The AFL’s new Tasmanian team will be built with priority picks over three drafts as the league heeds lessons from the mistakes it made setting up Greater Western Sydney and Gold Coast.
Under draft plans for building the team, the new Tasmanian club is likely to have fewer priority picks than Gold Coast or the Giants received, and its picks will be staggered over several drafts.
Tasmanian Premier Jeremy Rockliff, AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan and Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles are surrounded by local footballers for the announcement that Tasmania will get its own AFL team.Credit: AFL Photos
The Tasmanian team will have four or five first-round draft picks in three drafts from 2027, but will have to trade some of those picks to bring in experienced talent.
The AFL wants the team to be competitive from day one, so is pushing for a heavier balance of experienced players than was fielded by the previous two expansion teams, but will also ensure it has a strong mix of young elite talent. It is also concerned not to block the other 18 teams out of early picks in the drafts.
“We have learnt a lot; the drafts will be much less compromised than in the past. There are more mechanisms now, more liquidity, in the player market,” AFL chief Gill McLachlan said at the announcement of the new team in Hobart on Wednesday.
“The right people will be put in place, and we will get a set of rules to put the squad together, salary-cap concessions or whatever. A whole body of work has been done … it shows an increase in sophistication in our system and learnings from the two teams that came in.”
Sources with knowledge of the AFL’s draft plan, but not authorised to speak publicly, said that, of the four or five first-round picks the club would get in the 2027, 2028 and 2029 national drafts, the club would be required to trade two of those picks at each draft for experienced players.
In the event one of those picks could not secure a trade for an experienced player of suitable value, the draft pick would be rolled into the following year’s draft. So, if the Tasmanian team did not trade pick nine, for example, then it would immediately have pick nine, as an additional pick, at the next year’s draft.
The hope is that rolling over these draft picks will avoid an inflationary effect on the player-trade market that might be caused if established clubs try to offload mediocre talent for quality picks by lowballing the Tasmanian club if it were forced to trade.
Forcing quality picks to be available to the other 18 teams is a sop to clubs fearing they would be shut out of the early picks and to offer an incentive to clubs to trade players to get early draft picks.
The AFL has been warned against the new club taking too many elite players in one draft because of the risk the team would end up too young and take too long to be competitive. The further concern is that having too many elite players of the same age would mean they come out of contract at a similar time, creating salary-cap pressure and retention problems in the future.
Using three drafts to build the list will also mean the club is not reliant on the quality of one draft to build its team in the event of that year providing a relatively shallow pool of talent.
There are likely to be priority picks available in the second and third rounds of the draft, either for drafting players or trading for experienced mid-range players, understanding that premiership lists are not filled with 18 first-round draft picks and require a balance of elite talent and role players.
As revealed by The Age last year Sam Graham and Brad Scott, before he left to take over coaching Essendon, had overseen the plans for building the new team in consultation with senior figures at AFL clubs, including Jason McCartney at GWS, Blair Hartley at Richmond, Sam Power at the Western Bulldogs.
The AFL received strong feedback on the risk to the rest of the competition of locking clubs – especially those who are in a cyclical down swing – out of access to quality draft picks as they try to rebuild.
It is still being debated whether Tasmania will have priority access to 17-year-olds in the final draft before it enters the competition (2027), as occurred when GWS and Gold Coast arrived.
As reported in The Age, the club will get access to a pool of $1 million or more that will be outside the salary cap to use for sign-on bonuses for players.
A Tasmanian elite talent pathway academy is being established ahead of the team joining in 2028, and the club will have priority access to local elite junior players.
It would also have access to uncontracted players and the ability to bid for sons of ex-Tasmanian AFL players under the father-son rules.
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