The AFL Father-Son Rule Explained: Games, Bids and Cost
The AFL father son rule explained — the 100-game threshold, how bids and points matching work, the interstate variations, famous cases and the 2026 changes.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Lists & recruiting19 min read
- Introduced
- 1949 in the VFL
- Original threshold
- 50 senior games
- Current threshold
- 100 senior games for the club
- First player cleared
- Harvey Dunn Jr in 1951
- Threshold raised to 100
- Before the 2003 season
- Points bidding began
- 2015 draft
- AFLW equivalent
- One senior game for the father
- Levi Ashcroft bid matched at
- Pick 5 in 2024
The AFL father son rule is the oldest hole in Australian football's recruiting system, and it is older than the system it puts a hole in. It was created in 1949, thirty-two years before the first national draft, and it survives because the competition has never quite been willing to tell a former player's son that he cannot play for his father's club.
The test is a games count. If a man played at least 100 senior games for a club, that club has the right to claim his son. The son nominates the club before the national draft, and from that point he is handled through a bidding process: any rival club may call his name, and the father's club must pay the equivalent value in its own draft selections to keep him. It is a right of first refusal with a bill attached, and the size of that bill has been the central argument in AFL list management for a decade.
This guide covers where the rule came from, how the qualification threshold has moved from 50 games to 20 to 50 to 100, what the modern bidding process actually costs, the variations that apply to the South Australian, Western Australian and expansion clubs, the individual cases that forced each rule change, and what the 2026 loadings do to a successful club holding a good father-son prospect. For the wider machinery it sits inside, see the guide to how the AFL draft works.
A rule born from a war grave
The origin story is unusually specific for a piece of sporting regulation.
Ron Barassi senior played for Melbourne and was killed at Tobruk in 1941. His son, Ron Barassi junior, grew up wanting to play for the same club, but Victorian football at the time allocated players by residential zone and the family had moved outside Melbourne's. The club lobbied for a change that would let it recruit the sons of former players regardless of where they lived, and in 1949 the Victorian Football League introduced what became the father-son rule.
Barassi went on to play 204 games for Melbourne and 50 for Carlton, coached four premierships and became one of the defining figures in the sport. The first player formally cleared under the new rule, however, was Harvey Dunn Jr, recruited by Carlton in 1951.
What the rule did in 1949 was carve an exception out of the zoning system. What it does now is carve an exception out of the draft. The mechanism changed completely; the justification never has.
The threshold that will not stay still
The number of games a father must have played has been moved more often than any other element of the rule, and each move tells you what the league was worried about at the time.
It began at 50 games. In 1978 it was cut to 20, a very low bar that widened the eligible pool substantially. In 1993, with the competition now national and the draft established, it went back to 50. Before the 2003 season the AFL doubled it to 100, where it has stayed.
The minimum number of senior games a father must have played for the club, at the point each change took effect. Applies to the standard rule as it governs the Victorian clubs. Separate thresholds have applied to some interstate clubs.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| 1949 | 50 |
| 1978 | 20 |
| 1993 | 50 |
| 2003 | 100 |
| 2026 | 100 |
One hundred games is a meaningful career but not a great one. It is roughly five full seasons of senior football, which most listed players never reach and a solid regular does comfortably. The AFL set it there deliberately: high enough that the concession honours genuine service, low enough that it does not become a rule about club legends only.
The current qualification test
The standard rule is short. A club may claim a player whose father played a minimum of 100 senior games for that club.
Three details matter. The games must be senior games, not reserves or development matches. They must be for that club, not spread across a career at several clubs — a father with 60 games at one club and 60 at another qualifies the son for neither. And the son must nominate the club before the draft, which is the act that creates the tie.
There is nothing in the rule about the son's ability, location or preference. A father-son prospect from Perth can be tied to a Melbourne club and vice versa, and the rule cuts straight through the geography that otherwise shapes the pathway.
Fitzroy, South Melbourne and inherited history
Two clubs claim a lineage that is not their own, and both are entitled to.
Brisbane inherits Fitzroy. When the Fitzroy Football Club merged into the Brisbane Bears at the end of 1996, the Brisbane Lions took on Fitzroy's history, and the sons of men who played 100 games for Fitzroy became eligible for Brisbane. Sydney inherits South Melbourne in the same way, having simply relocated in 1982 rather than merged.
This is more consequential than it sounds. Without it, both clubs would have almost no father-son pool at all in their early decades, and Sydney in particular would have been claiming almost nothing until the 2000s. With it, both hold access to Victorian playing histories running back a century.
The South Australian and Western Australian variations
The clubs that joined the competition from state leagues negotiated their own arrangements, because their fathers had played most or all of their football in the SANFL and WAFL rather than the VFL.
