The Brownlow Medal Explained: Voting, History and Controversy
How the Brownlow Medal works — the 3-2-1 umpire vote, the fairest and best eligibility rule, count night at Crown, the records and the disputed winners.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Awards18 min read
- First awarded
- 1924 to Edward Greeves of Geelong
- Formal name
- The Charles Brownlow Trophy
- Voting system
- Three two and one awarded by the umpires
- Votes available per match
- Six spread across three players
- Most medals
- Three each held by four players
- Record vote tally
- Forty-five by Patrick Cripps in 2024
- Count night
- The Monday before the Grand Final
- Eligibility rule
- A tribunal suspension during the home and away season disqualifies a player
The Brownlow Medal is the individual award that decides, in the eyes of Australian football, who the best player in the AFL was over a season. It is decided by the umpires, three votes for the best player on the ground, two for the second and one for the third, in every home and away match. Add them up at the end of the year and the player with the most wins, provided they have not been suspended.
That last clause is the part that makes the Brownlow Medal different from every comparable award in world sport. Its formal terms describe the fairest and best player, in that order, and the fairness requirement is enforced literally: a player suspended by the tribunal during the home and away season cannot win, no matter how many votes they poll. Three men have topped a count and gone home without the medal.
The award has been running since 1924, which makes it older than the national competition it now serves, older than most of the clubs that have won it in their current form, and old enough that its rules have been rewritten repeatedly. What follows is how the voting works, who Charles Brownlow was, how the eligibility rule has been applied and misapplied, what happens on count night, the records, and the arguments that come round every September.
What the medal is
Formally it is the Charles Brownlow Trophy. In practice nobody uses that name. It is awarded annually to the player judged fairest and best across the AFL home and away season, and it is the most prestigious individual honour in Australian rules football.
The medal itself has barely changed since 1924. The design is essentially the same object it always was, with one alteration in 1990 when the monogram changed from VFL to AFL to reflect the competition's renaming as it became national.
Charles Brownlow
Brownlow was a Geelong man, and his connection to the club ran for more than forty years. He played for Geelong between 1880 and 1891, then served as club secretary from 1885 until 1923, an administrative tenure of nearly four decades. He was also president of the Victorian Football League in 1918 and 1919.
He died in January 1924 after a long illness. Later that year the league established an award in his memory, and the first medal went to Edward Greeves junior of Geelong, known universally as Carji. The letter that accompanied the first award set the tone that has governed the medal ever since, describing Greeves as the fairest and best player and presenting the medal in recognition of those qualities.
How the voting works now
After the final siren of every home and away match, the field umpires who officiated confer. They agree on three players: three votes to the best afield, two to the second best, one to the third. Six vote points leave every match and no other player receives anything, no matter how well they played.
Nobody outside that room contributes. Coaches do not vote, players do not vote, the media does not vote, and the club that won the match has no advantage beyond the obvious one that players in winning sides tend to look better. From 2026 the umpires have been given access to official match statistics when they deliberate, but the decision remains a judgement rather than a calculation.
The votes are sealed immediately and stored securely. They are transported under guard, they are not opened, and they are not disclosed to clubs, players or broadcasters until they are read aloud on count night. The secrecy is taken seriously enough that only the umpires who cast a given set of votes know what is in the envelope.
- Best afield50.0%
- Second best33.3%
- Third best16.7%
The fixed allocation of Brownlow votes in a single home and away match. Every match distributes exactly this and no more, regardless of the margin or the standard of play.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Best afield | 3 |
| Second best | 2 |
| Third best | 1 |
How the system evolved
The 3-2-1 method that everybody now takes for granted is not how the award started.
- 1924 to 1930. One vote per match, awarded to a single player. With only one vote on offer per game, ties were common. Three players finished level on four votes in 1930.
- 1931 onwards. The 3-2-1 system was adopted, and with it the eligibility rule that a suspended player cannot win. Both changes came in the same year and both survive.
- The 1970s variation. For a short period the two field umpires each awarded 3-2-1 independently rather than conferring, which doubled the vote points on offer per match. It was abandoned and the conferring method restored.
- Before 1991. Votes could not be awarded in a match in which a player had been reported, which disadvantaged players who were subsequently cleared by the tribunal.
- Modern era. The full umpiring team confers, with more field umpires officiating than in earlier decades.
The total vote points distributed in a single match under each version of the rules. This counts the structure of the voting system rather than how many votes any player received.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| 1924 | 1 |
| 1931 | 6 |
| 1976 | 12 |
| 1978 | 6 |
| 2026 | 6 |
The fairest and best rule
This is the clause that generates almost every Brownlow argument. A player suspended by the AFL Tribunal for an offence committed during the home and away season is ineligible to win, and the rule has applied since 1931.
