Beyond the Draft Board: how lists are really built
Wherein I speak with an AFL list manager about drafting for uncertainty, the psychology of prospects, and the human cost of managing people as assets.
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Most footy fans can name their side’s coach and captain. Attentive fans can name the CEO and President. Only the most committed can tell you about their list manager. On one hand, this makes perfect sense. List managers don’t kick the footy or mould the game plan. But on the other hand, it’s a curious blind spot in our shared understanding of how labour and glory are divided inside AFL clubs. Because list managers make it all possible. They work with recruiters to evaluate draft prospects. They work with coaches to identify trade targets. They lead contract negotiations. And they hold the whip hand when it comes time to decide which players to delist. Every side, successful or not, is the product of choices made by people most (well-adjusted) footy fans wouldn’t recognise if they walked past them on the street. To help me better understand the role and its salience in modern footy, I spoke to “Alex”, a list manager at an AFL club.
The player had red flags. Alex could see them in the data. He’d been part of a team that had built a system – data, supplemented by interviews and the good old-fashioned eye test – specifically designed to identify those red flags. They shouldn’t have been ignored. And yet, because the player’s athletic upside was so tempting, they were. Alex is wistful when I ask him the question that yielded that answer: what’s one decision in your career you wish you could have again? It’s clear this one plays on his mind. It was a decision, a reasonably big one, that didn’t work out.
That experience reinforced an important lesson: drafting for immediate need is dangerous. “The way I look at it now,” Alex says, “is that you’re always drafting for need. It’s just that in the first round, the need is talent. Once the talent dries up, positional need becomes more prevalent.” Alex and his club’s recruiters develop clear tiers based on their evaluation of the talent in each year’s draft. Clubs today have more tools at their disposal to evaluate talent. Some are technical – but the most important are epistemological. “In recruiting and evaluation,” says Alex, “there are some significant biases that can creep in through subjectivity, which is really important to identify first and try to counter as best you can. That’s probably our main goal through assessment.”
Recognise your own propensity for bias and error. And then create a system which allows for apples-to-apples comparisons. That’s how you create a process which yields better outcomes. “The way I describe it is,” says Alex, “is we try to make all our subjective measures objective. So if we’re watching tape, we’re identifying and recording a lot of that information through metrics we like to follow in terms of how a kid plays and some of these fundamental skill sets, and how they wash out at the end of the year. It’s a lot of work, but at the end of the day, we can objectify a lot of our information and generate a final grade and rating off the back of that.” Alex isn’t kidding when he says it’s a lot of work. AFL list managers and analysts do a lot of the technical work in-house because the market for player scouting tools is smaller and more opaque in footy than it is for global sports like soccer. Footy doesn’t have comprehensive public-facing tools like FBRef or Wyscout. Instead, it’s not uncommon for clubs and especially dedicated amateurs to develop their own player evaluation models. “Bailey”, a club analyst I interviewed for a piece in 2024, built one while working at a state league club. Alex’s answer seems to suggest that his club employs a bespoke model to evaluate prospective and incumbent players. Getting the right answers begins with asking the right questions.
Something else in Alex’s answer to my question about player evaluation jumped out to me: “immediate need”. List needs change because needs are determined by two things that themselves change: a list’s existing traits and the footballing traits that are most strongly predictive of on-field success. Many, probably most, of those footballing traits are predictable and stable over time. All else being equal, you’d prefer guys who can find the footy, win one-on-one contests, and possess a psychotic desire to win. But other traits like, say, size, the balance between contested ball-winning ability and outside spread, how far you can handball it, are more sensitive to rule changes. Just as the Reserve Bank of Australia’s determination of the cash rate directly influences the relative desirability of certain assets, the AFL’s decisions about rules and the interpretation of rules drive the behaviour of clubs. Changes to draft rules like NGA eligibility and bid matching impact how clubs plan for upcoming drafts. Changes to in-game rules, by changing the value of different footballing traits, impact the viability of different game plans (as I wrote about here), and significantly impact the practice of list management.
Alex’s solution to this vexing problem is to reason from first principles. “We break it right back to the core,” he tells me. “How we want to play and what types of players will be best suited in that system. Then you’re trying to overlay what we think the league’s going to look like in five years – potential rule changes, interchange changes, those sorts of things, and who they’ll impact most.” There probably are clubs and list managers who regard it as a reactive discipline that is mostly about filling holes. But I suspect the best list managers are those who don’t simply evaluate the player in front of them, but do so in the context of what they believe footy will look like in the near future.
