The All-Australian Team: Selection and Meaning
How the All-Australian team is chosen: the squad, the ten-person panel, the positional criteria set in 2007, the record holders and what it is worth.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Awards18 min read
- First official team
- 1953 Adelaide carnival
- Annual season-based team since
- 1991
- Positional criteria introduced
- 2007
- Squad size in 2026
- 46 players
- Final team in 2026
- 23 players
- Selection panel in 2026
- 10 members
- Most selections
- Max Gawn with nine
- Matches the team has played
- None in the modern era
The All-Australian team is the AFL's team of the year: a side of the season's best players, chosen in positions, announced on awards night in the last week of August and then never assembled to play a game of football. It is an honour rather than a fixture. A player who is picked receives a blazer, and that blazer is the most commonly cited quality marker on an Australian rules footballer's career record.
The mechanics are straightforward even if the arguments are not. A panel appointed by the AFL names a long squad — 46 players in 2026 — drawn from home-and-away form only. The same panel then cuts that squad to a final team, which since 2007 must be picked as if it were about to run out for a match, with a full-back, a centre half-forward, two wingmen and a ruck rather than simply the twenty-odd best players in the competition. In 2026 the final side was 23 players, up from the traditional 22, because the AFL had just moved clubs to naming 23 with five on the interchange bench.
That positional requirement is the whole character of the award. It is why a dominant inside midfielder can be squeezed out by a half-back flanker with worse numbers, why ruckmen are treated as a category of their own, and why the team the panel names and the team the average supporter would name are so rarely the same. This guide covers where the award came from, how the modern process runs, who has won it most often, what it is actually worth, and where its critics have a point.
What the All-Australian team actually is
Strip away the ceremony and it is a curated list with a shape imposed on it. The AFL asks a panel to identify the leading players of a season across defence, the midfield and attack, publishes that list as a squad, and then asks the same panel to compress it into a functioning side.
Nothing else happens. There is no representative match, no touring side, no interstate series it feeds into. The blazer is the product. That makes it unusual among Australian sporting honours, which mostly attach either to a trophy, a medal decided by a formula, or an actual representative team that plays. Cricket's Test side is picked to play cricket, and the team of the year that emerges from the Sheffield Shield is a byproduct of a competition that decides something. The All-Australian team is the byproduct with nothing behind it, and it is still the honour players talk about.
Where the award came from
Australian rules football spent most of the twentieth century as a set of state competitions rather than a national league, and the national moments were the interstate carnivals. An All-Australian side was first officially named in 1953, after the carnival held in Adelaide, and selected purely on carnival form. Teams were named at every subsequent carnival through to 1988.
There was an earlier series of selections published by a magazine between 1947 and 1955, but AFL historians do not treat those as official, and they are usually left out of a player's record.
The carnival model produced some odd totals. Because a player could be picked at a carnival and, in some years, in additional selections, the historical leaderboard contains eight players who reached eight or more selections under that system — Craig Bradley, Terry Daniher, Gerard Healy, Stephen Kernahan, Simon Madden, John Platten, Paul Roos and Greg Williams. Comparing those tallies with modern ones is not a like-for-like exercise, and the AFL generally does not.
Why 1991 was the turning point
When the VFL finished converting itself into a genuinely national competition and became the AFL, the interstate carnival lost its reason to exist. Clubs would not release players, the fixture had no room, and the best footballers in the country were now playing each other every week anyway.
So from 1991 the All-Australian team was rebuilt as an annual selection based on performances in the AFL premiership season. That is the version everyone means today. It converted a representative honour into a team-of-the-year award, and it made the award annual and continuous, which is why career blazer counts start to look meaningful from the 1990s onward.
How the All-Australian team is selected
The process runs in two public stages, both compressed into the final week of the home-and-away season.
First, the panel names the squad. This is a large group — 40 from 2007, 44 from 2022, 46 in 2026 — and the league frames it as recognition of the leading players across all parts of the ground rather than a simple shortlist. Squad selection carries its own weight: it appears in club media, in contract discussions and in player biographies.
Second, the panel reconvenes and names the final team, which is unveiled at the AFL Awards. In 2026 that was Tuesday 25 August. The squad had come out days earlier.
- Play the home-and-away seasonOnly home-and-away form counts, so a player who dominates September gets no credit for it in that year's team.
- Panel names the squadThe selection panel publishes a long squad of leading players across defence, midfield and attack, which was 46 names in 2026.
- Panel cuts to a final sideThe same panel reconvenes and selects the team as if to play a match, filling every named position rather than listing the best players available.
- Team unveiled at AFL AwardsThe side is announced on awards night in the last week of August, with a captain and vice-captain named at the same time.