The boundaries are narrower than most supporters assume. A player remains eligible if:
- the suspension arises from a finals match or a pre-season match
- the suspension is served for an offence committed in a previous season
- the sanction is imposed by the club rather than the tribunal
- the offence attracts only a financial penalty
Votes polled by an ineligible player are still counted and still read out on the night, which produces the peculiar spectacle of a player accumulating a leading tally in public while everybody in the room knows he cannot win.
Between 2005 and 2014 a more convoluted version applied, under which a player became ineligible if the Match Review Panel assessed an offence as worth a one-match suspension before discounts were applied. That produced outcomes nobody could defend: a player who pleaded guilty early, took his discount and never missed a match could lose eligibility, while a player who successfully challenged a charge and served nothing kept it. The rule was rewritten to key off the suspension actually served.
The three men who topped a count and lost
| Year | Player | Club | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1996 | Corey McKernan | North Melbourne | Polled level with joint winners James Hird and Michael Voss but was ineligible after a one-match suspension for kneeing |
| 1997 | Chris Grant | Western Bulldogs | Polled one vote more than winner Robert Harvey and was ineligible after a suspension for striking |
| 2012 | Jobe Watson | Essendon | Declared the winner on the night, four votes clear, and retrospectively ruled ineligible in November 2016 with the medal passing to Trent Cotchin and Sam Mitchell |
The 1996 and 1997 cases were known on the night and are usually discussed as evidence that the fairness clause works exactly as intended. The 2012 case is different in kind. Watson accepted the medal, held it for four years, and lost it as a consequence of the Essendon supplements matter rather than anything an umpire or a tribunal decided during that season. It remains the most contested outcome in the award's history.
Ties, countbacks and the 1989 correction
For most of the medal's history a tie was not shared. Countback rules applied, and although they changed over the decades they generally came down to who had recorded more three-vote games, then more two-vote games. A player could finish the season on exactly the same number of votes as the winner and receive nothing at all.
The system broke down in 1940, when Des Fothergill and Herbie Matthews could not be separated by any countback and both received a medal, one original and one replica.
In 1989 the AFL dealt with the accumulated unfairness by awarding retrospective medals to eight players who had tied on votes and lost countbacks since the award began. Ties are now shared outright, which is why 1996 produced two winners.
Count night
The count is held on the Monday of Grand Final week, five days before the match, at Crown in Melbourne. It has been televised every year since 1970, when it was staged at Dallas Brooks Hall.
The format is deliberately slow. The AFL chief executive reads the votes match by match, round by round, from round one through to the end of the home and away season. Because the votes are read in chronological order rather than by player, the leaderboard shifts continually, and a count is often not decided until the last two or three rounds are read.
Around this sits a considerable production. Players attend in black tie with their partners, the arrivals are broadcast as a red carpet event that Australian media has nicknamed the Gownlow, and the fashion coverage attracts an audience of its own that is largely uninterested in the football. The broadcast intercuts vote readings with highlights and studio commentary, and it typically runs late into the evening.
The security around the votes is genuine rather than theatrical. Ballots are sealed at the ground, transported under guard and stored unopened, and the only people who know a given match's votes are the umpires who cast them.
The records
| Record | Holder | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Most medals | Haydn Bunton senior, Dick Reynolds, Bob Skilton, Ian Stewart | Three each |
| Most votes in a season | Patrick Cripps | Forty-five in 2024 |
| Second-highest season tally | Matt Rowell | Thirty-nine in 2025 |
| Most career votes | Gary Ablett junior | Two hundred and sixty-two |
| Fastest to one hundred career votes | Nick Daicos | Eighty-five games |
| Youngest winner | Dick Reynolds | Nineteen years and ninety-one days in 1934 |
| Oldest winner | Barry Round | Thirty-one years and two hundred and thirty-eight days in 1981 |
| Most medals by one club | South Melbourne and Sydney | Fourteen |
Five players have won the medal at more than one club: Ian Stewart, Peter Moore, Greg Williams, Chris Judd and Gary Ablett junior.
Vote inflation
The winning tally has risen a long way, and the trend is one of the more interesting things about the award's modern history.
Between 1940 and 1998 no player exceeded thirty votes in a season. Thirty-plus tallies are now routine, and in 2021 four players passed the mark in the same count. Patrick Cripps took the record to forty-five in 2024 and Matt Rowell polled thirty-nine the following year in winning ahead of Nick Daicos on thirty-two and Bailey Smith on twenty-nine.
Several things drive it. Seasons are longer than they were in the 1940s, which mechanically raises the ceiling. The modern midfielder plays far more of the game and accumulates far more visible possessions, thanks to interchange rotations and a faster, more open style. And umpires now have statistical information available to them that did not exist for most of the medal's history.