West Coast, from its 1987 debut through to 2007, could recruit the sons of players who had managed at least 150 appearances for four designated WAFL clubs. The higher games bar reflected the shorter, less demanding nature of state league seasons relative to a national competition. Broadly similar modified rules have applied to the South Australian clubs for SANFL service predating their entry to the AFL.
These provisions are historical and have been wound back as the interstate clubs have accumulated enough of their own playing history to work from. They are worth knowing about mainly because they explain father-son claims from the 1990s and 2000s that would otherwise look inexplicable.
Gold Coast, Greater Western Sydney and the empty cupboard
The two newest clubs, founded in 2011 and 2012, are only now reaching the point where their own former players have sons of draft age.
A father who played his 100th game for Gold Coast in 2014 will have a son entering the draft pool in the 2030s at the earliest. That lag is unavoidable and it is one reason both clubs lean far more heavily on their northern academies, which produce tied players on a much shorter cycle. The academies guide sets out how those work.
The wider point is that the father-son rule is not a concession that treats clubs equally. It rewards age. A club founded in 1897 has a century of qualified fathers; a club founded in 2011 has almost none.
Life before the points system
For most of its history the rule operated as something close to a free pass, and for the decade after the draft arrived it was a genuinely enormous advantage.
A club holding a father-son prospect matched a rival bid using its own next available selection, whatever that selection was. If the bid came at pick two and the club's own first pick was eighteen, it paid eighteen. The gap between what the player was worth and what the club paid was pure profit.
Gary Ablett Jr is the standard illustration of the scale involved. Geelong took him at pick 40 in the 2001 draft. He won two Brownlow Medals, played in two premierships and was named All-Australian eight times. No pick-40 selection in an open draft has ever returned anything remotely comparable.
The bid that broke the old system
The change came from an academy case rather than a father-son one, but it applied to both.
In the 2014 draft Melbourne bid on the Sydney academy prospect Isaac Heeney with pick two. Under the rules as they stood, Sydney matched with its own first selection, which was pick eighteen. Heeney became a multiple-time All-Australian. The transaction was entirely within the rules and entirely impossible to defend as an equalisation measure.
The AFL reviewed the father-son and academy pathways in 2015 and produced the Draft Value Index: a points table that prices every early selection, so that matching a bid at pick two now costs something close to the value of pick two rather than the value of whatever a club happens to be holding.
What a father-son selection costs now
Under the points model the club pays a bill calculated from where the bid landed.
Pick one is worth 3000 points and the curve falls steeply. A bid inside the top five therefore costs most of a club's draft hand, while a bid in the forties costs a few hundred points and is close to a formality. A discount applies to the points required — 20 per cent for several years, cut to 10 per cent from the 2025 draft — and a club that cannot cover the bill from picks in hand may carry a limited deficit into the following year's draft, which reduces the value of its next first-rounder.
- Bid at pick 22517
- Bid at pick 40429
Draft Value Index points for the pick the bid is made with, before any discount, using the index as published for drafts up to and including 2024. The figures show the price of the bid, not the number of picks a club would surrender.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Bid at pick 2 | 2517 |
| Bid at pick 40 | 429 |
The practical consequence is that clubs now think about father-son prospects the way they think about any other asset. A club that expects an early bid on its tied player will hoard mid-range selections through the trade period specifically to have something to pay with, and a club that expects a late bid can spend freely.
Worked example: Levi Ashcroft in 2024
The clearest recent illustration is Brisbane matching Melbourne's bid at pick five on Levi Ashcroft in the 2024 draft.
Levi is the son of Marcus Ashcroft, who played 318 games for the club, and the younger brother of Will. Brisbane assembled the required points from four selections — picks 40, 42, 43 and 46, worth 429, 395, 378 and 331 points respectively, a total of 1533.
Two things stand out. The first is that the club paid with four picks in the forties rather than with anything early, which is exactly the stockpiling strategy the 2026 two-pick limit is designed to shut down. The second is that Brisbane was a premiership club at the time, and a premiership club acquiring a top-five talent at that price is precisely the outcome the AFL has now decided to price out.
Notable father-son selections
| Player | Club | Draft | Pick | Father |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gary Ablett Jr | Geelong | 2001 | 40 | Gary Ablett Sr |
| Nick Daicos | Collingwood | 2021 | 4 (bid matched) | Peter Daicos |
| Sam Darcy | Western Bulldogs | 2021 | 2 (bid matched) | Luke Darcy |
| Will Ashcroft | Brisbane | 2022 | 2 (bid matched) | Marcus Ashcroft |
| Jaspa Fletcher | Brisbane | 2022 | Bid matched | Adrian Fletcher |
| Levi Ashcroft | Brisbane | 2024 | 5 (bid matched) | Marcus Ashcroft |
Collingwood covered the Daicos bid at pick four using picks 38, 40, 42 and 44 — the same pattern Brisbane used three years later, and the same reason the rules changed.
