The AFL Trade Period: How Deals Actually Get Done

For ten days each October the Australian Football League stops playing football and starts trading it. The AFL trade period is the only window in the year when the eighteen clubs can exchange players with each other, and it produces more noise per day of actual activity than anything else in the Australian sporting calendar. There is no match to report on. There is only a set of phone calls, a queue of managers, and a deadline.

The mechanics are simpler than the coverage suggests. Clubs may trade contracted players and national draft selections, in any combination they can agree on. A contracted player has to consent to being moved. Everything must be lodged and registered before the window closes, in 2025 at 7.30pm AEDT on Wednesday 15 October. After that no player changes clubs by trade until the following October, although draft picks keep moving until the draft itself.

What makes the AFL trade period distinctive is that it is a market with no money in it. There are no transfer fees. A club cannot buy a player with cash the way an A-League or a European football club can. It can only pay in draft picks and in other players, and it can only do that with the consent of the person being moved. That constraint shapes everything about how the fortnight plays out.

What the AFL trade period actually is

Formally, it is a defined period in the AFL's rules during which clubs may lodge agreed exchanges of players and draft selections with the league for registration. Informally, it is the annual settling of accounts: contracts that have run down, players who have asked to go home to Perth or Adelaide, coaches who have decided a list needs surgery rather than patching, and clubs that finished fifteenth deciding whether to sell what they have.

It is not a transfer window in the football sense. There is no equivalent of a January window, no second bite mid-season, and no fee. A club that decides in June that it needs a key defender has to wait until October and then persuade both another club and the player himself.

The design is deliberate and it comes out of the AFL's broader equalisation philosophy. Australian rules is played seriously in one country by eighteen professional clubs, several of which sit in markets that could not sustain an open transfer market for a season. If clubs could buy players with money, the four or five wealthiest would buy them all, and the competition the AFL sells — one in which the bottom side can be playing finals within three years — would stop existing. So the league removed money from player acquisition entirely and replaced it with a rationed, ordered currency that the worst clubs get more of.

That has a consequence worth stating plainly at the start. Almost everything that looks irrational about the AFL trade period, from the theatrical deadline to the public trade requests to clubs accepting apparently poor returns, follows from three rules: no cash, a capped list, and a player who can say no.

When the trade period runs

The window sits between the Grand Final and the national draft. In 2025 the free agency period opened on Friday 3 October at 9am AEST and closed on Friday 10 October at 5pm AEDT. The trade period itself commenced on Monday 6 October at 9am AEDT and concluded on Wednesday 15 October at 7.30pm AEDT. The national draft followed on 19 and 20 November, with the rookie and pre-season drafts on 21 November.

The overlap between the two windows is deliberate and it is awkward on purpose. For five working days a club can be negotiating a trade for a player while a rival is negotiating a free agency signing that would make the trade unnecessary.

44%56%

• Free agency window8
• Trade period10

Length in days of the 2025 free agency and trade windows as published by the AFL. These are structural counts from the calendar, not measurements of activity, and the dates move by a few days each year with the finals schedule.

Show the numbers

The two 2025 player movement windows

Item	Value
Free agency window	8
Trade period	10

Why the window sits where it does in the calendar

Two hard constraints fix it in place. It cannot open before the Grand Final because no club should be losing players while another is preparing for a preliminary final, and because contract years run to the end of the season. It cannot close after the national draft because traded picks would then be worthless — a selection you acquire has to be acquired before it is used.

That leaves a five to six week corridor in October and November, and the AFL uses the first ten working days of it. The compression is intentional. A longer window would spread negotiations over months and reduce the pressure that forces decisions.

The three things clubs can trade

There are exactly three categories of asset in play. Contracted players, whose movement requires their consent. Out-of-contract players who are not free agents, who can be traded but who can equally walk into the draft. And national draft selections, which are the only asset that is fully liquid.

Everything else that gets discussed — salary cap space, list spots, future considerations — is context rather than currency. A club cannot trade cap space to another club. It can only create room for itself.

Draft picks as currency

The draft order is the reverse of the ladder. In 2025 Richmond finished eighteenth, so its first selection was pick one, and so on up the ladder. Each club must select at least three players at the draft, which sets a floor on how many picks it has to hold or acquire.