- Coach confirmed after the grand finalSince 1999 the All-Australian coach is that season's premiership coach, so the coaching appointment is settled by results in late September.
The published sequence for the 2026 season. Dates shift by a week or so each year and the AFL does not publish the panel's internal deliberations.
Who sits on the panel
The AFL chief executive chairs the panel. Around that sit a rotating group of recently retired players, league football executives and broadcasters.
The 2026 panel was Andrew Dillon as chair, with Eddie Betts, Simon Black, Jude Bolton, Abbey Holmes, Glen Jakovich, Laura Kane, David Mundy, Joel Selwood and Greg Swann — ten in all. A year earlier the panel had nine members and a different composition, including Nathan Buckley, Kane Cornes and Matthew Pavlich alongside several who returned in 2026.
That turnover matters more than it looks. There is no scoring rubric, so the identity of the selectors is effectively the methodology. A panel weighted towards former key defenders will read a defender's season differently from one weighted towards midfielders.
The 2007 criteria and why they changed everything
Between 1991 and 2006 the panel was free to name the best twenty-two players. What it named, repeatedly, was a midfield with some passengers attached. Positions on the printed team sheet were often nominal, and a genuine full-back could miss out to a fifth on-baller.
From 2007 the criteria required the final team to be selected as if to play a match. The side is announced in the traditional structure: three backs, three half-backs, a centreline of two wings and a centre, three half-forwards, three forwards, three followers, and an interchange group.
This is the source of nearly every All-Australian argument. It creates hard positional quotas in a sport that has spent twenty years dissolving positions. Modern half-backs behave like midfielders, key forwards drift up the ground, and rucks play as marking targets, but the team sheet still demands a full-back and a rover.
The All-Australian team of 2026 in full
The 2026 side was the first named as a team of 23, following the AFL's move to 23 named players with five on the bench. Max Gawn was named captain and collected a record ninth blazer. Jordan Dawson was vice-captain. Marcus Bontempelli's eighth selection took him level with the previous record holders.
| Position | Player | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Back pocket | Wayne Milera | First selection |
| Full-back | Callum Wilkie | Returning selection |
| Back pocket | Jarman Impey | First selection |
| Half-back flank | Lachie Ash | First selection |
| Centre half-back | Harris Andrews | Retained from 2025 |
| Half-back flank | Jordan Clark | Retained from 2025 |
| Wing | Bailey Smith | Retained from 2025 |
| Centre | Marcus Bontempelli | Retained from 2025, eighth blazer |
| Wing | Oliver Dempsey | First selection |
| Half-forward flank | Shai Bolton | Returning selection |
| Centre half-forward | Josh Treacy | First selection |
| Half-forward flank | Kysaiah Pickett | Retained from 2025 |
| Forward pocket | Nick Watson | First selection |
| Full-forward | Charlie Curnow | Returning selection |
| Forward pocket | Logan Morris | First selection |
| Ruck | Max Gawn | Captain, ninth blazer, a record |
| Ruck-rover | Jordan Dawson | Vice-captain, retained from 2025 |
| Rover | Nick Daicos | Retained from 2025 |
| Interchange | Luke Jackson | First selection |
| Interchange | Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera | Retained from 2025 |
| Interchange | Murphy Reid | First selection |
| Interchange | Zac Bailey | Retained from 2025 |
| Interchange | Zak Butters | Returning selection |
Nine players were named for the first time and ten were retained from the 2025 team. Five Indigenous players were selected, the most in any All-Australian team.
Which clubs the 2026 team came from
Twelve of the eighteen clubs had at least one player in the final side.
The squad was more concentrated still. Fremantle led it with eight named, ahead of Brisbane on six and Hawthorn on five, while Essendon, Richmond and West Coast had nobody in the squad at all.
The numbers that define the modern award
- 46Players in the squad
- 23Players in the final team
- 10Selectors on the panel
- 12Clubs represented in the team
- 9Gawn blazers after 2026
Structural counts published by the AFL for the 2026 season, not measurements. Squad and team sizes have changed several times and will change again.
What the teams of 1991 to 2006 looked like
It is worth understanding what the 2007 reform was reacting to. In the fifteen seasons of free selection, the printed team sheets carried positions, but the panel was not bound by them, and it showed. Sides were routinely loaded with ball-winning midfielders shuffled into nominal back pockets and half-forward flanks. A player who had spent the whole year at the bottom of packs would appear at centre half-forward on the team sheet because there was no better midfielder slot left.
