The Dally M Medal Explained: Voting, History and Winners
How the Dally M Medal works: the 3-2-1 judging system, why votes go behind closed doors at Round 12, the suspension rule and count night.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Awards18 min read
- Created by
- The Daily Mirror
- Awarded since
- 1980
- Named after
- Dally Messenger
- Judges per match
- 2
- Points per match
- 3, 2 and 1
- Votes go secret after
- Round 12
- Most medals
- Johnathan Thurston with 4
- Seasons not awarded
- 1997 and 2003
The Dally M Medal is Australian rugby league's player of the year award. Two independent judges vote after every regular-season NRL match, awarding three points to the best player on the field, two to the second best and one to the third. Those votes are published each round until the midpoint of the season, then go behind closed doors, and the winner is revealed at a televised count in the week before the grand final.
That is the mechanism. The reason it produces one of the more interesting nights on the Australian sporting calendar is the secrecy. Because roughly half a season of votes is counted but never published, the leaderboard that everyone has been arguing about since March is only half the story, and the count on awards night regularly overturns it. There is no equivalent moment in most Australian sports.
The medal has been awarded since 1980, it is named after the player who made rugby league viable in Australia, and it has been the sport's single official player-of-the-year award since the code reunified in 1998. This guide covers how the voting works, why the votes go secret, the suspension rule that has cost more than one leader the award, every winner, and the women's medal awarded on the same night.
What the award actually is
It is an individual award for the best player across an NRL regular season, decided by judged votes rather than by statistics, a panel debate or a public poll. It is administered by the NRL, it is presented at the Dally M Awards ceremony, and it is traditionally handed over by the Prime Minister of Australia — one of the small number of sporting occasions where that is a standing convention rather than an occasional appearance.
The medal is the headline award of a night that also covers positional awards, coach of the year, captain of the year, rookie of the year, the team of the year and the women's equivalents. But the medal is the reason the night exists and the reason the count is televised.
Who Dally Messenger was
Herbert Henry Messenger, born in Balmain in 1883, was the best rugby union player in New South Wales when a breakaway professional code was being organised in 1907. He signed with it. That single decision is why the medal carries his name.
Rugby league in Australia was, in its first two years, an idea with no supporters and no proven audience. Messenger gave it a name people would pay to watch. He toured with the first Kangaroos, played for New South Wales and Australia, and drew crowds that the new code could not have generated any other way. Historians of the split generally agree that without him the venture would probably have failed.
The nickname was his father's doing and was a misspelling of Dalley — a small piece of trivia that has outlived most of what is remembered about him.
How the medal came about
The award was created by The Daily Mirror, a Sydney afternoon newspaper, and has been presented every season since 1980. Newspaper-run player awards were common in Australian sport at the time and most of them have disappeared. This one survived because it was well run, because the count was a genuine event, and because it eventually became the property of the game itself rather than of a masthead.
The early winners are a fair reflection of the era: Robert Laurie of South Sydney in 1980, Steve Rogers of Cronulla in 1981, Ray Price of Parramatta in 1982. Terry Lamb, Peter Sterling, Gavin Miller and Cliff Lyons follow across the 1980s and early 1990s, which is close to a list of the most influential players of the period.
The 1998 merger and one official award
Through the 1980s and 1990s several player-of-the-year awards ran in parallel, and the game did not have a single agreed honour. The Super League war of 1995 to 1997 made that worse. In 1997 there was no unified competition at all, and the medal was not awarded.
The peace deal that created the National Rugby League for the 1998 season also settled the awards question. From 1998 the Dally M Medal became the single official player-of-the-year award for the game in Australia, and the other competing honours faded. Andrew Johns won the first two under the new arrangement, in 1998 and 1999.
How the Dally M voting works
Two judges are appointed to each match and vote independently of one another. Each awards three points to the player he or she considers the best on the field, two points to the next best and one point to the third.
Because there are two cards, a single match distributes up to twelve points and one player can take a maximum of six — three from each judge — from a single game. In practice the two judges agree on the best player often but not always, and the most common outcome is a top score of five or six for a dominant performance and a scatter of ones and twos below.
- The match is judgedTwo independent judges watch each regular-season game and separately award three, two and one points to the three players they rate best.
- The cards are combinedBoth judges' votes are added, so a single match releases up to twelve points and one player can take a maximum of six.
- Early rounds are publishedVotes for each round are released publicly up to Round 12, producing a running leaderboard that the media and the public follow all through the first half of the season.
