THE AFL is close to finalising a revised system to ensure clubs pay true value for academy and father-son selections they nominates for the NAB AFL Draft.
The League sent the proposed new system, designed by its player movement advisory group, to clubs for feedback on Tuesday, and hopes to present a final version to the AFL Commission for approval before the season starts in April.
If accepted, the proposal would represent the biggest change in the player selection system since the draft was introduced, and could lead to live bidding on draft day and the trading of future draft picks.
Under the proposed system, each draft selection has been allocated a points value. This will mean clubs nominating players as their academy or father-son selections will have to use their existing picks to match the value of the pick used by the club bidding for an academy or father-son selection if they want to acquire the player.
The points value will be determined following a discount process, designed to ensure clubs have an incentive to invest in academies and maintain the father-son tradition.
Academy nominations will receive a 25 per cent discount and father-son nominations will receive a 15 per cent discount, although those numbers may change depending on club feedback to the proposal.
Under the new system, draft picks from 1-74 would be allocated points to indicate their respective values, with pick No.1 being worth 3000 points, pick No.2 worth 2517 and so on in a sliding scale.
This scale was based on data relating to the average player salaries of each pick from the year 2000 onwards.
If the proposed changes had been in place for the 2014 draft, the Sydney Swans would have had to give up picks No.18 and No.37, and its pick No.38 would have slid back to pick No.70 in order to secure highly-rated academy graduate Isaac Heeney.
That combination of picks, would have delivered enough points to match Melbourne's potential bid of pick No.2 (2517 points) after the 25 per cent discount was incorporated (2517 x 25 per cent = 1888 points).
The Swans would have then been permitted to take Heeney at pick No.2, and Melbourne would have been left with pick No.3.
Under the existing system, the Swans only had to use pick No.18 (its first pick in the draft) to obtain Heeney, after Melbourne put in a bid for him at pick No.2, with the Demons retaining that pick (which was used on Christian Petracca).
Brett Ebert, son of four-time Magarey Medallist and former Port Adelaide captain and coach Russell Ebert, is the only player to be taken by Port Adelaide as a father-son selection.
Source: afl.com.au