The consequence is that vote totals cannot be compared across eras. Forty-five votes is a remarkable season, but it does not mean the player had a better year than a 1950s winner on twenty-four.
- Maximum possible in a season69
- Record actually polled45
The maximum possible tally is three votes in every one of the twenty-three home and away matches played in the 2026 season structure. The record figure is Patrick Cripps polling forty-five votes in 2024.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Maximum possible in a season | 69 |
| Record actually polled | 45 |
Why midfielders dominate
The clearest structural bias in the award is positional. Umpires vote on what they can see, and the players closest to the ball for the longest are midfielders. Disposals, clearances and contested possessions accumulate visibly across four quarters. A defender who reads the play so well that a dangerous forward never receives the ball has produced nothing an umpire can count.
Ruckmen and key defenders do win occasionally, and a full forward with a huge season is always a live chance because goals are unmissable. But the base rate is heavily weighted towards inside midfielders, and it has become more so as the game has sped up.
Australian football has partly solved this with other awards. The All-Australian team is chosen by a panel and reliably includes defenders the Brownlow ignores. Coaches' association voting produces a different picture again, and clubs run their own best and fairest counts that weight the season by the standards their own coaching staff apply.
What the medal does not measure
Three limits are worth stating plainly.
Finals do not count. Votes are awarded only in home and away matches, so a player who is ordinary until August and then wins a premiership single-handedly polls nothing extra. That is what the Norm Smith Medal, awarded for the best player in the Grand Final, exists for.
Availability counts enormously. A player who misses six weeks with an injury forfeits eighteen possible vote points and effectively cannot win, however good the other seventeen matches were.
And team quality distorts. Players in winning sides poll far more heavily than players in losing ones, because umpires watching a comfortable win tend to give the votes to the winners. An outstanding season in a bottom-four club is systematically undervalued, which makes the occasional winner from a struggling side, as Matt Rowell was for Gold Coast in 2025, a genuinely unusual achievement.
Where the Brownlow sits among Australian awards
Australian sport has a long habit of awarding an individual medal decided by officials rather than by media panels, and the Brownlow is the model that the others followed.
The Norm Smith Medal takes the Grand Final alone. The Coleman Medal simply counts goals. The AFL Coaches Association award is voted by senior coaches, and it produces a different winner from the Brownlow often enough to be interesting. Every club also holds its own best and fairest night, voted internally, and those awards frequently go to players the umpires never noticed.
Beyond Australian rules, the pattern repeats across codes. Cricket's Australian awards run on player and umpire votes across a full international summer, and the state competitions covered in our Sheffield Shield guide have their own equivalents, as does the Big Bash League. Rugby league runs the Dally M on a similar season-long voting basis, and if the differences between the two rugby codes are unfamiliar, our comparison of rugby league and rugby union is the place to start.
The Brownlow inside Grand Final week
The count is not a standalone event. It opens the last week of the Australian football season, three days before the Grand Final parade and five before the match itself at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
That timing has consequences. Players from the two clubs still competing attend the count on the Monday, in black tie, four days before the biggest match of their lives, which some coaches have quietly disliked for decades. It also means the medal is awarded before anybody knows who will win the premiership, so a player can collect the game's highest individual honour and lose a Grand Final in the same week.
The relationship between the count and the finals series is worth understanding in full, and our guide to the AFL finals system sets out how the five-week series works, while the AFL ladder and percentage guide explains the twenty-three rounds over which Brownlow votes are actually awarded.
Betting, leaks and the secrecy problem
The Brownlow supports a substantial betting market in Australia, which is the main reason the secrecy around the votes is enforced as tightly as it is. Umpires know their own votes for months before the count, and any leak would be commercially significant.
The AFL's response has been procedural: sealed ballots, restricted access, and a rule that umpires do not discuss votes with anybody. The system has held up well, and the count remains genuinely unknown to the public until it is read.
There is a related integrity question about umpires officiating matches involving players they have already voted for heavily, which the league has never treated as a live problem, on the ground that umpires are not told the running totals either.
What the umpires are actually looking at
Nobody outside the umpiring group can say with certainty how a set of votes is arrived at, because the deliberations are not published and umpires do not discuss them afterwards. What can be said is what the umpires are physically placed to notice.
A field umpire spends the match running with the ball. Their attention follows the contest, which means they see stoppages, tackles, clearances and the players who repeatedly arrive at the fall of the ball. They see goals, obviously, and they see the players they have to speak to. What they see far less of is the far side of the ground, the defensive third when play is at the other end, and the structural work that happens away from the ball.