- The count goes darkFrom Round 13 the votes are still cast and tallied but are not released, so nobody outside the count knows the real standings.
- Suspensions are deductedA player loses six votes for every week of suspension, and any player suspended from two or more matches in a season becomes ineligible outright.
- The count is read outOn awards night the hidden rounds are revealed one by one on television, the leaderboard moves in front of the audience, and the medal is presented.
Describes the standard process for a men's NRL season. Round numbers move when the season length changes, so treat Round 12 as the published midpoint rather than a permanent fixture.
Only regular-season matches count. Finals football contributes nothing, which means a player whose side is eliminated in week one can still win, and a player who carries his team through September gains no credit for it.
Why the votes go behind closed doors
Votes are published each round up to Round 12, roughly the midpoint of the season, and then stop. This is deliberate and it is the best design decision in the award.
If the votes were published all year the medal would be settled with three rounds to go and the ceremony would be a formality. If they were never published there would be no season-long conversation about it at all. Publishing the first half and hiding the second gives you both: an argument that runs from March to June, and a genuine reveal in September.
It also produces the count-night effect that gives the award its character. A player who led the public leaderboard at Round 12 by six votes can be passed by somebody who was fourth, because thirteen rounds of unseen votes are being read out at speed. That has happened often enough that experienced watchers treat the public leaderboard as a rough guide rather than a prediction.
The exact round at which the votes go dark has shifted slightly as the season length has changed. Round 12 is the long-standing convention for a season of around 26 rounds.
The suspension rule
This is the part that catches people out and it is unusually harsh.
A player loses six votes for every week of suspension he incurs during the season. Six votes is the maximum a player can earn from a single match, so one week on the sideline costs the equivalent of a best-on-ground performance.
More severely, any player suspended from two or more matches in a single season is automatically ineligible for the medal, regardless of his vote total. Not penalised — ineligible. A player who leads the count by twenty votes and then picks up a two-match ban in August is simply removed from consideration.
The justification is that a player-of-the-year award should not go to somebody who spent part of the year suspended. The criticism is that it converts a judiciary decision into an awards decision, which puts pressure on the match review committee that it was not designed to carry. Both arguments have been made every September for decades.
Count night
The ceremony is held after the preliminary finals, in the last week of September or the first week of October, in the week before the grand final at Accor Stadium.
The format is the count itself. Round by round, the votes from Round 13 onward are read out, and a leaderboard on screen reorders itself as they go. Players sit in the room watching their own totals move. It is slow television by design, and it works for the same reason a horse race works: everybody can see the positions changing and nobody knows the finish.
The medal is then presented, traditionally by the Prime Minister. The women's medal, the positional awards, coach of the year and the team of the year are handed out across the same evening.
The two seasons without a medal
The Dally M Medal has not been awarded twice since 1980.
In 1997 the game was split. The Australian Rugby League and Super League ran separate competitions, and there was no single premiership across which to judge a player of the year. The award simply did not happen.
In 2003 it was industrial. A dispute between the players and the league over pay and conditions disrupted the awards, and the medal was not presented for that season. It remains the only time the count has been lost to something other than a schism in the code.
Joint winners
Twice the count has finished level and two medals have been struck. In 2014 Jarryd Hayne of Parramatta and Johnathan Thurston of North Queensland tied. In 2016 Cooper Cronk of Melbourne and Jason Taumalolo of North Queensland tied.
There is no countback. If two players finish on the same number of votes they both win, and the record lists them jointly. The NRLW medal has also produced one tie, in 2021, when Millie Boyle and Emma Tonegato finished level.
Ties are rarer than you might expect given the vote spread, because a full season of judging usually separates the leading candidates by several points.
Every winner since 1980
| Decade | Winners |
|---|---|
| 1980s | Robert Laurie, Steve Rogers, Ray Price, Terry Lamb, Michael Potter, Greg Alexander, Peter Sterling twice, Gavin Miller twice |
| 1990s | Cliff Lyons twice, Michael Potter, Gary Freeman, Ricky Stuart, Laurie Daley, Allan Langer, Andrew Johns twice. No award in 1997 |
| 2000s | Trent Barrett, Preston Campbell, Andrew Johns, Danny Buderus, Johnathan Thurston twice, Cameron Smith, Matt Orford, Jarryd Hayne. No award in 2003 |
| 2010s | Todd Carney, Billy Slater, Ben Barba, Cooper Cronk twice, Jarryd Hayne and Johnathan Thurston jointly, Thurston again, Jason Taumalolo jointly, Cameron Smith, Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, James Tedesco |
| 2020s | Jack Wighton, Tom Trbojevic, Nicho Hynes, Kalyn Ponga, Jahrome Hughes, James Tedesco |
Read as a list it is a decent short history of the modern game: the Parramatta and Canterbury sides of the 1980s, Newcastle and Brisbane in the 1990s, Melbourne and North Queensland through the 2000s and 2010s, and a much wider spread of clubs in the 2020s.
