General manager of list management Tim Harrington said Melbourne would have 44 players in total for next season. At the moment, the Demons have four vacancies on their primary list and two on their rookie list, meaning those positions will be filled over the rest of the November/December drafting period.
“The magic number for clubs is 44 players at your disposal, whether that’s 40 on your primary list and four rookies or you can choose to have 39 on your primary list and five rookies. Or you can have 38 and six,” he told melbournefc.com.au.
“The AFL also dropped the requirement to have ‘X’ amount of rookies, so you can choose whether to have rookies or not.
“If you do only have 39 on your primary list and five rookies, then one of those rookies can become your nominated rookie at the start of the year, who can play senior footy all year.
“There is no veterans list anymore, so the maximum number on your primary list is 40 and you can still have veterans, but the veteran criteria has changed … which is 10 years service to your club. The age limit of 30 years has been dropped and you can have as many veterans as you’d like on your primary list, who fulfill that category of 10 years service and you get roughly $130,000 per player outside of your cap.
“So they become primary listed players, instead of being on the veterans list, so that’s the fundamental change.”
But with two other list lodgements before the end of the year, there is the possibility that more spots could become available.
Harrington said the club will also look closely at delisted players in the upcoming Gillette AFL delisted player free agency period, which starts on Thursday and concludes on November 13 (2pm).
“You get to work out what the relative strength of the draft might be and where your picks are in the draft,” he told melbournefc.com.au.
“You‘re weighing up the value of a draft pick versus a player you can bring into your club, who has already had that experience.
“There will be quite a number of players in that category, so our role is to work out whether players who have been delisted by their clubs fit into our premiership model and where they would fall in the draft.”
Harrington said this recruiting method would impact the NAB AFL Pre-Season Draft.
“Although it hasn’t been utilised really strongly over the last couple of years anyway, the numbers will be diminished even further,” he added.
But looking ahead to the NAB AFL Draft in November, Harrington said the club was very excited to have selection No.4.
“That’s obviously a pick that you’ve just got to get right,” he said.
“Interestingly though, we’ve got one club in front of us in GWS, so we’re the second club picking for the draft.
“So that could create a slightly different scenario as well. Where it might’ve been a fairly set No.1, No.2, No.3 and No.4 - the industry would say these are the best four players, but GWS might grab someone at pick No.3 … out of industry expectation order. So that’ll be really interesting for us too.”
Harrington said midfielders would be looked at closely in the NAB AFL Draft.
“You have to refresh your list … in terms of getting those younger players into the club, we’ve done that to a certain extent even before the draft and we’ve still got pick four at our disposal.”
“So then we need to look really strongly at our premiership model and what we needed in the short to medium term and what that meant for the long-term.”
Overall, Harrington said Melbourne wanted a “net effect” from the free agency, trade and draft period. And he believes that more movement will happen in the free agency period in the coming seasons.
“I think in future years, they’ll be more players who leave clubs on average because of free agency and it adds to the numbers and the mobility that players have between the clubs,” he said.
