AFL Academies and Next Generation Academies Explained

AFL academies are the second great exception to the draft, and unlike the father-son rule they were designed on purpose, by a league that had a specific problem to solve. The problem was that Australian rules football had four clubs in cities where almost nobody played it as a child, and no way of changing that without paying for it.

There are two systems and they are regularly confused. The northern academies, set up in 2010, belong to the Sydney Swans, Greater Western Sydney, the Brisbane Lions and the Gold Coast Suns, and cover allocated geographic zones across New South Wales, the ACT, Queensland and parts of the Northern Territory. The Next Generation Academies are run by all eighteen clubs in allocated regions and are aimed at Indigenous and multicultural players. Both give a club priority access to the players it develops, and in both cases that access has to be paid for in draft points when a rival bids.

This guide covers what each system is, who qualifies, how a bid is priced and matched, the players the academies have produced, the four separate rule changes the AFL has made to the bidding since 2015, and what happens from 2026. It sits alongside the guides to the AFL draft and the father-son rule.

Two AFL academies systems, not one

The distinction is worth getting right before anything else, because the two systems have different purposes, different eligibility tests and different histories of rule change.

The northern academies are geographic. If you are a talented under-18 footballer living in the Brisbane Lions' zone, you are in their academy regardless of your background. The purpose is market development: build the game where it is weak, and let the club that does the building keep some of what it grows.

The Next Generation Academies are demographic. Eligibility turns on Indigenous or multicultural background, not on postcode alone, and every club has one. The purpose is participation among groups the game has historically under-served, with draft access as the incentive that makes clubs take it seriously.

A player can only be tied to one club. In practice the two systems rarely collide, because the northern zones and the NGA regions are administered separately and eligibility is confirmed by the AFL before each draft.

• Northern academy plus NGA22.2%
• Next Generation Academy only77.8%

A structural count of club programmes, not of players. The four northern clubs run both a geographic northern academy and a Next Generation Academy; the other fourteen run an NGA only.

Show the numbers

Which academy systems the 18 AFL clubs run

Item	Value
Northern academy plus NGA	4
Next Generation Academy only	14

Why the northern academies exist

In 2010 the AFL was preparing to launch two new clubs into markets it did not own. Gold Coast entered in 2011 and Greater Western Sydney in 2012, joining Brisbane and Sydney in states where rugby league is the default winter sport and where football and rugby union take much of what is left.

A club in Melbourne inherits juniors. Every suburb has clubs, every school plays the game, and the pathway fills itself. A club in western Sydney inherits nothing. It has to fund clinics, put development coaches into schools, run regional squads across enormous distances and persuade a fourteen-year-old to choose an unfamiliar sport over the one all his friends play.

The academies were the AFL's answer, established as a joint initiative between the league, its state affiliates and the four northern clubs. The clubs do the work; the concession lets them keep a share of the talent that results. It is not charity and the AFL has never presented it as such — it is a development contract with a payment in draft picks.

The four zones

The zones cover very large areas, which is a fact that gets lost in the argument about draft fairness. This is not a suburb-sized catchment.

Club	Zone covers
Brisbane Lions	Brisbane, the Sunshine Coast, the Darling Downs and Wide Bay
Gold Coast Suns	The Gold Coast and northern New South Wales, far north Queensland from Rockhampton to Cape York, and metropolitan Darwin
GWS Giants	Greater western Sydney, the ACT and southern New South Wales, through regional centres including Wagga Wagga, Albury, Griffith, Broken Hill, Orange and Bathurst
Sydney Swans	The remainder of Sydney and coastal and northern New South Wales

Gold Coast's zone in particular runs from northern New South Wales to Cape York and takes in Darwin, which is several thousand kilometres of coastline and some of the most productive Indigenous football country in Australia. Greater Western Sydney's spans the ACT and the Riverina. Getting a squad together for a training session in either zone is a logistical exercise a Victorian club never has to think about.

The precise boundaries have been redrawn since 2010 and the two Sydney clubs have had more than one disagreement about where the line between them sits. Club zone maps are the authoritative source.

Inside a northern academy programme

An academy is not a single squad. It is a pyramid running from primary school age to draft age.

At the base are school clinics and community club partnerships, which are participation work rather than talent identification. Above that sit regional development squads, then age-group academy teams from roughly under-13 upwards, with the best players moving into representative programmes. At the top, academy under-18 sides play in national academy series fixtures and academy players are funnelled into the state pathway and the national under-18 championships.

That last step is the one that matters for the draft. An academy player is not hidden away. He plays against the best juniors in the country in front of every recruiter in the competition, and he is ranked on all eighteen club boards. Which is exactly why bids happen.