Because picks are numbered, they can be compared, and because they can be compared, they can be priced. Clubs use pick value indices — internal ranking systems that assign a numerical worth to each selection, weighted heavily towards the very top of the first round — to test whether a package balances. The AFL does not publish an official index, and the clubs' models differ from one another, which is one reason two list managers can look at the same offer and reach opposite conclusions.

The curve is steep at the top and flat in the middle. The difference in expected value between pick one and pick five is far larger than the difference between pick thirty and pick forty, because the top of the draft is where the genuinely rare players are and the middle is where the outcomes become close to random. This is why a club will trade three later selections for one early one and feel it has won, and why the club on the other side of that deal will often feel the same. Volume has value when a list needs bodies. Concentration has value when a list needs a star. Both clubs can be right.

A second complication is that a pick's number is not fixed when it is traded. Selections move down the order when academy and father-son bids are matched, and they move around when compensation selections are inserted. A club that trades away what it thinks is pick twelve can find it has traded pick fifteen. Clubs price this in, but it is a live source of disagreement during the window and it is one reason future picks — which have no number at all yet, only a club attached — are negotiated as ranges rather than as fixed assets.

Future picks and the two-year rule

Until recently, clubs could trade selections only one draft ahead. From 2025 that extended to two years, so a club trading in October 2025 could deal its 2025, 2026 and 2027 selections.

The change matters more than it sounds. A club in the middle of a rebuild can now accept two future firsts instead of one, spreading the return across drafts it expects to be better placed to use. A contender can push its cost further into the future. The obvious risk is that a club mortgages two drafts and then falls off the ladder, at which point it is handing high selections to somebody else at precisely the moment it needs them.

The player holds a veto

This is the rule non-followers most often get wrong. If a player has one or more years remaining on his contract, his club must have his consent before it can trade him. A player may veto any proposed move he does not agree with, whether he is contracted or not.

There is no equivalent of an NFL or NBA trade where a player learns on television that he now lives in another city. In the AFL the player is a party to the negotiation, and in practice his manager is the third participant in every conversation. This is why trade requests are made publicly. A player who wants out and says so has effectively told his club that it can accept the best offer available or keep an unhappy footballer.

The veto also explains the geography of AFL player movement. A very large share of trades run in one direction: interstate players returning to Victoria, or Victorian-raised players heading home from Perth, Adelaide and the Gold Coast. Because the player chooses, the market is shaped by where people want to live rather than by where the money is. Clubs based in Western Australia and Queensland have to carry that as a structural cost, recruiting with the knowledge that a proportion of their best young players will eventually ask to go back across the Nullarbor. Clubs in Melbourne have the opposite problem in reverse — they are competing with nine other Victorian clubs for the same returning players, and being one of eighteen national clubs in a city of five million is not the advantage it sounds.

The one qualification is that consent is not the same as leverage. A contracted player who vetoes every move stays where he is, on the contract he signed, and his club has no obligation to trade him at all. Clubs do sometimes refuse to deal, hold the player for a season and either win him back or trade him a year later at a discount. The veto protects the player from being moved. It does not oblige the club to move him.

How a trade is actually lodged and approved

The two clubs agree terms. The player, if contracted, consents. The clubs then lodge the exchange with the AFL, which verifies it: that both clubs remain within list size limits, that both remain inside total player payments, that the picks being traded exist and have not already been committed, and that the consent requirements have been met. Only once the league registers the deal is it done.

The gap between "agreed" and "registered" is where the trade period's reporting goes wrong every year. A deal reported as complete at 3pm can still be unwound at 5pm.

1. 1Request or approachA player asks to be traded, or a rival club approaches the player's club about a contracted player it wants.
2. 2Club-to-club talksList managers negotiate what combination of players and draft selections would make the exchange acceptable to both sides.
3. 3Player consentA contracted player must agree to the move and to terms with the new club, and can veto any deal he does not want.
4. 4Package balancingIf the pick values do not match, a third club is often brought in to absorb or supply selections and bridge the gap.
5. 5LodgementBoth clubs formally lodge the agreed exchange with the AFL before the window closes at 7.30pm on the final day.
6. 6AFL verificationThe league checks list sizes, total player payments, pick ownership and consent, then registers the trade, at which point it is final.

The sequence set out by the AFL's trade period rules. Every step must be complete before the deadline for the exchange to be registered.

