From a Queensland vantage point, the debate raging inside AFL House right now looks rather different to how it must feel in a Richmond boardroom. The AFL Commission is finalising new draft bidding rules that will reshape how northern academy clubs access their homegrown talent at draft time, and the outcome will say a great deal about whether the league's most ambitious expansion project is treated as a success story or a problem to be regulated away.
The stakes are real. Greater Western Sydney has called on the AFL to treat the four northern academies differently as the league's impending new set of bidding rules close in, with the changes set to see clubs match bids using their next two picks, the removal of the 10 per cent points discount, and a likely points loading based on ladder position. The AFL Commission was briefed on those proposed changes ahead of the season launch in Sydney, according to AFL.com.au.
Wayne Campbell, a former Richmond captain and current head of the Sydney Swans academy, put the case for the northern system bluntly in the Sydney Morning Herald this week, and his core argument is hard to dismiss. The academies were built to do two things: grow participation and produce draftable players. By both measures, the programme has exceeded every expectation.
Queensland has surged past 91,000 AFL participants, now ranking second nationally in participation behind Victoria, with women and girls' coaching numbers in the Sunshine State rising by more than 25 per cent, the strongest increase in the country. To put that in perspective, South Australia sits at 70,500 participants and Western Australia at 90,000. Queensland, for decades dismissed as rugby league country, has quietly become one of the game's great participation engines.
The on-field output has matched the grassroots growth. As Campbell noted in the SMH, the Gold Coast academy produced eight first-round picks across the past three national men's drafts. In last year's AFLW draft, six of the first 15 selections came from the Gold Coast academy, and two of the first six from the Swans' academy. Nine of the first 18 AFLW picks came from those two programmes alone. Those are not development league numbers. Those are numbers that reshape the talent map of the entire competition.
The complaints from Victorian clubs centre on draft pick displacement. Richmond, which finished 17th in 2024 and held pick two entering last year's draft, ended up selecting at seven after academy bids ate into their currency. On the surface, the grievance has a certain pub-test logic. But Campbell dissects it carefully in the SMH: pick two became Gold Coast's Zeke Uwland, a player who had a back stress fracture in his 18th year and whose care and development inside the academy system made him draftable; pick five became Dylan Patterson, who is now playing for the Gold Coast Titans in the NRL; and pick six became Daniel Annable at Brisbane, a player who, without the academy, would have returned to suburban club football at Redland. Richmond's pick seven, in other words, would not have become a better player in the absence of the system. The talent pool is larger because the academies exist.
That said, Victorian clubs are not wrong to raise questions about competitive balance. Gold Coast drafted five players in the top 20 at last year's draft, with Essendon coach Brad Scott saying the draft had lost its effectiveness as an equalisation mechanism. That concern deserves an honest hearing. The draft exists partly to help struggling clubs rebuild, and if its equalisation function is consistently diluted, that matters for the long-term health of the competition. The AFL opted against a full draft lockout concept after lobbying from several clubs, instead moving toward a grading system where teams in different parts of the ladder would need to be in zones to match bids.
The more interesting question, though, is what happens if the commission tips the balance too far toward restriction. Queensland sits on the doorstep of the 2032 Brisbane Olympics, and the state's best young athletes will have more pathways and more suitors than any generation before them. Touch football, rugby league, flag football and soccer are all organised, well-funded, and actively recruiting. If the draft cost of accessing a northern academy player becomes punishing enough that clubs pull back on investment, the talent pipeline will not stay neutral. It will flow somewhere else.
Campbell frames the broader lesson through Australia's winter Olympic success: targeted investment in smart infrastructure produces results that seem impossible from the outside. The ski ramp in Brisbane with a pool to land in is a useful metaphor. The northern academies are that ramp. They exist because someone decided the return was worth the spend. All of the rule amendments sit within a broader fix to be announced by the league on the tighter bidding system applied to all father-son, northern academy and next-generation academy prospects, with the AFL also increasing its own funding from $75,000 to $120,000 per club to support girls' NGA programmes.
The commission has a genuinely complex set of trade-offs to manage. Reasonable people can disagree about exactly where the bid-matching cost should sit, and GWS chief executive Dave Matthews makes a fair point that the four northern academies are not all the same. As Matthews told AFL.com.au, "We've reached a point where the four northern Academies should be considered differently under the next set of rules," noting that GWS's circumstances differ markedly from Brisbane's in terms of both father-son access and local market maturity. That is a legitimate call for differentiation, not special pleading.
The pragmatic path forward is one that holds northern clubs accountable for genuine development work, as the AFL's revised NGA framework already requires, while ensuring that the draft cost of academy access does not become so steep that it disincentivises the investment that built Queensland into a genuine AFL state. A rising tide, as Campbell puts it, floats all boats. The commission would do well to remember that before it places a toll on the harbour.