The Geelong generation
Geelong's use of the rule through the 2000s is the best single demonstration of what it can build.
In the 2009 grand final the club fielded three father-son players: Ablett, the full-back Matthew Scarlett and the forward Tom Hawkins. Three players in one premiership side, all acquired through a concession, all of them either great or very good. No other club has assembled anything comparable in a single team.
That period is what convinced the rest of the competition that the rule needed pricing rather than abolishing. Nobody suggested Geelong had cheated. What they had done was recruit well from a pool nobody else could touch, at a cost that bore no relation to the value received.
The genetics argument
Underneath the rules debate sits an uncomfortable question: does the rule work because footballing ability is heritable, or because the sons of AFL players grow up with access nobody else has?
Both, almost certainly, and the second is probably the larger factor. A father-son prospect has spent his childhood around professional training environments, has been coached by people who played at the highest level, and has had his development managed with a clarity most junior footballers never encounter. Height and athleticism are heritable; so is a set of advantages that has nothing to do with genes.
The strike rate of father-son selections is genuinely high relative to the picks used to acquire them, which is what the ABC's analysis of the rule found and what every recruiter will tell you privately. That is the strongest practical argument for keeping the concession priced properly, and the strongest argument against pretending it is a sentimental gesture.
What changes for the 2026 draft
The AFL's 2026 package leaves the eligibility rule untouched and rewrites the price entirely.
A ladder-based sliding scale replaces the flat discount. The two grand finalists face a 20 per cent loading on the points required to match a bid, which the league has said makes matching an early bid nearly impossible for a grand finalist unless it first loses a key player and gains draft capital. Preliminary finalists face a 10 per cent loading. Clubs finishing fifth to tenth pay the bid value flat. Clubs that missed the finals keep a 10 per cent discount.
Clubs are also limited to two picks when matching a bid in the early part of the draft, and a bottom-five club whose own top selection is pushed down the order by another club's matched bid receives an extra pick at the start of the second round.
Read together, the changes convert the father-son rule from a flat concession into a means-tested one. A struggling club with a good tied prospect keeps most of the benefit. A premiership club with the same prospect will have to trade hard for early picks first, or let him go.
The father-daughter rule in the AFLW
The AFLW has run an equivalent since the competition began in 2017, with a threshold set at one senior AFL game rather than 100.
The reason for the enormous gap is arithmetic. The women's competition is new, and almost no current AFLW-age player has a father who played 100 games for a specific club — the eligible pool under the men's rule would be a handful of names nationally. Carlton's selection of Abbie McKay, daughter of the club's former captain Andrew McKay, was the first use of the concession in the competition's opening drafts.
The AFLW bidding system has worked differently from the men's, with matching handled inside a fixed window of subsequent selections rather than through the full points index, and the league has flagged bringing it closer into line with the men's model. That work is ongoing and the current AFLW draft booklet is the place to check it.
Why the rule survives
Every few years someone proposes abolishing the father-son rule, and every few years the AFL declines.
The arguments for abolition are straightforward. It is anti-equalisation, it favours old clubs over new ones, it has repeatedly delivered elite players to clubs that were already strong, and no other element of the draft is justified on sentiment. The AFL's chief executive has publicly ruled out removing it, choosing instead to make it more expensive.
The arguments for keeping it are less tidy but not weak. The concession is a real part of the sport's culture in a country where football clubs are genuinely multigenerational institutions. Its cost is now measurable and rising. And the alternative — a competition in which a former player's son is allocated to whichever club finished last — would remove something supporters demonstrably care about in exchange for a marginal equalisation gain.
What it means for a young player
For the prospect himself, the rule is a genuine fork in the road, and not always a welcome one.
Nominating his father's club means near-certainty about where he will start, and it usually means arriving at a club where his surname is already known. Declining means entering the open draft with the same uncertainty as everyone else, and possibly a better football fit. Some have declined. Most do not.
The pressure that comes with it is real and rarely discussed. A player arriving at a club under a famous name is compared to his father from his first training session, and the comparison does not stop. For every Ablett or Daicos who exceeds the expectation, there are several who spend a short career being measured against something they were never going to reach.
When a club holds father-son and academy players at once
The two concessions stack, and that is where the argument about equalisation gets sharpest.
