The Norm Smith Medal and Every Major AFL Award
The Norm Smith Medal and every other AFL award explained, from the five-judge Grand Final panel to the Coleman, the Rising Star and the AFLW set.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Awards18 min read
- Norm Smith Medal first awarded
- 1979 to Wayne Harmes of Carlton
- Who decides it
- A five-member panel of former players and media figures
- Votes each judge casts
- Three two and one for a maximum of fifteen
- Winners from a losing side
- Four in the medal's history
- Most Norm Smith Medals
- Three by Dustin Martin of Richmond
- Premiership coach award
- The Jock McHale Medal first presented in 2001
- Players association award
- The Leigh Matthews Trophy voted by the players themselves
- Best young player award
- The Ron Evans Medal for the AFL Rising Star
The Norm Smith Medal goes to the player judged best on ground in the AFL Grand Final. Five judges each award three votes to the best player, two to the second and one to the third, which puts fifteen vote points on the table and makes fifteen a perfect score. It has been presented every year since 1979 and it is handed over on the ground, in front of the crowd, within a few minutes of the final siren.
That is the single most visible AFL award after the Brownlow, but it is one of roughly a dozen that the competition hands out across a season, and this page is the full set with the Brownlow deliberately left out. The Brownlow Medal has its own guide covering the umpire vote, the fairest and best eligibility rule and count night, so there is no need to repeat it here. What follows is everything else: the Grand Final medal, the finals series medal, the premiership coach's medal, the two awards decided by coaches and players rather than umpires, the young player award, the goal and mark competitions, the match-day medals and the AFLW equivalents.
Get the AFL awards explained properly and the season reads differently. Each award is measuring something the others deliberately ignore, and the gaps between them — a Brownlow winner who misses the All-Australian team, a Norm Smith medallist who polled nothing all year — are usually more interesting than the winners themselves.
The medal that gets handed over on the ground
The Norm Smith Medal is the only major AFL award presented while the confetti is still coming down. Everything else waits for a function in a ballroom. The winner takes it standing on the turf of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, usually still in a torn jumper, and the presentation is squeezed into the window between the siren and the premiership cup.
That timing is why the award used to be voted before the end of the game, and why the rule eventually had to change.
Norm Smith, player and coach
Smith is one of the few figures in Australian football whose record is elite in both roles. He won four premierships as a Melbourne player. Then he coached Melbourne to six flags in the decade from the mid-1950s, a period of dominance that no club has matched since, and he also had a coaching spell at South Melbourne along the way.
He died in 1973. The league created the Grand Final award in his name in 1979, and the first medal went to Wayne Harmes of Carlton after the win over Collingwood — a game remembered mostly for Harmes's own desperate lunge at a ball skidding towards the boundary line late in the last quarter.
How the five judges vote
The panel is five people: former players, journalists and media figures, with one of them designated chair. Each of the five independently awards three votes, two votes and one vote to the three players they thought were best. The totals are added up and the highest wins.
If two players tie, the countback runs in a fixed order. The player with more three-vote scores wins. If that is level, the player with more two-vote scores wins. If that is still level, the chair decides. Only one medal has ever been settled that way: Paul Chapman of Geelong beat Jason Gram of St Kilda in 2009 after both finished on nine votes.
- Panel appointedThe AFL names five judges — former players, journalists and media figures — with one of them acting as chair.
- Judges watch independentlyEach judge forms their own view across four quarters without conferring, unlike the umpires who agree on a single set of Brownlow votes.
- Votes lodged after the sirenSince 2002 the judges submit three, two and one only once the match is over, so late passages of play count.
- Totals combinedFifteen vote points are available in total and the highest aggregate wins, with a perfect fifteen requiring every judge to rate the same player best.
- Countback if tiedMost three-vote scores decides it, then most two-vote scores, then the chair.
- Presentation on the groundThe medal is handed over on the turf within minutes, before the premiership cup is presented.
A structural description of the process, not a measurement. The panel's exact membership is set by the AFL each year and can change.
The 2002 change nobody planned for
Until 2002 the judges lodged their votes before the final siren so the medal could be engraved and presented immediately. It was an administrative convenience that worked until it very nearly did not.
In the 2002 Grand Final, Michael Voss of the Brisbane Lions produced several crucial possessions in the closing minutes — after the votes were already in. The medal went to Nathan Buckley of Collingwood, from the losing side. The league changed the process afterwards so that votes are now cast on the completed match, with the count run quickly enough that the on-ground presentation survives.