What the northern academies have produced

Sydney's is the programme with the longest record, and the record is strong.

Isaac Heeney, taken at pick 18 in the 2014 draft, became a multiple All-Australian and won a mark of the year award. Callum Mills won the Rising Star in 2016. Nick Blakey, Errol Gulden — taken at pick 32 in the 2020 draft — and Braeden Campbell followed, all of them from the Sydney academy, all of them senior AFL players well before they turned 22.

Gold Coast's breakthrough came in the 2023 draft, when four of its academy players were taken inside the first round: Jed Walter at pick three, Ethan Read at pick nine, Jake Rogers at pick fourteen and Will Graham at pick twenty-six. No club had ever had four academy graduates go in a single first round.

That is the case for the academies and the case against them in the same set of numbers. The programmes work. They work well enough that the rest of the competition has spent a decade trying to make them cost more.

The bid that created the points system

The academies changed the draft, and the moment it happened is easy to date.

In the 2014 draft Melbourne bid on Heeney with pick two. Under the rules in force, Sydney matched with its own next selection, which was pick eighteen. Sydney acquired a player rated second in the country at a price sixteen places lower, entirely legally.

The AFL reviewed both the academy and father-son pathways in 2015 and produced the Draft Value Index, the points table that prices every early selection. From that point a bid at pick two cost roughly the points value of pick two, less a discount, paid from the matching club's own picks. The draft guide covers how the index works and how steeply it falls.

How an academy bid actually gets paid

The mechanics are the same for northern academy, Next Generation Academy and father-son players.

The player nominates his club before the draft. On the night a rival calls his name with one of its own selections. The AFL prices that bid, applies the discount or loading, and gives the club a short window to decide. If it matches, its picks are consumed from the earliest available downwards until the points are covered, and the club often receives a late selection back if it overpays by more than the value of the next pick.

Gold Coast's 2023 haul shows what that looks like in practice. To match the pick-three bid on Walter it used picks 26, 30 and 32, and received picks 58 and 87 back. For Read it used 34, 38 and 48 and got 49 back. For Rogers it used 42, 47 and 49 and got 65 back.

Note what is happening there. The club paid for three top-fifteen talents almost entirely with selections in the twenties, thirties and forties. Under the two-pick limit coming in for 2026, that particular arithmetic no longer works.

Jed Walter at pick 32234

Ethan Read at pick 91469

Jake Rogers at pick 141161

Will Graham at pick 26729

The Draft Value Index points value of the pick each bid was made with, using the index as published for drafts up to and including 2024. This is the price of the bid before any discount, not the net cost after Gold Coast received late picks back.

Show the numbers

What Gold Coast's 2023 academy bids were worth in draft points

Item	Value
Jed Walter at pick 3	2234
Ethan Read at pick 9	1469
Jake Rogers at pick 14	1161
Will Graham at pick 26	729

What Next Generation Academies are

The NGA programme is a different animal, and its stated purpose is participation first.

Every club is allocated a region and runs outreach in it — clinics, school programmes, community club partnerships — targeting Indigenous Australians and people from multicultural backgrounds, both groups the game has historically under-represented relative to the population. Children can join from around age eleven. Programmes run for girls and boys.

The draft concession sits on top of that as the incentive. A club that develops an NGA player good enough to be drafted has the right to match a bid on him, which means the community investment can produce a footballer as well as participants. It is the same bargain as the northern academies, applied to demographics rather than geography.

NGA eligibility: who actually qualifies

There are two routes in.

The Indigenous route is straightforward: a player who identifies as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander is eligible.

The multicultural route turns on parental birthplace. The criteria centre on a parent born in an African or Asian country, and some club programmes extend to parts of Central America, South America and Oceania excluding New Zealand. The AFL tightened this in a review that removed the previous option of qualifying through the player's own overseas birth, so eligibility now rests on where at least one parent was born.

The tightening was a response to clubs stretching the criteria. When a rule confers draft access, clubs will read it as generously as they can, and the AFL's revision was an explicit crackdown on eligibility claims the league considered outside the programme's intent.

Four rule changes in eight years

The NGA bidding rules have been rewritten more often than any other part of the draft, and following the sequence explains why clubs complain about instability.

From 2017 to 2020 there was no restriction: a club could match a bid on an NGA player at any point in the draft. In 2020 the Western Bulldogs matched Adelaide's bid at pick one on Jamarra Ugle-Hagan, an NGA player, which meant the first selection in the entire draft went to a tied prospect.

From 2021 the AFL restricted matching to bids made outside the first 20 selections. The restriction was later widened to the first 40. Under it, an NGA player good enough to attract an early bid was simply lost — the club that developed him could not match at any price.