“We talk often about the types of players that may not exist in three or four years, and the types of players you want multiple of in three or four years, and where the game is shifting,” Alex explains. “There’s been a real influx of clubs wanting to get small forwards and speed through their front half – both on the ground and maintaining an aerial threat. That’s been a pretty significant shift in the last five years, and you see a lot of smaller forwards going earlier in the draft than they might have historically. Off the back of that, you’re thinking about what types of players can play on those types. So you’re searching for trends that have become more prevalent over the last few years, trying to stay ahead of that – but you’ve also got to acknowledge where the game is now and where you think it might get to.” Watching Nick Watson strut his stuff this year has made me consider that perhaps the best advice one can offer a talented but undersized 16 year-old midfielder hoping for an AFL career is to retrain as a lockdown small defender.
Best practice in list management is driven by making decisions that anticipate the evolution of the game. But that process of evolution is itself highly contingent and dynamic. It isn’t just driven by rule changes; it’s also driven by the sides that have bent the rest of the competition to their will. Tactically, we still live in the shade of trees planted by Damien Hardwick’s Richmond. Although most sides have added their own tweaks, Hardwick’s innovations – embracing post-clearance contests, surging from turnovers, and the forward handball – remain the basic blueprint for how footy is played in 2026. Alex acknowledges the influence of that side, and indeed of all great sides, on how he does his job. “They [Hardwick’s Richmond] were probably the first ones to embrace the contest and embrace a neutral ball,” he tells me. “That was a step change from Hawthorn, who wanted to control the game. Time in possession was a big thing for them. I remember whenever we scouted Hawthorn it was about trying to keep the ball off them as much as we could, because if they control it, you’re defending for 70% of the game, and they’ll kill you.” This matters for list management because the ability to execute certain tactics is largely constrained by a side’s physical and technical attributes. Alex is very clear on this point: “If you don’t have the personnel that match up with that system, I think you get in trouble. If you want to play fast but you don’t have speed in your team, it’s probably not going to work. It sounds simplistic, but your personnel needs to match up with the way in which you want to play.”
Any discussion of the way a side wants to play raises an obvious question: who gets to decide that? The responsibility for designing the game plan still sits principally with the senior coach (although at some clubs – St Kilda is an example – that responsibility is partly delegated to senior assistants). But, as the game has become more tactically dense and the industry has professionalised, the job of implementing that game plan has been distributed across a larger number of personnel. On one side, there is a growing network of specialist assistants – line coaches, ball movement coaches, heads of game plan, analysts – who each own a small chunk of what used to be the domain of the senior coach. And on the other, list managers like Alex have responsibility for what is ultimately the biggest constraint on what the game plan can achieve.
Most elite European soccer clubs now employ a Director of Football. That role emerged in response to a specific problem: managers get sacked a lot, and that turnover is detrimental to long-term club strategy (it’s also usually very expensive). By shifting responsibility for recruitment and squad planning to a separate executive who sat above or alongside the manager, clubs gained continuity regardless of who was in the technical area. The emergence of the Director of Football role has brought its unique dynamics. Some have gained public prominence and many have accrued a parallel power base that can sit in tension with a manager whose job security is highly sensitive to short-term results. Alex, I should add, is extremely effusive about his senior coach.
There’s a few reasons footy has resisted the Director of Football model. I suspect the main one is that there’s so much less coaching turnover. AFL Coaches are given an amount of grace that’s unusual in elite sport. They start with more political capital and their political capital diminishes more slowly. Partly that’s because appointing a new coach is usually an admission by a club that the list needs to be overhauled. That task, whether it’s a full tear-down rebuild or a more modest refresh, is a painstaking process that requires the senior coach and list manager (and other key staff, including the head of recruitment) to work closely together. Overhauls take time, and although Alex stresses to me that list builds are never “complete”, clubs generally understand that parting ways with a list manager creates disruption. That’s why Carlton dismissing Nick Austin on the same day Michael Voss departed was so significant: it was institutional recognition of collective failure. The importance of the list, and the fact they’re harder to improve than in sports where you can buy your way out of trouble, gives list managers power. By the time a game plan has been reshaped in a coach’s image, it’s often married to a list that’s been crafted by list managers like Alex.