The multiple winners
- 46Medals awarded
- 4Most by one player
- 6Most by one club
- 2Joint winner years
- 2Seasons not awarded
Counts medals rather than players, covering the men's award from 1980 to 2025 inclusive. Joint winners are counted as one medal each, and the two seasons without an award are excluded from the total.
Johnathan Thurston is the only four-time winner, taking the medal in 2005, 2007, 2014 as a joint winner and 2015. Winning it in consecutive seasons is difficult and winning it a decade apart is harder still, which is what makes his record likely to stand for some time.
Andrew Johns won three, in 1998, 1999 and 2002, all with Newcastle. Eight players have won two: Peter Sterling, Gavin Miller, Cliff Lyons, Michael Potter, Cameron Smith, Cooper Cronk, Jarryd Hayne and James Tedesco, whose second arrived in 2025, six years after his first.
Which positions win the Dally M Medal
This is where the award's biases show most clearly.
Halves and fullbacks account for roughly four out of every five medals. Second-rowers have won it twice in more than four decades, and both were Gavin Miller of Cronulla in 1988 and 1989. No prop or centre appears in the list at all.
Two explanations are usually offered. The generous one is that halves and fullbacks genuinely decide more matches, because they touch the ball most and make the decisions that produce points. The less generous one is that judges reward visible involvement over accumulated work, and a front-rower who runs for 200 metres and makes forty tackles is doing something a judge is not watching for.
The NRL has partly addressed this with positional awards, which give every position its own honour. It has not changed the medal itself.
Which clubs have won the most
Melbourne Storm lead with six medals: Cameron Smith in 2006 and 2017, Billy Slater in 2011, Cooper Cronk in 2013 and jointly in 2016, and Jahrome Hughes in 2024. That is a fair summary of a club that has been near the top of the competition for twenty years.
Newcastle have four, three of them Andrew Johns and one Danny Buderus, with Kalyn Ponga adding a fifth in 2023. North Queensland's total is driven almost entirely by Thurston. Parramatta's spans four decades, from Ray Price in 1982 to Jarryd Hayne in 2009 and 2014.
The pattern is unsurprising. A player needs his team to be winning to accumulate votes, because judges rarely give three points to the best player in a beaten side. The medal is an individual award with a heavy team dependency baked into it.
The NRLW Dally M Medal
The women's competition has its own Dally M Medal, awarded on the same night, using the same 3-2-1 judging system across the NRLW season.
| Season | Winner |
|---|---|
| 2018 | Brittany Breayley-Nati |
| 2019 | Jessica Sergis |
| 2020 | Ali Brigginshaw |
| 2021 | Millie Boyle and Emma Tonegato jointly |
| 2022 | Raecene McGregor |
| 2023 | Tamika Upton |
| 2024 | Olivia Kernick |
| 2025 | Tamika Upton |
Tamika Upton is the only two-time winner. The count is shorter, because the NRLW regular season is eleven rounds rather than twenty-six, which makes each individual vote worth far more and makes a single poor month effectively fatal to a campaign. It also means the leaderboard is less predictable and the spread at the top is tighter.
Origin form is a reasonable leading indicator. Olivia Kernick won the Women's State of Origin player of the series award in 2025 and the NRLW Dally M Medal in 2024, and the overlap between the two shortlists is substantial most years.
The other awards on the night
The ceremony covers a good deal more than the two medals. Positional awards go to the best player in each position across the season, which is where forwards get their recognition. There is a coach of the year, a captain of the year, a rookie of the year and a representative player of the year, plus a team of the year selected across the whole competition.
Provincial and pathway competitions are also recognised, and the night has become the game's general awards evening rather than purely a player-of-the-year count.
The Provan-Summons Medal
The people's choice award is the Provan-Summons Medal, decided by a public vote rather than by judges. It began in 1997 as a referees' award and was later converted into a fan vote.
The name comes from the photograph taken after the 1963 grand final, in which Norm Provan of St George and Arthur Summons of Western Suburbs walk off the mud together, one very tall and one much shorter, arm over shoulder. The image became the model for the NRL premiership trophy and is the single most reproduced photograph in Australian rugby league.