Four medallists from beaten sides
The brief given to the panel is to find the best player on the ground, not the best player in the winning side. Four times that has produced a medallist walking off a loss.
| Year | Player | Club | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1982 | Maurice Rioli | Richmond | Lost to Carlton |
| 1989 | Gary Ablett senior | Geelong | Lost to Hawthorn |
| 2002 | Nathan Buckley | Collingwood | Lost to Brisbane Lions |
| 2005 | Chris Judd | West Coast | Lost to Sydney |
Ablett's 1989 performance is the one usually cited as the high-water mark of the category. Buckley's 2002 medal is the one that changed the voting rules.
Repeat winners
Only three players have won consecutive Norm Smith Medals: Andrew McLeod of Adelaide in 1997 and 1998, Dustin Martin of Richmond in 2019 and 2020, and Will Ashcroft of the Brisbane Lions in 2024 and 2025.
Martin holds the outright record with three, having added his 2017 medal to the back-to-back pair. No other player has won more than two. Gary Ayres of Hawthorn won in 1986 and 1988, and Luke Hodge of Hawthorn won in 2008 and 2014.
Hawthorn leads the honour roll with eight medals, which reflects a long run of Grand Final appearances rather than any one player. Geelong, Richmond and West Coast have five each. Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon and the Brisbane Lions have four apiece.
The year two medals were awarded
The 2010 Grand Final was drawn. Lenny Hayes of St Kilda won the Norm Smith Medal for that match. The replay was played the following week, Collingwood won it comfortably, and Scott Pendlebury won a second Norm Smith Medal for the same Grand Final fixture. It is the only season with two medallists, and the AFL abolished Grand Final replays in 2016 in favour of extra time, so it cannot happen again under the current rules.
- 5Judges on the panel
- 15Vote points available
- 4Medallists from losing sides
- 3Most medals by one player
Structural counts and records as at the end of the 2025 season. The 2026 medal had not been awarded when this page was written.
The award for the whole finals series
The Gary Ayres Award, introduced in 2016, covers something the Norm Smith Medal cannot: a player who was outstanding across three or four finals but had a quiet Grand Final.
It is voted by coaches. In every final, the senior coach of each competing club awards five votes to the player he judges best on ground, four to the second, three, two and one down the list. Votes cast in the Grand Final are weighted at one and a half times the value of votes from earlier finals, which keeps the last Saturday in September important without letting it override a whole September.
It is named for Gary Ayres, a five-time premiership player and Australian Football Hall of Fame member, whose two Norm Smith Medals make him an apt namesake for a finals award.
The premiership coach's medal
The Jock McHale Medal goes to the coach of the premiership side. It was first presented in 2001 and named after the Collingwood coach who won eight premierships, more than anyone before or since, and who retired in 1949.
When the medal was created the league backdated it, awarding retrospective medals to every premiership coach from 1950 onwards — the first season after McHale stopped coaching. That makes the honour roll continuous rather than a list that begins arbitrarily in 2001. The premiership players themselves receive premiership medallions in the same presentation, which are not individually named awards but are the objects players talk about most.
The award the players vote on
The Leigh Matthews Trophy is the AFL Players Association most valuable player award. Every player in the competition votes, awarding three to the man he rates the best in the league that season, two to the second and one to the third. Nobody may vote for a teammate, which removes the obvious source of bias.
It was first presented under that name in 2002 and named for Leigh Matthews, who won the inaugural players association award in 1982; earlier winners of the association's award were later reclassified as Matthews Trophy winners. Unlike the Brownlow Medal, a suspension does not make a player ineligible, so the trophy occasionally goes to a player the umpires' award has ruled out.
Marcus Bontempelli of the Western Bulldogs won a third trophy in 2024. Nick Daicos of Collingwood won in 2025 and again in 2026.
The award the coaches vote on
The AFL Coaches Association Champion Player of the Year is the coaches' verdict on a season. Coaches lodge votes on every home and away match on a five-down-to-one scale, so a great deal more vote weight is distributed than the six points umpires spread across three players for the Brownlow.
That difference in method produces a genuinely different reading of a season. Coaches see a player's role, the opposition matchup assigned to them and the defensive work that never appears in a statistics sheet. A shutdown defender or a wing who spends a game running with the opposition's best midfielder can poll heavily with coaches and get nothing from umpires. Nick Daicos won the coaches award in 2026, his second.
The young player award
The AFL Rising Star is decided on a two-stage process. To be eligible a player must be under twenty-one on 1 January of that year and have played ten or fewer senior games before the season starts. Each round the league hands one nomination to a young player who stood out, building a shortlist across the season.
At the end of the year a panel of nine AFL figures each selects five of the nominees, giving five votes to their first choice down to one for their fifth. The winner receives the Ron Evans Medal, named for the former AFL chairman. A suspended player may still be nominated but cannot win the award.
Murphy Reid of Fremantle won in 2025. Jagga Smith of Carlton won in 2026.