The best list managers recruit players who are aligned to their club’s game model and are well-suited to how clubs believe the game will evolve. One of the biggest challenges is to not overreact. The Richmond example is useful here. The clubs that saw what Hardwick was doing and immediately tried to replicate it without adequately considering that it was a unique marriage of system and talent usually failed. My mind turns, wistfully, to Adelaide drafting Ned McHenry with its first-round pick in 2018, partly because of a belief that it needed more scrappy, defensive midfield/half-forward types on its list. The correct lesson to draw from the way Richmond’s dominance shaped the competitive meta was to acknowledge its influence and plan for the next version of that style (see: GWS under Adam Kingsley) instead of brute-forcing an ersatz version of the original.
List managers try to make decisions that seem optimal based on the information they have to hand at the time. The problem is that the information they have is almost always incomplete. Perhaps the key bit of information that is both highly conducive to success in an AFL environment and hard to measure is a player’s psychological profile. Clubs are very interested in understanding a player’s competitive drive, their emotional regulation, their “coachability”, and their capacity to perform under pressure. “There’s no doubt it’s of high importance,” Alex tells me. “Resilience, competitiveness, self-belief – those values are hard to measure outside of talking to the kid and getting information from people who know them really well. We do have psych profiles, but interpreting that information is a challenge, for the most part, for 18-year-old kids who can potentially change their psychological makeup.”
Every AFL club spends time thinking about how to improve the accuracy of its psychological profiling. These days, clubs talk to a player’s friends, family members, junior coaches, and teachers in an attempt to form a comprehensive picture of the kid they might draft. The biggest brushstroke, however, is still made by the face-to-face interview. They’re very useful. But they’re gameable. A teenager who presents well in a room, answers questions fluently, and projects the right kind of confidence is not necessarily the adult who will respond well to being dropped, or to losing, or to being asked to learn a new role five years into their career.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that prospects – especially those who tend to attract the most attention from clubs – are getting better at preparing for exactly this kind of scrutiny. In US sports, a cottage industry has developed around pre-draft interview coaching: agents and former players who run mock interviews, school prospects on how to discuss their weaknesses, and teach them to present a particular kind of psychological profile to evaluators. Although the AFL isn’t as far down that road, the principle might still apply. By the time a highly-rated prospect sits across from the list manager at the national combine, they’ve almost certainly been coached on what to say. That reduces to a classic problem in organisational psychology: interviews measure interview performance, and that’s an imperfect proxy for actual job performance. Interviews still have their place. But the clubs which operate at the leading edge have begun to lean harder on other sources of information, such as chatting to close personal contacts and observing the player in situations – training sessions, social settings, pressure moments within games – that can’t be faked.
Alex acknowledges that difficulty, but is careful to draw a distinction between what happens here and what happens in America. “We’re open-minded about whether a player can actually change their psychological makeup,” he says. “They’re still adolescent boys at the end of the day. They’re not 21 or 22-year-old college kids who sort of are who they are. As 18-year-olds, a lot of these kids may not have dealt with many hardships in their life. That’s not the kid’s fault. But understanding how they may react to a hardship is really, really hard to predict if they haven’t actually been through it.” You can measure athletic ability. You can observe footy ability. But psychology is what determines how effectively a player can bring that ability to bear in crunch moments. And that’s bloody hard to measure ahead of time.
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Conflict is the great driver of human affairs. The peasant boy becomes the hero at the end of the story because they overcome adversity. But many elite draft prospects haven’t needed to overcome much adversity – at least on the field – before joining the AFL system. Their talent tends to make big problems easy to solve. And their talent can often lead to them being indulged. They were never the peasant boy; they were the prince. That can create bad habits or, more prosaically, situations where resilience hasn’t been fully tested. Alex understands that problem, but isn’t sure there’s a solution. “Often, that top-end kid has been the best his whole life,” he says. “And then he gets into an AFL program, and I don’t care who you are: if you’re a first-year player, for the most part, it’s a grind. You’re down the bottom of the list. There are 20 players ahead of you when you start, but that hasn’t been the case throughout their journey. How do they respond to that? Do they work harder? Because they’re going to have to. Or does it become too hard? Because the AFL is hard.”
