AFL Fantasy and SuperCoach Explained: Scoring and Strategy
AFL Fantasy and SuperCoach compared: how each scoring system works, why the same game produces two different numbers, and squad and trade rules.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Practical19 min read
- Two separate games
- AFL Fantasy is run by the AFL and SuperCoach by the Herald Sun, with different scoring engines
- SuperCoach launched
- 2006, built on Champion Data statistics
- AFL Fantasy scoring
- A fixed value per action with no judgement applied, using kicks, handballs, marks, tackles, goals, behinds, hit-outs and free kicks
- The AFL Fantasy formula
- Three points a kick, two a handball, three a mark, four a tackle, six a goal, one a behind, one a hit-out, one a free for and minus three a free against
- SuperCoach scoring
- Champion Data ranking points drawn from more than fifty statistics, weighted by effectiveness and field position
- The clearest SuperCoach difference
- A kick that is judged ineffective scores nothing and a clanger scores negative, where AFL Fantasy pays three points regardless
- Match scaling
- SuperCoach scales every match so total points across the twenty-two-a-side contest land near a fixed figure of about three thousand three hundred
- Squad shape
- SuperCoach teams have carried thirty-one players across five position groups under a ten million dollar salary cap in recent seasons
AFL Fantasy and SuperCoach are the two large Australian rules fantasy competitions, and the reason people argue about them is that they watch the same match and produce two different numbers for the same player. AFL Fantasy pays a fixed value for each counted action, so a kick is three points whether it lands on a teammate's chest inside fifty or is hacked out of bounds under pressure. SuperCoach uses Champion Data ranking points, which judge whether the kick worked, where on the ground it happened and what it was worth to the team, so the same two kicks can score four points and minus four.
That single difference drives everything else. It changes which players are valuable, which positions score, how a coach reads a live match, and whether a score can be calculated in your head from a stats feed. It also explains why an outside midfielder can be a Fantasy star and a SuperCoach liability, and why a key defender who takes intercept marks is nearly worthless in one game and a premium in the other.
This guide sets out both scoring systems with the actual values, compares them on the same passages of play, then covers squad structure, salary caps, price movement, trades, captaincy, rookies, the bye rounds and the Draft formats. It assumes some knowledge of how the sport is scored and played, which is covered in the AFL section and in the guide to AFL positions.
The two games in one sentence each
AFL Fantasy is run by the AFL. It counts nine statistics, applies a fixed value to each, and adds them up. Nothing in the calculation depends on judgement, so any two people with the same stats sheet will produce the same score.
SuperCoach is run by the Herald Sun and launched in 2006. It is built on Champion Data's ranking points, a proprietary system drawing on more than fifty statistics, which weighs the effectiveness of each action, the difficulty of winning the ball, the part of the ground it happened in, and then scales the whole match. No two people can reliably reproduce a SuperCoach score from a stats sheet, because the inputs are not all public.
Both run a salary cap Classic format and a league-based Draft format, and both run alongside the real season from March to September.
AFL Fantasy scoring: the whole system in one line
The AFL Fantasy formula is short enough to memorise:
| Action | AFL Fantasy points |
|---|---|
| Kick | 3 |
| Handball | 2 |
| Mark | 3 |
| Tackle | 4 |
| Goal | 6 |
| Behind | 1 |
| Hit-out | 1 |
| Free kick for | 1 |
| Free kick against | -3 |
Written out, a player's score is three times kicks plus two times handballs plus three times marks plus four times tackles plus six times goals plus behinds plus hit-outs plus frees for, minus three times frees against.
Two consequences matter. First, there is no such thing as a disposal for scoring purposes: the split between kicks and handballs changes the total. Twenty kicks and ten handballs is eighty points from disposals; ten kicks and twenty handballs is seventy. A player whose game is handball receives in a congested midfield is worth less than his disposal count suggests.
Second, nothing is penalised except a free kick against. A turnover costs nothing. A kick to no one costs nothing. Efficiency is invisible. That is not a flaw in the design, it is the design: the game is meant to be countable live.
SuperCoach scoring: ranking points, not counting
SuperCoach starts from a different question. Instead of asking what a player did, Champion Data's system asks what the action was worth. The published explainer values give a reasonable picture of the shape, even though the full table is not officially released.
| Action | SuperCoach points, as publicly reported |
|---|---|
| Goal | 8 |
| Score assist | 3 |
| Behind | 1 |
| Intercept contested mark | 8 |
| Contested mark | 6 |
| Mark on a lead | 5 |
| Uncontested mark | 2 |
| Contested possession at ground level | 4.5 |
| Intercept possession | 4.5 |
| Handball received | 1.5 |
| Gather | 1.5 |
| Effective kick | 4 |
| Effective handball | 1.5 |
| Ineffective disposal | 0 |
| Clanger disposal | -4 |
| Tackle | 4 |
| Spoil | 2 |
| Shepherd | 1.5 |
| Hit-out to advantage | 5 |
| Hit-out | 0 |
| Hit-out sharked | -1 |
| Free kick for | 4 |
| Free kick against | -4 |
| Fifty-metre penalty against | -8.5 |
Those numbers should be read as a good public approximation rather than as the rulebook. Champion Data has never published a definitive list, analysts who model the system describe it as effectively secret, and reverse-engineered models of it reach high but not perfect accuracy. The direction of each value is reliable even where the exact figure is not.