For the 2024 draft the AFL reversed the restriction entirely, returning NGA prospects to the same footing as northern academy and father-son players. The league pointed to Mac Andrew and Cam Mackenzie, both drafted in 2021, as players who fell through the cracks under the restricted rule, and named Isaac Kako at Essendon, Adrian Cole at St Kilda and Malakai Champion at West Coast among the beneficiaries of the reversal.

• 02017 to 2020 restriction
• 202021 restriction
• 40Later restriction
• 0From 2024 restriction

The pick number inside which a club could not match a bid on an NGA player. Zero means no restriction applied. Structural summary of the rules in force, not a count of players affected.

What the academies cost the clubs that run them

The concession looks like a gift until you see the invoice.

Sydney has publicly put its academy spending at around 3.5 million dollars a year and has argued that a large share of that investment produces players who end up at other clubs — either because the Swans declined to match a bid, or because the player was never quite good enough to be tied and simply entered the open draft. The club has gone as far as calling for a draft levy on clubs that recruit northern talent developed at someone else's expense.

Whether or not that particular proposal goes anywhere, the underlying point is real. The academies are cost centres that occasionally produce a first-round player. A Victorian club drafting a Queensland teenager has contributed nothing to the fifteen years of coaching, travel and facilities that produced him.

The argument, in both directions

The case against the academies is the same case made against the father-son rule, only sharper because the academies deliver more players.

Tied-player access concentrates talent at specific clubs regardless of where they finished. When Brisbane and Gold Coast were both contending, both were also claiming academy and father-son prospects, and the rest of the competition could see a structural advantage compounding rather than correcting. The Gold Coast haul in 2023 was the moment that argument became unanswerable, and the AFL wrote to clubs immediately afterwards to say it would review the bidding system, the NGA incentive and the Draft Value Index.

The case for the academies is that without them the northern clubs would carry the entire cost of growing the game in two rugby league states and receive nothing for it, and that the four northern clubs exist at all only because the AFL decided a national competition was worth building. Remove the concession and you have not equalised the draft; you have defunded football development in half the country.

The AFL's position through every review has been to keep both systems and keep raising the price. Nothing in the 2026 package changes that.

What the 2026 changes do to academy access

The eligibility rules are untouched. The price is not.

A ladder-based sliding scale replaces the flat 10 per cent discount. The two grand finalists face a 20 per cent loading on the points required to match, preliminary finalists a 10 per cent loading, clubs finishing fifth to tenth pay level, and clubs that missed the finals keep a 10 per cent discount. Clubs are limited to two picks when matching an early bid. A bottom-five club whose own top selection is pushed back by another club's match receives an additional pick at the start of the second round.

The Draft Value Index has been steepened again, and the values were adjusted to accommodate Tasmania's entry to the competition. Between the steeper index, the two-pick limit and the loadings, a successful club matching an early bid on an academy player will pay several times what the same match cost in 2023.

Academies in the AFLW

The women's competition runs the same programmes and a different draft system.

All eighteen NGA programmes include girls' pathways, and the northern clubs operate women's academy squads across their zones. Because the AFLW talent pool is younger and shallower, academy work matters proportionally more there: a club that runs strong girls' programmes in its region is building the competition's future playing group, not just its own list.

The AFLW draft concessions have worked differently, with a father-daughter rule set at one senior AFL game for the father, and bidding handled inside a fixed window of subsequent selections rather than through the full points index. The AFL has flagged bringing the AFLW model closer into line with the men's rules, so this is an area to check rather than assume.

Academy players still go through the normal pathway

One persistent misunderstanding is that academy players are somehow developed in isolation and handed over.

They are not. An academy player plays in his state's under-18 competition, is selected in state representative sides, plays at the national under-18 championships, attends the draft combine and is ranked by every recruiter in the country. The academy adds coaching, exposure and continuity on top of that pathway; it does not replace it.

This matters for how you read a bid. When a rival club bids on an academy player at pick three, it is not making a nuisance bid — it has scouted him through the same channels as everyone else and rated him third in the draft. The bid is a valuation, and the tied club's decision to match is a valuation too.

Where the players actually come from

The academies have quietly changed the geography of the AFL's talent supply.

For most of the competition's history, the overwhelming majority of draftees came from Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. New South Wales and Queensland produced a trickle, usually players who had moved from elsewhere. Two decades of academy work has turned that trickle into a genuine stream, with locally raised players from Sydney, the Gold Coast, Brisbane and regional New South Wales now going in the first round most years.