Despite the entire discipline of list management existing to prevent its occurrence, shit still regularly happens. I want to return to the anecdote I opened this piece with – the one about the player with the red flags. Part of the reason for the regret I detect in Alex’s voice, beyond the bare fact of an investment that didn’t work out, is that his answer is a microcosm of the central emotional dilemma of his role: an AFL list manager is ultimately an asset manager. But he or she is a list manager with a twist – because the assets they manage are people. You don’t feel bad when you rebalance your financial portfolio. If anything, you feel good, because you believe that doing so will improve your returns. Delisting or trading out players, both of which Alex has done many times, is governed by the same expected value calculations. But just because it’s rational, doesn’t mean it’s easy. There is a human element. People form bonds when they work together for years in high-pressure industries, and severing them is tough.
The AFL club Alex works for isn’t based in Melbourne. But, like most list managers, he is. As he admits, that comes with challenges as well as benefits. “I’m not around the place 24/7 like I would be at a Melbourne club,” he tells me. “But there’s no doubt the relationship you forge with players is a challenge when it comes to having meaningful discussions about them as assets, and that’s the same from a coaching point of view.” Alex, who is wearing a Major League Baseball team cap throughout our interview, acknowledges the AFL is a long way from the US sports model where players are traded without their knowledge. Nor does he think we’re close to introducing such a model. The AFL Players’ Association is strong, as is, one suspects, the cultural taboo. However, things have changed since Alex took on his current role. “Player movement has shifted a fair bit over the last five or six years in terms of contracted players getting traded,” he says. “Two years ago, we looked at it and 50% of players who moved in the trade period were in contract. That’s a massive shift, in terms of what free agency was intended for.”
Alex keeps using a specific word to explain the principle which guides club behaviour around player movement: flexibility. Clubs want options, because options create more room to pursue opportunities to improve their lists. Consider the case of Charlie Curnow. Clubs were made aware partway through last season that the two-time Coleman Medallist would be open to leaving Carlton. In the end, the deal was possible because Sydney persuaded Will Hayward that his future lay elsewhere and – just as importantly – because the Swans included their 2026 and 2027 first-round picks as part of the package. More options, more possibilities, more player movement. Just the way Alex – and the AFL – likes it. Of course, forcing out a player that had spent nine seasons at the club came with an emotional cost. It just happened to be one that the Swans were willing to pay in the pursuit of a player they believed could hold the key to winning a flag.
I used the passive voice in the preceding paragraph to describe how clubs were alerted to Charlie Curnow’s availability. In truth, it was his manager, Robbie D’Orazio, who did the alerting. Player managers are a much-maligned part of the footy landscape. Acting in their client’s interests often means acting against the interests of the client’s club, and the average footy fan’s loyalty ultimately belongs to the club. But the conventional critique misses something important. AFL football is an illiquid labour market. Players are bound by contracts, constrained by salary caps, and subject to taboos against requesting trades that don’t exist to anywhere near the same degree in other industries (no one really cares if Geoff from Accounts moves to another company; they just have a farewell morning tea). Without player managers, clubs would hold almost all the cards over the people they employ.
The best player managers understand that their job isn’t simply to maximise their client’s salary. It’s to maximise their welfare. That includes some combination of winning, belonging, and what a career in football does for a player’s life after football. The apparent trend of players in successful sides “taking unders” (and partly confounding the goals of equalisation) is a reflection that, sometimes, the satisfaction of winning in September is worth more than the marginal utility of an extra $250,000. A player manager who only chases money is probably, by that standard, a bad manager. “For the most part, they’re really good,” says Alex. “They understand the landscape, they understand their clients and what opportunity might look like. They’re really important in terms of having an open dialogue around potential player movement.”
The largest management firms have accumulated a form of structural power that clubs have to accommodate. They’re an unusual centre of power in the footy landscape, existing, as they do, outside of clubs or the AFL administration. “You have to have good relationships with player managers,” Alex tells me. “The big management stables have a lot of significant players under their banner.” If a single stable represents your captain, your key forward, and three of the top five in your Best & Fairest, the relationship between that stable and your club is not purely adversarial – it’s closer to the wary relationship between sovereign states, with all the leverage, shared interests, and bargaining that implies. There’s no alternative but to come to the table.