The structural point is visible immediately. Winning the ball in a contest at ground level pays roughly three times what receiving a handball pays. A kick pays four if it works and minus four if it is a clanger, an eight-point swing on one action. A ruckman gets nothing for a hit-out that does not go to a teammate. Nothing in AFL Fantasy behaves like that.
Scaling, and why SuperCoach scores move after the siren
SuperCoach applies a match scaling step. The raw ranking points from a game are adjusted so that the total awarded across the match finishes near a fixed figure, widely quoted as about three thousand three hundred points, a number reportedly settled on after studying several seasons of matches.
The reason is comparability. A wet Saturday afternoon at a Victorian ground with sixty inside-fifties between the two sides generates far less raw statistical activity than a fast dry game with a hundred and twenty. Without scaling, a midfielder in the second match would out-score an equally influential midfielder in the first purely because of the weather.
Analysts who study the system add that scoring inside a match is not flat either: ranking points appear to be weighted by time elapsed and by the current margin, so contributions in a tight last quarter are treated differently from contributions in a blowout.
The practical consequence for a coach is that live SuperCoach numbers are provisional. A player sitting on a hundred and ten in the last five minutes can finish on a hundred and two or a hundred and eighteen once the match total is normalised. AFL Fantasy has no equivalent step, so its live number is final.
- Record the actionChampion Data codes every disposal, mark, contest and one-percenter live, including whether it was effective, ineffective or a clanger.
- Weight itEach action is assigned ranking points according to its type, its effectiveness, the difficulty of winning the ball and where on the ground it happened.
- Apply match contextContributions are weighted for time elapsed and the current margin, so the same action is not worth the same amount in every situation.
- Total the matchRaw ranking points are added for every player on both sides to produce a match total.
- Scale to the standardThe match total is scaled towards the standard figure of roughly three thousand three hundred, which moves every individual score up or down.
- Publish the final scoresOnly after scaling are the scores final, which is why provisional in-game numbers are not the ones that count.
A description of the published order of operations, not a reproduction of Champion Data's formula, which is not public. The scaling step is why a live score can move after full time.
The same player, two very different numbers
Take a midfielder with thirty-two disposals of which twenty-two are handballs, ten marks, four tackles and no goals, whose disposal efficiency for the day is poor and who gives up three turnovers by hand under pressure.
In AFL Fantasy that is ten kicks at three, twenty-two handballs at two, ten marks at three, four tackles at four: a hundred and twenty points before frees, which is an elite score. The turnovers are invisible.
In SuperCoach the same game is punished. Most of the handballs are receives worth about one and a half, the uncontested marks pay two apiece, three clangers cost four each, and the contested-possession count is low because the ball was given to him rather than won. The score lands well below the Fantasy figure.
Reverse the player. A key defender with sixteen disposals, six of them intercept marks, twelve effective kicks and four spoils scores modestly in Fantasy and strongly in SuperCoach. This is why the two games produce genuinely different squads, and why the standing advice is not to copy a Fantasy team into SuperCoach.
What each game rewards
AFL Fantasy rewards volume. Midfielders who accumulate, ruckmen who rack up hit-outs regardless of quality, and taggers who tackle. Position matters less than minutes on the ground and the ability to touch the ball often.
SuperCoach rewards influence. Contested ball winners, intercept defenders, goal-kicking forwards, ruckmen whose taps go to advantage, and anyone who uses the ball well. It punishes the player who touches it a lot and does little with it.
Neither is more correct. Fantasy is a counting game and is honest about it. SuperCoach is an attempt to model contribution, and it inherits both the sophistication and the opacity of the model.
Squad structure in SuperCoach
SuperCoach squads in recent seasons have carried thirty-one players across five position groups: defenders, midfielders, rucks, forwards, and a flex slot that can be filled by any of them. Only part of the squad is on the field in a given round, with the rest on the bench in each line, and bench players cover for anyone who does not play.
The whole squad must fit inside a salary cap, which has been ten million notional dollars in recent seasons. That number is meaningless on its own; what matters is the relationship between the cap and player prices, because it determines how many premium players a coach can hold at once. The universal opening position is that you cannot afford a full team of them, so a proportion of the squad has to be cheap players who will appreciate.