The consequence was a systematic underweighting of two groups. Key defenders, whose job is to make an opponent do nothing rather than to do something themselves, almost never survived a straight best-twenty-two comparison. Genuine ruckmen fared little better, because a ruckman's statistical output looks thin against an inside midfielder's.
Reintroducing hard positions solved that at the cost of creating a different unfairness. Now a season's fourth-best midfielder misses out while a merely good full-back is picked, because the sheet has to be filled. Both systems produce a defensible team and an indefensible omission. The league chose the version that at least resembles a football side.
Records and the eight-blazer club
Max Gawn's ninth selection in 2026 broke a mark that had stood for years at eight. That group — Gary Ablett senior, Gary Ablett junior, Patrick Dangerfield, Lance Franklin, Robert Harvey and Mark Ricciuto — now includes Marcus Bontempelli.
The composition of that list is revealing. Two ruckmen aside, it is dominated by midfielders and one forward. Key defenders almost never accumulate blazers at that rate, partly because defensive impact is the hardest thing in football to evidence and partly because the panel only has three back and three half-back slots to hand out each year.
Why the ruck position distorts everything
There is exactly one ruck position in the named team, plus whatever the panel chooses to do with the interchange. In a season where three ruckmen have outstanding years, two of them miss, no matter how good they were relative to their own position.
This is the clearest case where the positional criteria create a result the raw ratings would not. In 2026 the panel resolved it by naming Gawn in the ruck and Luke Jackson on the interchange, which is the standard workaround: a second big man comes in as a bench selection.
Why half-back has become the hardest position to judge
The rebuilding half-back is the defining player type of the modern AFL, and the team sheet gives the panel only two half-back flanks and a centre half-back. Meanwhile the players filling those roles have midfield-level disposal numbers, which makes them look enormous next to genuine defenders and modest next to genuine midfielders.
The 2026 team is a good example. Jordan Clark and Lachie Ash occupied the half-back flanks, with Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera, a player who spent much of the year running through the midfield from defence, accommodated on the interchange rather than in a back position.
What the blazer is worth in practice
There is no prize money attached. The value is in three places.
The first is contractual. Player agreements commonly carry bonuses linked to award and representative selection, and All-Australian selection is among the standard triggers. The second is negotiating leverage: a blazer is the cleanest evidence a manager can put in front of a list manager. The third is historical. Games played measures durability and goals measure output, but a blazer count is a record of how a player was rated at the time, and it is the number that survives into retrospective rankings.
For a competition that runs one of the tightest equalisation systems in Australian sport — the AFL's own cap works differently in detail from the NRL salary cap, but the logic of holding every club to the same spend is identical — an award that quietly moves money is not a trivial thing.
The captain, the vice-captain and the coach
The panel names a captain and vice-captain within the final team. In 2026 that was Gawn and Dawson. The captaincy is usually given to a senior player having an outstanding season, and it frequently doubles as recognition of a career rather than a single year.
The coach is different. Since 1999 the All-Australian coach has been the coach of the premiership side, which means the appointment is not made on awards night at all. It waits for the grand final at the end of September. It is the only element of the honour that is decided by a result rather than by opinion.
How it sits alongside the AFL's other awards
The Brownlow Medal is umpire-voted, three-two-one, after every home-and-away match. It rewards conspicuous ball-winning and it favours midfielders so heavily that key position players effectively cannot win it. The Coleman Medal is a simple count of home-and-away goals. The Norm Smith Medal is a single-match award for the grand final.
The All-Australian team is the only one of the four that requires a judgement about a whole season across every position on the ground. That is why a Brownlow winner is not automatically the best player of a year, and why the All-Australian centre and the Brownlow winner are often different people.
The AFLW All-Australian team
The women's competition has named its own All-Australian side every season since 2017. Its structure mirrors the AFLW's playing format rather than the men's: a side built for a sixteen-a-side game, with an interchange group on top.
Jasmine Garner and Emma Kearney share the record with eight selections each, and Kearney's run of eight consecutive teams from the competition's first season is the longest unbroken sequence. Ebony Marinoff sits on seven. Those numbers are remarkable given how short AFLW seasons have been, because a player accumulating blazers in a twelve-round competition is being judged on a far smaller sample than her male equivalent. That is an argument both for and against reading much into the tally. The format producing those seasons is covered in the AFLW guide, and the recruiting system feeding it in the AFLW draft and pathways guide.
The fan team and the public argument
Every year the AFL publishes an interactive team selector so supporters can pick their own side, and every year the results are compiled and published before the real team lands. Radio, print and podcast previews do the same thing.
This is unusual for an award. Nobody publishes a crowd-sourced Brownlow count, because the Brownlow has an answer. The All-Australian team does not have an answer, and the league has decided that the argument is an asset rather than a problem. It is the main reason the award generates more discussion in August than most trophies generate in September.