That is the strongest defence of the whole apparatus. It has not just moved talent between clubs; it has increased the number of Australians playing the game at a serious level in states where it was marginal. The venues tell the same story — the Gabba and Optus Stadium host football crowds that would have been unimaginable when the northern expansion began, and Marvel Stadium exists partly because the Victorian clubs needed somewhere to play once the competition went national.

How this compares with the other codes

Rugby league runs junior development through club-affiliated pathways and controls the market through the NRL salary cap rather than through allocation, so there is no bidding process and no equivalent of an academy concession — a club that develops a junior signs him.

Cricket allocates young players through state associations, as the Cricket Australia structure guide sets out, with the closest analogue to a bidding system being the Big Bash draft for overseas players. Neither code has needed to build a points index, because neither took the allocation decision away from clubs in the first place.

The AFL's academies exist because the AFL centralised allocation and then discovered that centralised allocation gives a club no reason to invest in developing anybody. The concession is the fix for a problem the draft created.

Bidding early as a weapon

Not every bid is an attempt to get a player. Some are an attempt to bankrupt a rival.

A club that bids early on a tied player it has no realistic chance of keeping still achieves something useful: it forces the academy club to spend. A bid at pick five instead of pick fifteen can be the difference between a club paying two mid-round selections and paying most of its draft. If the academy club matches, its remaining hand is gutted and the players it wanted at picks in the twenties are gone. If it declines, the bidding club gets a first-round talent.

Both outcomes suit the bidder, which is why the ethics of it are debated every November and why nobody has ever proposed banning it. A bid is a valuation, and a club is entitled to value a player highly. What the AFL has done instead is adjust the price, because it is the only lever available that does not require reading a rival recruiter's mind.

The defensive counter is to arrive at the draft with the right sort of picks. A club expecting an early bid on a tied prospect will spend the October trade period accumulating selections specifically to pay with, sometimes trading a good player for a bundle of mid-round picks that look underwhelming until you understand what they are for. From 2026 the two-pick limit narrows that option considerably, because a stack of picks in the thirties and forties can no longer be assembled into a top-five match.

The pick-one match, and why it looked wrong

The Ugle-Hagan case in 2020 is the sharpest illustration of what the concession can deliver at full stretch.

Jamarra Ugle-Hagan was a Western Bulldogs Next Generation Academy player. Adelaide bid on him with pick one — the first selection in the draft — and the Bulldogs matched. A club that had finished seventh took the best player in the country, and the club that finished last did not.

Nothing about it broke a rule. Adelaide made a genuine bid, the Bulldogs paid the points the index required, and the transaction was exactly what the 2015 reforms envisaged. But a competition that runs a draft to give the worst club the best player, and then produces a draft where the worst club does not get the best player, has a presentational problem regardless of the arithmetic.

The top-20 restriction on NGA bids arrived the following year. It lasted three drafts, produced a different unfairness — clubs losing players they had developed for a decade with no right to pay for them — and was scrapped. That loop, from unrestricted to restricted to unrestricted again, is the clearest evidence that the AFL has not found a settled answer and is still adjusting the price rather than the principle.

What supporters most often get wrong

That academy players are cheap. They were, before 2015. Since then a club has paid market value less a discount, and from 2026 a successful club pays market value plus a loading.

That an academy is a talent squad. The great majority of an academy's work is participation: clinics, school programmes and community club support for children who will never be drafted. The handful who are drafted are a by-product of a much larger operation.

That the northern clubs alone have academies. All eighteen clubs run a Next Generation Academy, and NGA players have been claimed by clubs in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth as well as by the northern four.

That a tied player is guaranteed to his club. He is not. The club has to want him at the price the bid sets, and several have declined.

What to check before each draft

Three things move often enough to be worth verifying.

Zone boundaries have been redrawn more than once, including a full reset of the Next Generation Academy zones after an AFL review, so use the current club map rather than an older list. Eligibility criteria for the NGA multicultural pathway were tightened in the same period and now rest on parental birthplace. And the bidding rules have changed in 2015, 2021, 2024, 2025 and again for 2026, which is the single most volatile area of AFL list management.

One further caution. Reporting during trade and draft season routinely quotes points values from the older, longer version of the Draft Value Index, because it is the only version the AFL has published in full. The compressed index introduced from the 2025 draft carries points across fewer selections and the league has released only anchor values from it, so any points figure you read in November — including the ones in this guide — should be treated as the shape of the market rather than a live quote.

The AFL publishes its academy and draft material ahead of each draft. For the surrounding system see the draft guide and the father-son rule; for the rest of the Australian sporting landscape, the Australia hub and the sports index collect the code-by-code guides.