- 31Players in a squad
- 5Position groups
- 40Trades in a season
- 5Trade boosts
Settings reported for recent SuperCoach seasons rather than permanent rules. The operators reset squad size, cap, trade allowance and boosts each year, so confirm the current numbers in the game rules before the season starts.
Squad structure in AFL Fantasy
AFL Fantasy Classic uses the same broad architecture, a squad split across defenders, midfielders, rucks, forwards and a utility slot, under a salary cap with a fixed trade allowance for the season. The details are set by the AFL each year and are the settings most often adjusted between seasons, so they should be read from the current rules rather than from memory or from a previous year's guide.
Two structural features are worth knowing regardless of the exact numbers. Dual position players, who qualify in two lines, are disproportionately valuable because they let a coach move a player between lines to cover an emergency. And the interchange bench in fantasy terms is not the same thing as the real interchange bench: a player named as a medical substitute in a real match may play very few minutes, which is a live risk to a fantasy score in a way that has no equivalent in most other codes.
Prices, and how cash is generated
Both Classic formats price players on scoring. A player who consistently outscores what he costs rises; one who underscores falls. Both apply a rolling average and a lag, so a single enormous score does not immediately reprice a player, and a single bad week does not crash him.
The lag is the whole basis of the cash generation strategy. A cheap first-year player priced at the bottom of the market who holds a place in a senior side and scores even moderately will rise steeply over his first handful of games, because he is being measured against a basement price. A coach who owns several such players accumulates enough notional cash to upgrade a mid-priced player to a premium later in the season.
The corresponding risk is that the rookie is dropped, injured, or used as a substitute. A cheap player who does not play generates nothing, occupies a squad spot, and eventually costs a trade.
Trades and the trade economy
Trades are the scarcest resource in Classic. SuperCoach has run forty for the season in recent years, with a small number of trade boosts available for extra moves, and a weekly limit on how many can be used at once. AFL Fantasy sets its own allowance, historically more generous in some seasons and with a period during which unlimited trades applied in specific rounds.
The strategic content is the same in both. A trade spent early on a correction is a trade unavailable in August. Coaches who burn trades reacting to one bad score generally run out by the bye rounds and spend the run home unable to fix injuries.
The standard discipline is to divide the season into three: an early phase where trades fix genuine mistakes and cash-cow injuries, a middle phase where trades upgrade rookies into premiums, and a late phase where trades are held in reserve for injuries and for the finals structure of whichever league the team is in.
The captain, the vice-captain and the loophole
Both games double the captain's score, which makes captaincy the highest-leverage weekly decision. Both provide a vice-captain whose score doubles instead if the captain does not play.
That produces the loophole. If the vice-captain plays early in the round and scores heavily, a coach can arrange for the nominated captain not to play, so the vice-captain's big score is the one doubled. The mechanics differ between the two games and the conditions attached to it have been adjusted at various points, so it is one of the settings that genuinely needs to be read fresh each season rather than assumed.
The everyday version of the same logic is more useful than the trick: captain a premium midfielder playing a weak opponent at a ground he scores well at, avoid captaining a player carrying a fitness cloud, and do not captain a ruckman against an opponent who plays two.
Rookies, and why they decide seasons
The rookie cycle is the part of Classic that separates experienced coaches from new ones. The chain runs like this: identify first-year and low-priced players who will actually be selected in a senior side, own them from round one, hold them while they rise, and sell them at or near their peak price into a premium.
The judgement is not about which rookie will be the best player. It is about which rookie will play the most consecutive matches. A brilliant teenager who plays four games and is managed is worth less than a modest one who plays fourteen straight.
The preseason competition and the club practice matches are where most of that information comes from, and the guides to AFL list management and the AFL draft explain the rules that determine which young players are on a list and eligible in the first place.
The bye rounds
The AFL schedules a block of rounds in which several clubs have a week off, and in fantasy those weeks are the sharpest test of squad construction. A coach whose premium players are concentrated in one bye round can be left unable to field a full side, and even with extra trades granted during the period, the damage can be several hundred points.
Planning for it is a preseason job, not a June one. The bye structure is published with the fixture, and the standard method is to check the distribution of premium players across the bye weeks before the season starts and adjust selections so no single week is catastrophic. The way the fixture itself is constructed is set out in the guide to the AFL fixture.
Draft formats
Draft is a different game with the same scoring. A small league of coaches takes turns picking players, each player belongs to one team only, and there is no salary cap and no price movement. A player who goes undrafted sits in a free agent pool and is claimed through a waiver system.
Because cash generation does not exist, the skills change completely. Depth of player knowledge matters more, because the last rounds of a draft are where leagues are won. Positional scarcity matters, particularly at ruck. And injury management becomes acute, since there is no market to buy a replacement from beyond what nobody else wanted.