While we’re on the subject of employers, I ask Alex to entertain a hypothetical (and indulge me in a hobby horse). If he was to become the AFL CEO – the big boss – what list management rules would he change? Regular readers will know this is a preoccupation of mine. In a previous article, I tried to articulate the principles of a “footy libertarianism” that would relax the restrictions on what teams could do on the field and what clubs could do off it. In my view, we should be encouraging innovation across all phases of the game. Alex pauses, a small smile creeping across his face, before responding. “Two things come to mind,” he begins. “First, a maximum contract length or a maximum financial contract amount. I just worry about the overspill – players getting certain amounts of money and the domino effect that has for other players in the club. Players on big money want their teammates to have a piece of that as well, and you’ve got to try and educate them on money versus team success. In my view, if you’re paying someone $2 million or more, it’s very hard to put a premiership team around that player under our current salary cap restrictions.”
Alex doesn’t mention any names. But it is hard to hear his answer and not think of St Kilda’s decision to offer the two biggest contracts in footy to Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera and Tom De Koning. I understand why the Saints did what they did. I even wrote an article defending their approach. But arithmetic won’t be denied: they have less money to pay other players on their list. Alex’s response also reinforced the point that the interests of clubs and players sometimes diverge. Of course a list manager would like a cap on contract lengths! A spokesperson from the AFL Players’ Association would likely say the exact opposite. Each is advocating for their group’s interests.
“The other thing that I’d do,” Alex continues. “I’d probably remove the rookie list. I think it’s antiquated. A lot of clubs use it as a list management tool. It’s within the rules, but I just think you can extend your primary list, make it a full list, and remove the admin, remove the stress of players getting delisted and re-listed.” It’s clear that the rookie list has assumed a different function than the one it was originally designed for. Every club uses it as an overflow of the senior list. If I was feeling charitable, I’d say that the AFL simply doesn’t consider it a sufficiently big problem to bother addressing. The fact that clubs have converged on a utility-maximising alternative use of the rookie list makes me even more confident that there’s an appetite for innovation in list management that isn’t currently being met. I put it to Alex: why have restrictions on list sizes at all? Why can’t struggling clubs be given the chance to roll the dice on more speculative prospects who could one day mature into good AFL players? Alex is sympathetic, even if I can sense he doesn’t quite share my enthusiasm (it’d mean more work for him, after all). “Philosophically, rookies need more than 12 months,” he agrees. “There’s an irony in it: first-round picks get all the licence because they’ve got the talent. But rookies can sometimes get swallowed up and spat out pretty quickly, and they’re the ones who actually need the time to develop and adjust to a full-time program.”
My time is almost up. I can picture Alex’s media manager fretting that I’m keeping him away from his job. To close, I try to pose a question which best represents the average footy fan’s beliefs about list management: do list managers operate as though “Premiership windows” exist, or is that just something those of us in the peanut gallery have agreed is true without actually checking? “You’re always looking at windows,” he responds. “It might not be Premiership windows, but you’re looking at short, medium, and long term, and making sure the list is in good shape across a lot of different areas. We have list management discussions once a month and we tick a lot of those things off, keeping an eye on what the list looks like over the next three years, five years.” The grind never stops, in other words. Perennial competitiveness, you sense, is the dream of most clubs – and the reality of only a few. “But as I said at the top, there’s a type of person that we’re trying to bring into the footy club, and then athletically and fundamentally they need to be at the level we’re looking for.”
Alex considered that final question the same way he considered all my questions throughout our 45 minutes – carefully. I’d seen him in the media a few times before our conversation, but I sense he’s much happier doing his job behind the scenes. We end somewhere close to where we began: talking about a player who didn’t quite work out, and a decision that still plays on his mind. In a job defined by the management of uncertainty, that regret is unavoidable. You build the best system you can. You counter your biases as best you can. You gather data. And then you make the call, with imperfect information, on a kid, a rival club’s gun, or a senior player who swears they can recapture their best form if only they had another year on the list. Whatever their age, whatever their status, you are shaping their life in some way. Most of the time, list managers do this without anyone noticing. When it goes wrong, the blame usually lands elsewhere – on the senior coach, the player, the development coaches. When it goes right, the players get the medals and the coaches are hailed as geniuses. That’s the job. Alex knew what it was when he took it.
Phenomenal read. Your analysis is always top-notch, but there's something here with this interview format that is profoundly unique. By acting as a conduit between professional insiders and intellectually curious fans, you're breaking down a previously impermeable wall. Felt like I learned a massive amount by reading this, which is so vanishingly rare in AFL media. Hope you can secure more interviews in this format!