Anatomy of a multi-club deal

Two-club trades are the norm, but the interesting ones involve three. The reason is arithmetic. Club A wants a player from Club B. Club B wants a first-round selection. Club A has already traded its first and holds only seconds. Club C is happy to take Club A's seconds now in exchange for its own first, because Club C expects to finish low and values current picks less than future ones.

Deals like this are assembled in the last forty-eight hours, because the third club only becomes available once its own primary business has resolved. In the 2025 window, Carlton's deal to send Charlie Curnow to Sydney was reported as returning three first-round selections, and the same two clubs also moved Will Hayward and Oliver Florent in the other direction — a cluster of transactions between the same pair of clubs, priced against each other.

The 2025 trade fortnight, as scheduled

Stage	2025 date and time	What it allowed
Free agency opens	Friday 3 October, 9am AEST	Qualifying free agents may sign with a new club
Trade period opens	Monday 6 October, 9am AEDT	Clubs may lodge player and pick exchanges
Free agency closes	Friday 10 October, 5pm AEDT	Last point for a free agency signing
Trade period closes	Wednesday 15 October, 7.30pm AEDT	Hard deadline for all player movement by trade
National draft	19 and 20 November	Selections used, picks still tradeable live
Rookie and pre-season drafts	21 November	Rookie list spots filled

Deadline day

The final day is a genuinely distinct event. Deals that have been stalled for a week move in minutes because the alternative is no deal at all. Clubs that have been holding out for a first-round selection start taking seconds at four o'clock. Managers who have been playing two clubs against each other find they have run out of clubs.

The last thirty minutes routinely produce multiple registrations, and the broadcast counts down to 7.30pm the way a sports broadcast counts down to a siren. When the clock goes, anything unlodged is gone.

The deadline is doing real work, not just producing television. Without it, both sides in every negotiation would have an incentive to wait, because the club that moves second gets better information about what the market will bear. A hard stop converts that stalemate into a game where waiting eventually becomes more expensive than conceding. It is the same mechanism that makes an auction end and a court case settle on the courthouse steps.

It also produces predictable errors. Deals struck in the last hour are struck with less due diligence than deals struck on day three, and clubs have accepted packages at 7.20pm that they would have laughed at on the Monday. The counter-argument, made regularly by list managers, is that a longer window would simply move the same panic to a later date.

Why deals collapse

The common failure modes are consistent from year to year. Valuation gaps, where the selling club's price never comes down and the buying club's offer never goes up. List spot shortages, where a club that wants a player has no room and cannot delist quickly enough. Salary cap constraints, where the recruiting club can afford the player but not the player and the contract it already has. Contract length disputes, where the player wants five years and the club offers three. And occasionally a straightforward change of mind by the player.

Valuation gaps are the largest single cause and they have a specific structure. The selling club is pricing the player it is losing; the buying club is pricing the marginal improvement that player makes to a list it already has. Those two numbers are almost never the same, and the gap widens for players who are very good without being elite, because the buying club can usually name three cheaper ways to achieve most of the same improvement.

There is also a reputational dimension that is rarely discussed on the record. A club that is seen to give up a player cheaply invites every rival to test its resolve the following year, and a club that is seen to overpay finds the asking price for everything it wants goes up. List managers negotiate with one eye on the deal in front of them and one on the next five Octobers, which makes them slower to concede than a purely rational single-deal analysis would predict.

What happens when a trade fails

The player stays. If he is contracted, he is contracted to a club he has publicly asked to leave, and he plays out the year or is traded twelve months later at a lower price. If he is out of contract and not a free agent, he can nominate for the national draft and be selected by any club, which usually means his old club loses him for nothing.

That asymmetry is why clubs would rather accept a disappointing offer than hold firm and lose the asset entirely. It is also why trade requests made in August are more valuable to a player than trade requests made in October.

Pick swaps continue until draft night

Player movement stops at the deadline. Selections do not. Clubs continue to trade picks in the weeks between the trade period and the draft, and they trade them live during the draft itself, moving up to secure a player another club is about to take or sliding back to accumulate volume.

This is the quiet part of the market and it produces some of the better value, because it is done without the deadline pressure and without a broadcast counting down.