Brisbane is the case everyone points at. The club holds a Fitzroy-inherited father-son pool, a northern academy covering Brisbane, the Sunshine Coast, the Darling Downs and Wide Bay, and through the second half of the 2020s it was contending for premierships while claiming tied players from both. In 2022 it matched early bids on the father-son prospects Will Ashcroft and Jaspa Fletcher in the same draft. The AFL has since said publicly that the combination Brisbane assembled under the old pricing would not be achievable under the 2026 rules.
The stacking is not a loophole. Each concession has its own justification — one rewards club history, the other rewards investment in developing the game in a state where it competes with two rugby codes for every junior. But a club that qualifies for both, and is also winning, ends up with an advantage that neither rule was designed to produce on its own. That is the specific problem the ladder-based loadings are meant to solve.
Brisbane supporters heading to a Lions home game will find the ground itself covered in the guide to the Gabba, which hosts cricket in summer and football in winter.
Which clubs have the deepest father-son pools
There is no published ranking, but the structural logic is easy to follow.
The deepest pools belong to the older Victorian clubs — the ones founded in the nineteenth century, with more than a century of players who reached 100 games. Collingwood, Carlton, Essendon, Geelong, Richmond, Melbourne, Hawthorn, St Kilda, Fitzroy through Brisbane and South Melbourne through Sydney all draw on that.
The shallowest belong to Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney, whose first 100-game players only began appearing in the mid-2010s and whose sons are still children. West Coast, Fremantle, Adelaide and Port Adelaide sit in between, with roughly three decades of AFL service each plus their negotiated state league provisions.
Depth of pool is not the same as value, though. A club with a hundred qualified fathers gains nothing in a given year unless one of them has a son who can play, and that is entirely a matter of luck. Collingwood went long stretches with nothing to claim before Peter Daicos's sons arrived, and then claimed two.
How a father-son prospect is scouted
A common misconception is that a tied player is somehow outside the normal recruiting process. He is not, and the bidding system only works because he is inside it.
Every club in the competition scouts a father-son prospect exactly as it scouts anyone else. He plays in the state under-18 pathway, he is watched at the national championships, he is tested at the combine, and he is given a ranking on every club's board. The ranking is what determines where the bid comes, and the bid is what determines the price.
This is why a club holding a good tied player will often be publicly cool about him in the months before a draft, and why rival recruiters are so willing to talk him up. The incentives run in exactly the directions you would expect. A club that wants a bid to come late has every reason to be quiet, and a rival that wants to force a competitor to spend its whole draft hand has every reason to bid early even with no expectation of getting the player.
Nothing quite like it in the other Australian codes
No other professional sport in Australia runs a formal hereditary recruiting concession, which is worth pausing on.
Rugby league has produced as many father-and-son pairs as football has, and its clubs work hard to keep them, but they do it through junior development agreements and contract offers rather than a rule. There is no draft to make an exception to, so there is nothing for a concession to override. The comparison between the two codes' player systems is set out in the rugby league and rugby union guide.
Cricket has the same phenomenon and the same absence of a rule. Australian cricket allocates young players through state associations and contracting rather than a national allocation system, as the structure guide explains, so a promising son simply plays for whichever state he lives in. Nobody needed to write a father-son clause because nothing was blocking him.
The AFL is the outlier because it is the only one of the three that took the allocation decision away from clubs entirely. Once you build a system that hands every teenager to the club that finished last, you have to decide what to do about the ones whose fathers spent a decade at a different club — and 1949 answered that question before the draft existed, which is why the answer sits so awkwardly inside it now. For the broader picture across codes, see the rugby section and the Australia section.
Three things people get wrong about the rule
That the club gets the player for nothing. It has not been true since 2015, and from 2026 a successful club will pay a loading on top of full market value.
That the son has to take it. Nomination is a choice, made before the draft, and it can be declined.
That any family link counts. It does not. The rule covers fathers only, at 100 senior games for one specific club. Grandfathers, brothers and uncles are irrelevant, and there is no mother-son rule, which is a gap the AFLW generation will eventually force the league to address.
Before the next draft, check this
Three things change often enough to be worth verifying rather than assuming.
The games threshold has moved four times and could move again. The discount and loading structure changed for 2025 and again for 2026. And the list of players who have actually nominated a club is published by the AFL ahead of each draft, which is the only authoritative confirmation that a tie exists — a father's games tally on its own does not settle it, particularly for the interstate clubs with modified rules.
For the surrounding system, see how the AFL draft works and the guide to club academies and Next Generation Academies. For the rest of the Australian sporting calendar, the Australia hub collects the code-by-code guides, the sports index covers the wider set, and the contrast with a code that has no draft at all is set out in the NRL salary cap guide.