Draft also removes the main frustration of Classic, which is that everybody's team converges on the same twenty players by August. In a draft league, no two teams can be the same.
What a good score looks like by position
Benchmarks differ between the games and this is where the practical gap shows up most clearly. In AFL Fantasy an elite individual score is generally spoken of in the range of about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and thirty, and scores much beyond that are rare because there is a ceiling on how many actions one player can accumulate in two hours.
SuperCoach has a longer tail in both directions. Because efficiency and contested work are multiplied rather than counted, an outstanding performance can climb far higher, and the competition record stands at two hundred and sixty-two, set by Jonathan Brown in round seven of 2006, the game's first season. The same scoring behaviour produces the opposite result on a bad day: a player who turns the ball over repeatedly can post a score well below anything AFL Fantasy would give him for the same disposal count.
Positional expectation follows from that. Midfielders anchor both games. Ruckmen are more predictable in Fantasy, where every hit-out counts, and more volatile in SuperCoach, where only taps to advantage pay. Defenders are far more useful in SuperCoach because intercept marking is rewarded heavily. Forwards other than genuine goal-kickers are the weakest line in both, which is why forward premiums cost a disproportionate share of a cap.
Building a team in the preseason
The team that starts round one is mostly decided in February. The sequence experienced coaches follow is consistent: read the price list first and identify which premiums are underpriced after an injury-affected previous season, then find the cheap players who will actually be selected, then fill the middle of the squad last, because mid-priced players are the ones most often wrong.
Preseason matches and club practice games are the only public evidence about which first-year players are near selection, and about role changes under a new coach, which are the largest single source of scoring change from one season to the next. A midfielder moved permanently forward, or a half-back given the kick-in duties, can shift forty points a week without any change in ability.
The last preseason job is the bye audit described above, and the last-minute one is the round-one team sheets, since both games allow changes right up until each match starts.
Common mistakes
The most common is treating the two games as interchangeable, which produces a SuperCoach team full of high-volume, low-efficiency accumulators.
The second is over-trading in the first month. Player prices barely move in the opening rounds and a poor score in round one carries almost no information.
The third is ignoring the bye rounds until they arrive.
The fourth is over-weighting a single huge score. Both games use rolling averages precisely because one match is noise, and a coach who trades in a player on the strength of one hundred and forty is usually buying at the peak.
The fifth is forgetting that the real sport is the input. Late positional changes, a player named as a substitute, a role change under a new coach, a tag, or the interchange and rotation pattern a club uses all move fantasy scores more reliably than any pricing model.
Where the numbers come from
AFL Fantasy scores come from the AFL's own statistics feed with published values applied to it, which is why they are reproducible.
SuperCoach scores come from Champion Data, the statistics provider whose ranking points also appear in mainstream broadcast and print analysis of Australian football. That connection is the strongest argument for SuperCoach as a way of watching the game: the number that decides a fantasy round is the same number an analyst uses to argue who was the most influential player on the ground.
It is also the reason the values cannot be fully verified. Champion Data treats the weighting as commercial property, published explainer tables cover only part of it, and independent models can predict scores accurately without ever being able to prove the underlying table.
Which one to play
If you want a game you can follow live with a stats app and a calculator, and you are still learning the sport, AFL Fantasy is the better starting point. Its scoring teaches you what the counted actions are and nothing is hidden.
If you want the game to correspond to who actually influenced the match, and you are comfortable with a scoring system you cannot fully audit, SuperCoach is closer to how the sport is analysed.
If you want a competition against a fixed group of friends rather than against a hundred thousand strangers, play a Draft league in either game, because the format matters more than the scoring engine once you are in a league of ten.
Playing both is common and the standard complaint about it is real: the two formats pull selections in opposite directions, so a coach ends up holding two quite different squads and watching the same match hoping for two different things from the same player. Coaches who do it usually treat one of the two as the serious team and the other as a lower-maintenance side, because managing forty trades in one competition and a separate trade economy in another across the same twenty-four rounds is a genuine time commitment rather than a weekend hobby. The prize structures are modest relative to that effort, with weekly cash prizes and a season prize measured in the tens of thousands rather than anything larger, so the honest reason to play either is that it changes how you watch the football.
What to check before each season
Squad size, position requirements, the salary cap, the trade allowance, trade boosts, captain and vice-captain conditions, bye round handling and prize structures are all reset annually by the operators. The scoring values are the stable part; the settings around them are not.
Read the current season rules in the game itself before locking a team, and check the AFL's own competition rules for anything that affects who takes the field, since a change to the substitute rule or to interchange caps changes fantasy scoring without any fantasy rule changing at all. For the surrounding context on how the professional competition is structured, the AFL section of this site and the wider sports guides cover the fixture, the finals and the list rules, and the grassroots end of the same sport is described in the guide to country football in Australia.