The blazer and the goalkicking medal
Two of the largest awards on the calendar have their own pages on this site because each needs one. The All-Australian team is the panel-selected side of the season's best players, picked as if to play a match, and the blazer that goes with it is the honour most players list first in a career summary. The Coleman Medal is the simplest award in the game — most goals in the home and away season, no votes, no panel, no judgement.
They sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. One is entirely a matter of opinion; the other is entirely a matter of arithmetic.
Goal and Mark of the Year
The AFL Goal of the Year winner receives the Phil Manassa Medal. Three goals are nominated each round, an AFL panel picks a round winner, and the public has been able to vote through the league website since 2006. For the season award the league's game analysis committee vote is weighted very heavily against the aggregate public vote, so the public is a genuine but minor input. The winner is announced during the Brownlow Medal broadcast.
The award rewards creation rather than difficulty of the shot. A long set shot from the boundary almost never wins; a goal that begins with a player stealing the ball at half-back and running the length of the ground usually does. The Mark of the Year competition runs on the same weekly nomination model alongside it, with an official award since the early 2000s.
Match-day medals
Several individual matches have their own medal, awarded on the ground straight after the siren.
The best known is the Anzac Day Medal, given after the Collingwood against Essendon match at the MCG on 25 April. Its criteria are unusually specific: the player judged to best exemplify the Anzac spirit through skill, courage, self-sacrifice, teamwork and fair play. That wording means the medal is not simply for best on ground, though in practice it usually goes to the best player. It was introduced in 2000 and retrospective medals for the 1995 to 1999 matches were awarded in 2011. Scott Pendlebury has won it four times, and Chris Tarrant in 2001 is the only winner from a losing side.
Other themed matches carry their own medals for the same purpose. Round-by-round rivalry games, Indigenous round fixtures and interstate blockbusters at venues such as Adelaide Oval, the Gabba and Optus Stadium have accumulated named awards over the past two decades. They are club and match honours rather than league-wide ones, and the list changes as fixtures change.
An award the league stopped giving
The Michael Tuck Medal was awarded from 1992 to 2013 to the best and fairest player in the AFL pre-season competition final. It was named for the Hawthorn player who made 426 senior appearances between 1972 and 1991, a games record that stood until Brent Harvey passed it in 2016.
The medal stopped being presented after 2013 because the pre-season competition was restructured and no longer finished with a final. It is a useful reminder that the awards list is not fixed: awards are created, renamed and quietly retired as the competition changes shape.
The AFLW set
The AFL Women's competition runs a parallel and complete awards program.
The league best and fairest is voted by the three field umpires on a three, two and one basis after every home and away match, exactly as the Brownlow is. The eligibility rule is also the same: a player suspended by the tribunal during the home and away season cannot win, while suspensions in finals, in the pre-season or carried over from a previous season do not disqualify. Erin Phillips won it twice, in 2017 and 2019. Monique Conti won in 2023, Ebony Marinoff in 2024 and Ash Riddell in 2025. Maddy Prespakis was the youngest winner at nineteen in 2020.
The competition also selects an AFLW All-Australian team, which has been chosen since the inaugural 2017 season and is currently structured as sixteen named positions plus five interchange players. There is an AFLW Rising Star, a leading goalkicker award and a best on ground medal for the AFLW Grand Final, and the season awards are presented together at the league's own function.
The club awards
Every AFL and AFLW club also runs its own best and fairest, voted internally and presented at a club function in the weeks after the season. These are older than most of the league awards and in some cases they carry more meaning inside a club than a league honour does. Hawthorn's is the Peter Crimmins Medal, named for a captain who died young; most clubs have a similarly weighted name attached.
Club awards are decided by coaching staff votes on every match, usually on a larger scale than three-two-one, so they reward consistency more than peaks. A player who is solid twenty-three weeks running will often win a club best and fairest while polling almost nothing with the umpires.
Who decides what
The clearest way to hold the awards apart is by the deciding body. The table below covers the league-wide awards for the men's competition.
| Award | What it recognises | Decided by |
|---|---|---|
| Norm Smith Medal | Best player in the Grand Final | Five-member media and former-player panel |
| Gary Ayres Award | Best player across the finals series | Senior coaches of the finals clubs |
| Jock McHale Medal | Premiership coach | Automatic to the winning coach |
| Coleman Medal | Most home and away goals | Arithmetic, no vote |
| All-Australian team | Best side of the season | AFL selection panel |
| Leigh Matthews Trophy | Most valuable player | All AFL players |
| AFLCA Champion Player | Best player of the season | Senior coaches, every match |
| Rising Star | Best young player | Panel of nine after weekly nominations |
| Goal of the Year | Best goal of the season | AFL committee plus public vote |
| Anzac Day Medal | Best in the Collingwood v Essendon match | Match-day panel |
Read down the right-hand column and the point becomes obvious. Umpires, coaches, players, media panels and a calculator are all being asked slightly different questions, so a season with one clear best player will still generate four or five different names on awards night.