How free agency changes the trade market

The two systems interact in ways that frustrate list managers. A qualifying out-of-contract player can move without a trade at all, with the AFL handing his old club a compensation selection instead. That means a club negotiating hard for a player during trade week can be undercut by a rival simply signing him as a free agent for nothing.

It also means clubs try to convert free agency departures into trades where they can, because a negotiated return is often better than the league's compensation. Whether that is true depends on the compensation band, which is covered in detail in our AFL free agency guide.

• 18Clubs able to trade
• 10Days in the window
• 3Draft years tradeable
• 3Minimum draft selections used per club

Structural counts taken from the AFL's 2025 rules and calendar, not measurements of activity. The minimum selections figure is the number of players each club must take at the national draft.

List spots are the constraint nobody mentions

A club's list is capped. A primary list runs to around 36 to 38 players, with Category A rookie spots filling the difference — up to six if the primary list is 36, five at 37, four at 38 — plus up to two Category B rookies. That produces a total squad in the mid-forties.

Every incoming player therefore requires an outgoing one. A club with a full list that wants to trade in two players and take three at the draft has to move five out. This is why the trade period is followed immediately by a wave of delistings, and why some trades are made not to acquire talent but to create the space to acquire it.

The salary cap sits underneath every trade

Total player payments are a hard limit and the AFL verifies compliance before registering a deal. A club cannot simply agree a contract and sort the cap out later.

This produces trades that look strange on talent and make sense only on money: a good player moved for a modest return because his contract was the problem rather than his football. The reverse also happens, with clubs banking cap space in one year to make a run at a marquee player the next. The full mechanics are in our guide to the AFL salary cap and total player payments.

Trade Radio and the market's information problem

The AFL runs a dedicated Trade Radio broadcast through both windows, on air daily through the working day. It is genuinely useful for followers and genuinely destabilising for clubs, because the market is small, everyone is listening, and information moves prices.

A report that a club is willing to accept a second-round selection collapses the price immediately. A report that two clubs are in the race for the same player raises it. Managers understand this and use it. So do list managers. Much of what is described as a leak during trade week is a deliberate placement.

How the AFL system compares with the NRL

Rugby league does not have a trade period at all. Contracted NRL players move by mutual release and by clubs paying out contracts, and the market runs more or less year-round under a hard cap. The NRL has no draft, so there are no picks to trade and no currency other than money and playing contracts. Our explainer on the NRL salary cap sets out how differently the two codes handle the same problem, and the broader differences between the codes are covered in our comparison of rugby league and rugby union.

The AFL's design — a draft, a hard cap, a short window, and a player veto — produces a market that is more equal and considerably more theatrical than league's.

Common misconceptions

That clubs can pay cash for players: they cannot. That a contracted player can be moved against his will: he cannot. That a reported trade is a completed trade: it is not until the AFL registers it. That the trade period is when most list turnover happens: a good deal of it happens afterwards, through delistings and the three drafts. And that a first-round pick is always worth more than a good player on a fair contract: clubs that believe this consistently lose trade weeks.

What to watch in the next window

Three things tell you most of what will happen. Which players have publicly requested a move, because those transactions almost always complete in some form. Which clubs have a shortage of list spots, because they will be sellers whether they want to be or not. And which clubs have already traded away future selections, because they will be under pressure to acquire picks rather than players.

A short glossary

Trade period: the ten-day October window for exchanging players and picks. Future pick: a selection in a draft one or two years ahead. Pick value index: a club's internal model for pricing selections. Consent: the contracted player's required agreement to a move. Registration: the AFL's formal approval, without which no trade exists. Deadline: 7.30pm on the final day, after which no player moves by trade.

Where to go next

The trade period is one of three connected systems. Free agency governs who can move without being traded and what the losing club receives. The salary cap governs what any of it can cost. And the draft governs what the picks being traded are actually worth. Our guide to AFL free agency explains the eight-year threshold and the compensation bands, and our AFL salary cap guide covers total player payments in detail.

For the venues where all of this eventually plays out, see our guide to Marvel Stadium and the MCG. The rest of the Australian sport section is at /australia and /sports.

Related reading: AFL free agency explained, the AFL salary cap and total player payments, the NRL salary cap explained, rugby league versus rugby union, Optus Stadium, Adelaide Oval, the Gabba and rugby on Cricket Times.