top 40, clubs were not able to match the bid.
Read about NGAs, the northern academies and more here.
Draft Value Index changes
This is the first year of the AFL’s revamped Draft Value Index system.
The previous 20 per cent discount will be reduced to 10 per cent and the new DVI will see points attached to only the first 54 picks (down from the current system of the first 73 picks).
There will be more than 10,000 points shaved off the value of the DVI across the board.
This has been done so clubs have to give up much more in order to match bids. Clubs would not be able to match by stocking up on middle-range draft picks, with the AFL keener for them to have to pay a fairer price for father-son and Academy players. It will also make it far more difficult to match multiple bids on players in the same draft.
There will also be a change to the deficit limit for clubs matching bids on father-son and Academy players.
Under the old bidding system in place in 2024, clubs had a points deficit limit at 1723 points, meaning they could only go that far into deficit to match bids. Any further and they would not be allowed to match a bid on a draftee.
The number was the equivalent of the total points attached to the group of picks assigned to the premiership team each year: No.18, 36, 54 and 72.
But with clubs heading into next year’s model, they will have their new points deficit reduced to 1167 points, equal to pick 18 (836 points), 36 (317), 54 (14) and 72 (0) in the new model.
Why are there three drafts?
Three days, three different drafts – the national, the pre-season and the rookie. So what’s the difference?
Broadly for players, there’s little difference when and how they get drafted. The different drafts are mainly for clubs as they navigate complex rules surrounding the salary cap and list sizes to build their squad for the upcoming season.
The majority of new players will be picked up in the national draft, with AFL.com.au’s Cal Twomey reporting last month that between 44 and 57 picks are expected in this year’s national draft, potentially a record low.
The rookie draft
The rookie draft, held the afternoon after the national draft finishes, is a much shorter affair, with an average of 24 selections taken in the past three rookie drafts.
Players taken here are added to a club’s rookie list, rather than the senior list. The main difference here is the rookie player’s base salary of $100,000 is not included in the club’s salary cap. If a rookie-listed player is paid more than the base, the extra money is included in the cap.
It used to be that rookie-listed players had to be upgraded to the senior list in order to play at AFL level. But that is no longer the case, so being on the rookie list doesn’t make much of a difference for the player.
Clubs have recently used the rookie draft to ‘re-draft’ players they have recently delisted. The Sydney Swans recently announced that Dane Rampe and Jake Lloyd will be re-drafted in the Rookie Draft.
Under AFL rules, clubs must have at least three list senior list vacancies in order to take part in the national draft. Before the national draft, clubs will delist a player to open up a senior list spot, but commit to re-drafting that player in the rookie draft. This year, clubs have delisted a total of 16 players and committed to taking them in the rookie draft.
Other players taken in the rookie draft are primarily those who were overlooked in the national draft. During the national draft, you may hear about a club opting to wait for the rookie draft to pick up a player, rather than using up a primary list spot on them at the national draft.
The draft order for the rookie draft is reverse ladder position. It is not possible to trade and swap rookie draft picks.
The pre-season draft
First held in 1989, the pre-season draft (PSD) has diminished in importance to the point it is often not held at all. Six of the past 10 pre-season drafts have not been conducted, with clubs showing no interest in taking any players. Two players (Jack Gunston re-drafted by Hawthorn, Sam Day drafted by Brisbane) were selected in the 2024 pre-season draft.
The PSD was introduced as a way for uncontracted and delisted players to be drafted to a club they want to go to. But the introduction of free agency in 2012 has made the PSD all but redundant in an era when delisted players can move to a new home of their choice.
The PSD is often referenced during the trade period when trade negotiations for an uncontracted player reach an impasse. If a trade can’t be struck, the player could instead fall out of contract and be picked up in the PSD, and this rarely used mechanism is set to be used for Callum Ah Chee’s desired move from Brisbane to Adelaide. You can read more about how the PSD is likely to be used this year here.
Live trading
Since 2018, clubs have been able to trade picks amongst themselves on draft night. Clubs have different needs at the draft so as the night progresses, some may be satisfied with what they have, while others might want more picks to get the players they want.
Clubs can secure themselves more high picks, or look to do a deal to get more future picks if they believe the draft group the next year suits their needs better.
It involves a lot of pre-planning but also happens in real time; if a player a club wants is taken by a rival on the night, that club might look to cash in for 12 months later by doing a trade involving future picks.
Future trading
As is the case in the trade period, clubs can trade picks in this year’s draft as well as next year’s draft and – for the first time in 2025 – the draft two years in advance. These picks for drafts one and two years away are known as future picks.
Because draft picks are tied to ladder position, we don’t yet know what each club’s picks in future drafts will be. So there’s a sense of gambling when future trading, because clubs are essentially betting on where they and their rivals will finish on the ladder in any given year.
Clubs plan years in advance so will know the strength of the 2025 group of draftees compared to the 2024 group. The 2025 group isn’t considered as strong as some past years, so clubs have been more willing this year to give up 2025 picks for future picks than they have in previous years.
‘Moving up the board’
With live trading available, if a club is concerned a player they want to draft will be snapped up before their pick, they can ‘move up the board’ by doing a trade.
For example, in 2024, Adelaide had pick 11 but believed a rival would take West Australian talent Daniel Curtin before their pick. So they did a deal with GWS, trading picks 11, 15 and a future second-rounder in exchange for picks 8 and 17, ensuring they got Curtin with pick 8. The Giants then did a pick swap of their own with St Kilda to move up the board to get James Leake, which shifted Adelaide’s future second-rounder to the Saints.