That is not a criticism of umpires so much as a description of the job. They are officiating, not analysing, and their primary task through four quarters is adjudicating a fast, contested game with a large field and a lot of bodies. Voting is something they do afterwards, from memory, with a colleague, under time pressure. The addition of official statistics as an aid from 2026 was intended to reduce the reliance on recollection rather than to change what the award rewards.
The state league equivalents
The Brownlow is the national award, but Australian football has awarded fairest and best medals at state level for as long, and in some cases longer. South Australia's SANFL awards the Magarey Medal, Western Australia's WAFL awards the Sandover Medal, and the Victorian state competition, along with every country and suburban league across the country, runs its own equivalent count.
The structures differ in detail. Some are voted by umpires in the Brownlow manner, some by coaches, some by a combination. What is consistent is the framing: fairest and best, with a conduct requirement attached, decided across a home and away season rather than a finals series.
This is a genuinely Australian institution. A player in a country league in western Victoria or the Riverina will spend a season chasing a medal decided on exactly the same principle as the one presented at Crown on Grand Final Monday, and the local awards night carries a comparable weight in the town.
Common misconceptions
Four assumptions about the Brownlow Medal come up constantly and all four are wrong.
That the best player always wins. The medal measures umpire perception across twenty-three matches, which correlates with quality but is not the same thing. Coaches' votes and All-Australian selection regularly disagree with it.
That a suspension only matters if it is long. Length is irrelevant. A one-match suspension from a tribunal for a home and away offence removes eligibility as completely as a six-week ban, which is exactly what happened to Corey McKernan in 1996.
That the count is decided by the last round. It often is, but only because the votes are read chronologically. The winner was determined months earlier and simply is not known yet.
That finals form counts. It does not. A player can be enormous through September and it will not add a single vote.
What the medal is worth to a player
There is no prize money attached in the way there is with a golf major or a tennis title. What the Brownlow delivers is status, and in Australian football status has a market value.
A medal changes a player's negotiating position at the next contract, though the salary cap limits how far a club can go, and it changes their commercial standing entirely. Brownlow medallists become the faces of national campaigns, they are booked for corporate speaking work for the rest of their lives, and they are the first names raised in any conversation about a club's greatest players.
It also confers a kind of permanent identity. A player is a Brownlow medallist forever, in every introduction and every obituary, in a way that a premiership player is not, because premierships are shared with twenty-one teammates and the medal is not. That is part of why the 2012 case still generates so much feeling. Losing a premiership medal would have been a shared misfortune. Losing a Brownlow was personal, and it was retrospective, which is a combination Australian football had never had to deal with before and has not had to deal with since. The award had survived a century on the assumption that whatever the umpires wrote down on a Saturday afternoon was final.
A short chronology
- 1924. The award is created after the death of Charles Brownlow and the first medal goes to Edward Greeves junior of Geelong.
- 1931. The 3-2-1 voting system is adopted and the eligibility rule excluding suspended players is introduced.
- 1934. Dick Reynolds wins at nineteen years and ninety-one days, still the youngest winner.
- 1940. Des Fothergill and Herbie Matthews cannot be separated by countback and both receive a medal.
- 1970. The count is televised for the first time, from Dallas Brooks Hall.
- 1981. Barry Round wins at thirty-one years and two hundred and thirty-eight days, the oldest winner.
- 1989. Retrospective medals are awarded to eight players who had tied on votes and lost countbacks.
- 1990. The monogram on the medal changes from VFL to AFL.
- 1996 and 1997. Corey McKernan and then Chris Grant top counts while ineligible.
- 2012 and 2016. Jobe Watson wins, then is retrospectively ruled ineligible, with the medal passing to Trent Cotchin and Sam Mitchell.
- 2024. Patrick Cripps sets the record with forty-five votes.
- 2025. Matt Rowell wins with thirty-nine, the second-highest tally recorded.
Watching a count for the first time
If you have never sat through a Brownlow count, three things will be unfamiliar.
It is long. Reading votes for every match of a twenty-three round season across eighteen clubs takes hours, and the broadcast makes no attempt to speed it up.
It is chronological, not cumulative, so the leaderboard genuinely swings. A player who leads after round twelve can be well beaten by round twenty-two.
And it is a social event as much as a sporting one, with the arrivals coverage often drawing a larger audience than the count. Australians treat it as the opening ceremony of Grand Final week rather than as an awards presentation.
For the wider picture of how football's showpiece week sits inside the Australian sporting year, our Australia hub covers the seasons and the sports index covers the codes running alongside it. If you are planning to be in the country for it, the MCG guide and the Marvel Stadium guide cover the two Melbourne venues where most of the season is played, while Optus Stadium and Adelaide Oval are the two best interstate grounds to see a match at. For the summer game that takes over the same stadiums in December, start with our cricket section.