The Provan-Summons Medal and the Dally M Medal often go to different players, and the gap between them is usually the most interesting result of the night. Judges reward the player who controlled matches; the public reward the player they enjoyed watching.
Criticisms of the voting system
Three recur.
The first is the positional skew described above: halves and fullbacks win it, forwards do not, and no amount of positional awards has changed that.
The second is the suspension rule, which is defensible in principle and blunt in practice. Making a player ineligible for a two-match ban means a marginal judiciary grading can end a season-long campaign, and it invites the accusation that the award is being decided by the match review committee.
The third is team dependency. A player in a side that finishes eleventh will rarely accumulate votes, however well he plays, because judges hand three points to winners. That is a criticism of every judged award in every sport, but it bites harder in a thirteen-a-side game where individual influence is harder to isolate.
None of these has produced a change to the method, and the argument that the system's flaws are part of its appeal is not entirely unserious.
How it compares with other Australian awards
The obvious comparison is the AFL's Brownlow Medal, which is also a 3-2-1 count read out on television before a grand final and is also biased toward midfielders. The differences are instructive. The Brownlow is voted by the match officials rather than by appointed judges, its votes are never published in-season, and a suspension makes a player ineligible outright rather than deducting points. So the Brownlow keeps all of its votes secret while rugby league publishes half of them, which gives the two counts a very different rhythm — the AFL night is a complete unknown, the rugby league night is a known first half and an unknown second.
Cricket's Allan Border Medal, awarded across formats and voted by players, umpires and media, sits somewhere between the two, and the Big Bash League and the Women's Big Bash League run their own player-of-the-tournament awards on similar lines. The differences between the codes themselves, and why their awards are structured the way they are, are covered in this comparison of rugby league and rugby union.
How to read a leaderboard properly
A published leaderboard at Round 12 is less informative than it looks, for two reasons that are easy to state and hard to remember while you are looking at it.
The first is that half the season has not been counted. A player fifteen votes behind at the midpoint needs to average a little over one vote per round more than the leader across the remaining rounds to catch him, which is well within the normal range of variation for a judged award. Leads of that size are overturned regularly.
The second is availability. A player who has already missed three matches by Round 12 and is on twenty votes is scoring at a much higher rate than a player who has played every game and is on twenty-four. The published table shows totals, not rates, and it does not tell you who is carrying an injury into the second half of the year.
The practical way to read it is to look at votes per match played, check who has a judiciary record, and check where each contender's team sits on the ladder. Those three columns explain most Dally M results better than the total does.
The medal and a player's contract
Winning the medal has a direct commercial effect, though not a formal one. There is no bonus written into the NRL's collective agreement for it, and the medal itself carries no prize money that anybody publicises.
What it does is reset a player's market value at the next negotiation. Being the reigning player of the year is the strongest single argument an agent can make, and it arrives in late September, immediately before the November signing window opens. Several of the largest contracts in the game's history have been signed within a few months of a medal.
It also interacts with the roster arithmetic. A club that develops a medal winner is usually a club that then has to find room for him under a fixed ceiling, and the medal is one of the more reliable predictors of a player becoming unaffordable to the club that produced him.
How to follow the count
During the first half of the season the votes are published after each round on the NRL's site and app, and every major outlet runs a leaderboard. That is the part of the year when the medal is a public argument.
From Round 13 there is nothing official to follow, and what you get instead is estimation — writers projecting votes from performance, which is entertaining and frequently wrong.
On awards night the count is broadcast live. If you only watch one part of it, watch the last five rounds, which is where the reveals happen and where the public leaderboard from June is usually demolished.
What the medal actually measures
It measures who two judges thought was the best player on the field, twenty-six weekends in a row, in matches their team was mostly winning, without missing time through suspension.
That is a narrower thing than "the best player in the competition", and it is worth holding onto when the medal goes to somebody unexpected. Players who miss six weeks with injury cannot win it. Players in poor sides almost never win it. Front-rowers have never won it. A player who is the best in the game over three seasons but rarely the standout in a single match may never win it at all.
What it does well is capture a particular kind of season: sustained availability, sustained influence and a team good enough to keep winning. Every name on the list had one of those years, which is a reasonable definition of a player of the year even if it is not the only one.
More on Australian rugby league, its stadiums and its other codes is in the Australia section, the rugby index and the wider sports hub. For the ground most medal winners name as the hardest place to play, see the guide to Suncorp Stadium, and for the rules that decide whether a club can keep a medal winner, see the NRL salary cap.