The standing criticisms
Three come up every year, and all three have some force.
The first is that the team never plays, so the positional criteria are a fiction imposed on a hypothetical. The counter is that without them the team collapses into a midfielder list.
The second is that finals form is excluded. A player can have an ordinary August, be named, and then be outplayed in September by somebody who missed the team. The counter is practical: the awards night has to happen before the finals or it competes with them.
The third is reputation bias, the sense that established names clear a lower bar than first-time candidates. This is unfalsifiable without a published rubric, which is precisely the complaint.
Following the announcement
The squad and the team both land in the last week of August, either side of the awards broadcast. The AFL publishes the full squad list, the final team in positions, and the club-by-club breakdown on its own site on the night.
Because the AFL grand final is played in late September, awards night sits in an unusually crowded fortnight in the Australian calendar. It falls after the Australian Open and the summer of cricket have long finished, in the same window as the NRL run home, and three months before the Big Bash League takes over the free-to-air schedule. Melbourne's football venues turn over quickly in that period, with Marvel Stadium hosting football into September and the MCG switching to cricket preparation soon afterwards.
The squad, and why it is announced separately
The forty-strong squad announced before the final team is not a formality, and understanding what it is for makes the final announcement easier to read.
The squad is the selectors' shortlist, published to be argued with. It is deliberately wider than the team, it is not positionally balanced, and inclusion in it carries no guarantee. Its practical function is to absorb the first round of public argument before the team is named, so that the debate about who was omitted happens against a published list rather than against nothing.
For a player, squad selection without final selection is a real if lesser marker, and it appears in career summaries and occasionally in contract language. For a reader, the gap between squad and team is where the positional structure does its work: a squad heavy with midfielders becomes a team carrying the standard allocation, and the players squeezed out are almost always in the most crowded position rather than the weakest.
Following the selection process through a season
Selection is not a single September decision. The panel watches across the year, and several visible checkpoints exist before the team is named.
Mid-season media teams, coaches' association awards and club best-and-fairest counts all feed the same conversation, and they are worth watching if you want to anticipate the blazer rather than react to it. None of them binds the panel. But a player who is absent from every mid-season list and then appears in the final twenty-two is rare, and a player who leads every mid-season list and misses out has almost always been squeezed positionally rather than judged poorly.
How to read a selection argument
Every September the All-Australian team produces the same three arguments, and knowing which one you are having makes the discussion shorter.
The positional argument. The team is named in a set structure, so a player can miss out despite better numbers than someone selected in a different position. A half-back who has had a better season than three of the selected midfielders does not displace them, because the team does not carry six midfielders. Most snub complaints are positional rather than evaluative.
The availability argument. Games played is not a formal criterion, but it functions as one. A player who missed six weeks and was outstanding in the other sixteen competes against players who were merely very good across a full season. Selectors have historically leaned toward availability, and the squad announcement usually reflects that before the final team does.
The team-success argument. Players from successful sides are selected more often than their individual numbers alone would predict. Some of that is real, since good teams create the conditions for individuals to perform, and some of it is visibility, since finals contenders play more prime-time football in front of more selectors. Both effects are present and neither is formally acknowledged.
What the honour is actually worth
The All-Australian blazer sits below a premiership and below the Brownlow in most players' own accounting, and above almost everything else.
Its practical value is contractual and reputational. Selection is a common trigger in performance clauses, it is one of the criteria clubs cite in trade negotiations, and repeated selection is the shorthand used when a career is summarised at retirement or considered for the Australian Football Hall of Fame. A player with six blazers is understood to have been elite for six seasons in a way no other single statistic conveys.
Its limitation is that it is a season award with no weighting for era. Twenty-two players are named every year regardless of whether that season produced twenty-two genuinely elite performers, so the honour is not directly comparable across decades. Comparing a 1990s blazer with a current one compares two different competitions with different list sizes, different interchange rules and different scoring.
What to check before quoting any of this
Three things move. The squad size has changed three times since 2007 and moved again in 2026. The final team size moved from 22 to 23 in 2026 to match the AFL's new 23-player match-day list. And the panel is reappointed annually, so the selectors named here apply to 2026 only.
Everything structural in this guide is taken from the AFL's own 2026 releases. Before citing a number for a different season, check the league's announcement for that year, because the All-Australian team is one of the few AFL institutions that changes its own shape almost as often as the rules change around it. For the wider picture of how Australian football sits among the country's codes, the comparison of rugby league and rugby union is a useful starting point, the sports index covers the rest, and the national hub sits at Australia.