The Pre-Season Draft Is Changing — Who Follows Ah Chee?

For the best part of two decades, the AFL’s pre-season supplemental draft was the quiet backwater of list management — the administrative equivalent of rearranging the furniture at midnight when no one is watching. What Callum Ah Chee and the Adelaide Football Club did this summer was open every window in the house and let the light pour in.

The mechanics of it were relatively straightforward, which is partly what makes the precedent so significant. When a trade to Adelaide stalled — Brisbane and the Crows unable to agree on compensation — Ah Chee requested and was granted his delisting. He then nominated Adelaide as his club of choice in the pre-season draft and, because no other club matched or intervened in a meaningful way, he arrived at West Lakes for, in effect, nothing. A useful, experienced small forward who booted 31 goals last season, delivered to a premiership contender gratis. You can admire the elegance of it even if you barrack for someone other than the Crows — and as someone who very much does barrack for the Crows, I’ll admit to admiring it quite a lot.

What the PSD Was, and What It Might Become

The pre-season draft in its traditional form served a narrow purpose. Clubs used it to bring in fringe players overlooked in the national draft, to recycle veterans between state leagues, or to tidy up their own lists after the trade period closed. It was a mechanism for marginal decisions, not consequential ones. A selector’s tool, not a strategist’s weapon.

What has changed is the awareness — among players, managers, and football departments — that the system can be used differently. Ah Chee did not invent a loophole so much as he identified that an existing door had never really been tried. Once one player walks through it successfully, others will follow. That is simply how these things work in football. The salary cap, the father-son rule, the academy system — every mechanism that could be exploited eventually was, usually within a year or two of the first successful test case.

The question worth asking now is: which players, currently unsigned or likely to seek a fresh start before the 2025 season, are positioned to use the same path?

The Profile of a PSD Candidate

Before we speculate on names, it is worth establishing the profile that makes a player a genuine pre-season draft candidate rather than a wishful-thinking exercise. The Ah Chee model requires a few specific conditions to align.

• The player must be willing to be delisted — meaning they accept the risk that their preferred club may not select them, or that another club could take them first.
• Their current club must be willing to release them — either because trade discussions have broken down or because the player’s value in a forced trade is lower than the goodwill earned by facilitating a clean exit.
• A destination club must have a list spot available and be willing to use it on this particular player.
• The player must have genuine AFL-level currency — not a prospect, but someone experienced enough that a club will make a calculated decision to nominate them.

It is also worth noting the financial dimension. A delisted player who nominates via the PSD is not bound by the same contract obligations as a traded player. The destination club negotiates terms directly. In a competition where salary cap management is a constant pressure, acquiring a proven contributor without surrendering a pick or a player in exchange is an increasingly attractive proposition.

Players Worth Watching This Off-Season

I will be deliberate here and note that several contracts and list decisions are still in motion. Nothing that follows should be read as confirmation of any player’s intention — these are analytical observations based on publicly reported information, nothing more.

Several experienced players across the competition are either out of contract, have been the subject of trade speculation that has not resolved cleanly, or have indicated through their managers — in the way football managers tend to indicate things, which is to say loudly and indirectly — that they might welcome a change of scenery. Any one of them could, in theory, take the Ah Chee path if trade discussions stall in the coming weeks.

The clubs most likely to benefit are those who already have the list architecture to absorb a late addition: sides with a mature-age rookie spot available, or those who burned through their trade period picks and need to find value elsewhere. A club picking in the twenties at every stage of the national draft has genuine incentive to use the PSD creatively if a player of genuine quality is made available.

The Receiving Club’s Calculus

From Adelaide’s perspective — and again, I acknowledge my obvious bias here — the Ah Chee acquisition looked clean because the player fitted a specific need. The Crows wanted an experienced small forward who could play finals football. They got one. The fit mattered as much as the mechanism.

That calculus will be important for any club considering a similar move. Taking a player through the pre-season draft on the basis that they are available and cheap, rather than because they genuinely address a list need, is how football departments make the sort of errors that look obvious in hindsight. The PSD is a tool, not a strategy in itself.

What the Ah Chee case demonstrated, however, is that when the fit is right and the timing aligns, the system can deliver genuine list improvement at a fraction of the cost a trade would normally require. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot — particularly for the mid-table clubs trying to close the gap on the competition’s upper echelon without the trade leverage that finals appearances typically provide.

Will the AFL Move to Restrict It?

This is the governance question that the Commission will need to weigh carefully. The AFL has historically been pragmatic about mechanisms that work — they tend to let things run for a season or two before intervening, usually after a handful of clubs have exploited a gap and a few others have cried foul loudly enough to force the issue onto the agenda.

My own view is that outright restriction would be the wrong response. The pre-season draft in its expanded form represents something genuinely useful: it gives players agency, it reduces the leverage imbalance that exists when a discontented player is stuck at a club that refuses a reasonable trade request, and it keeps list movement competitive in the months when the trade period has already closed. These are good outcomes for the competition, even if they occasionally produce a result that looks asymetric from the outside.

What the AFL might reasonably do is introduce modest guardrails — a minimum number of nominees before a club can make a direct selection, perhaps, or a requirement that the delisting request be lodged within a defined window. Either change would preserve the mechanism’s utility while reducing the scope for it to function as a fully bespoke free agency workaround.

The Broader Shift in Player Power

Underneath all of this sits a deeper structural story. Player power in Australian football has been shifting incrementally for a decade, and the Ah Chee case is one more data point in that trend. The generation of footballers currently playing have grown up watching the AFL’s trading system mature, and their managers understand it in granular detail. They know where the edges are.

That is not a criticism. Players who have given years of service to a club are entitled to have some say in where they finish their career. The pre-season draft, used in this way, is a reasonable expression of that entitlement — one that does not require a club to pay a ransom in picks or force a confected trade that suits nobody.

Whether a dozen players follow Ah Chee’s path next summer or just one or two, the conversation has changed. The pre-season draft is no longer the footnote at the bottom of the list management calendar. It is, potentially, one of the most interesting chapters in the whole off-season story.

For a Crows fan watching all of this unfold, I’ll take that.