When the awards actually happen
The AFL awards are compressed into a short window at the end of the home and away season and through finals. The All-Australian squad is named in the last week of August, with the final team unveiled at the AFL Awards night days later, where the Coleman Medal, the coaches award, the Leigh Matthews Trophy and the Rising Star are also presented. The Brownlow Medal count follows on the Monday of Grand Final week. The Norm Smith Medal and the Jock McHale Medal are presented on Grand Final day itself, and the Gary Ayres Award is announced at the end of the finals series.
For a competition whose home and away season now runs from early March to late August, that is an awards program packed into about a month. The 2026 season ran from 5 March to late September, with Fremantle taking the minor premiership on a nineteen-win record.
Common misconceptions
That the Norm Smith Medal goes to the best player in the winning team. It does not. Four medallists have come from beaten sides, and the panel's brief has never been restricted to the premiers.
That the Norm Smith Medal and the Brownlow are measuring the same thing. They are not remotely. The Brownlow counts only home and away matches, so Grand Final form is worth nothing to it. The Norm Smith counts only one match. A player can win one and poll nothing in the other in the same season.
That the coaches award is a second-tier Brownlow. It is a differently constructed award using a wider vote spread and a body of judges who know what each player was asked to do. Recruiters read it seriously.
That the Rising Star is for the best first-year player. The eligibility is under twenty-one and ten or fewer previous senior games, so a second-year or even third-year player who was managed slowly can win it.
That all these awards are old. Most are not. The Norm Smith dates from 1979, the Jock McHale from 2001, the Gary Ayres from 2016. The Brownlow, at 1924, is the outlier.
What the awards are worth
None of these medals carries prize money that matters against an AFL salary. What they carry is leverage. An All-Australian blazer and a coaches award appear in every contract negotiation and every trade valuation. A Norm Smith Medal is a career marker that never has to be re-argued.
There is also a difference in how they age. A Coleman Medal tally reads flatly across eras and needs context to interpret. A Norm Smith Medal does not: everybody who watched that Grand Final remembers who was best, and the medal simply confirms it.
The financial side is indirect but real. AFL clubs work inside a hard salary cap, so a club cannot simply pay an award winner whatever the market says he is worth without taking the money from somewhere else on the list. That makes awards a bargaining chip rather than an automatic pay rise. An All-Australian selection strengthens a manager's argument at the negotiating table; three of them in four years changes the shape of a club's whole cap. It is one of the reasons clubs quietly campaign for their players in the weeks before the squad of forty-six is named, feeding statistics and highlight packages to anyone likely to be asked for an opinion.
Awards also drive the trade market. A player coming out of contract with a fresh blazer commands a materially better return in draft picks than the same player without one, even when the underlying form is identical. Recruiters know this and discount for it, but the effect survives anyway, because a blazer is a shorthand that a list manager can defend to a board in one sentence.
Following an awards season
If you are new to the sport, the practical order is: watch the All-Australian squad announcement in late August to see who the panel rates, watch the AFL Awards night a few days later for the team, the Coleman and the two association awards, watch the Brownlow count on the Monday of Grand Final week, and then watch the Norm Smith presentation on the ground on the last Saturday in September.
That sequence tells you almost everything about a season in about five weeks. The rest of the Australia sports coverage on this site follows the same idea across codes — the Dally M equivalent in rugby league sits inside a very different pay structure, and the individual honours in rugby union and rugby league are organised around representative football rather than a single national league. For the broader picture of how Australian sport organises itself by code, the sports index is the starting point, and the AFL's own home grounds are covered in the venue guides for Marvel Stadium and the MCG.
A short chronology of the awards
1924 — The Brownlow Medal is created, covered in full on its own page.
1953 — The first All-Australian team is selected after the Adelaide carnival.
1979 — The Norm Smith Medal is awarded for the first time, to Wayne Harmes.
1981 — The Coleman Medal is presented for the first time, to Michael Roach.
1991 — The All-Australian team becomes an annual season award rather than a carnival honour.
1992 — The Michael Tuck Medal begins for the pre-season final, running until 2013.
2000 — The Anzac Day Medal is formally introduced.
2001 — The Jock McHale Medal is created and backdated to 1950. The Goal of the Year becomes an official award.
2002 — The Leigh Matthews Trophy takes its current name. Norm Smith voting moves to after the final siren.
2016 — The Gary Ayres Award for the finals series begins. Grand Final replays are abolished.
2017 — The AFLW competition begins and brings its own full set of awards.