It’s a question that has lingered over the AFL landscape – who is the player you want at your club the most?
It’s the type of question that raises more questions. Queries like “just next year?” or “my club, or any club?”
It’s also the type of question that tends to stoke hot takes. Because it’s future focused, it’s all hypothetical in nature. The answer to the most valuable player of next year can only be written…well, next year. Radio airtime has to be filled now however.
According to both PAV and the AFL Player Ratings the answer to that question this year was…Ed Richards? Few would have predicted that 12 months ago, and perhaps even fewer would expect that to be the answer next year.
For around the past decade HPN has dove in at the other end of the spectrum to the “hot take”. HPN uses past performance and future projections to value players and draft picks. You might be aware of our work on the ABC, in the book Footballistics, in other media outlets or right across this website.
There’s a couple of ways HPN does this.
To value draft picks, HPN uses the Draft Pick Value Chart. The chart uses actual player performance (measured via Player Approximate Value aka PAV) from chosen draft picks, which is then smoothed to create an estimated output for each draft pick. HPN has not reviewed this chart in 2025, but will do further testing over the weekend.
Valuing players is a far harder task but HPN has a tool for that called PAPLEY. This was created a few years back to project out a player’s future career based on some core attributes of the player. It’s not perfect but it might be the best public tool for this going around. HPN will also do a quick look in the coming days testing how accurate PAPLEY has been so far.
There’s a lot of caveats to valuing player that needs to be applied. The biggest one is that the data we have now is somewhat incomplete with respect to how football is played. Further to this, some of the data used to build the model is more limited due to data collection and access issues.
For some, this is an insurmountable issue.
Any modelling also inherently ignores the eye test – how good a player looks on the field. Some footy watchers don’t trust the numbers because they don’t line up with they think has happened on the park. That’s also perfectly understandable.
Finally, most modelling tends to ignore role context and the impact of other players on output. There’s only one ball on the field, and limited opportunities to impact play directly for almost all players. PAV and PAPLEY are better than most other player value systems due to the team weighting, but it’s hard to fully account for this.
Inherently the highest rated players in our systems are high quality young players with many seasons ahead. Youth combined with an established track record gives relatively high confidence in the quality and longevity of their future output.
One name stands out as the personification of this.
For the second year running, Nick Daicos sits at the top of the value projections. His career, potentially another ten seasons at his current level, is worth the equivalent of the average pick 1 plus the average pick 3. This is a slight drop on last year, when the model rated him worth two pick 1s.
The reasons for the drop are pretty simple – he’s a year older, and he wasn’t quite as good this year as last year. This is a philosophical argument however – if Collingwood were to consider trading Daicos something major would have to have happened, which would likely cause his value to drop.
Nick Daicos has had an impeccable start to his career and pretty consistently tracked the high projections we’ve had for him so far.
At the age of 22 he’s an extremely accomplished player, but his fellow 2021 draftee Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera has jumped up to second after a breakout season. He re-signed with St Kilda to much fanfare. If St Kilda were to make a move, a starting point valuation might be pick 1 and pick 17. In the real world this could easily be three high-ish first round picks as a reasonable starting point.
Max Holmes has also bolstered his projections with his best season to date. Most of the other top players are similar to last year, with the likes of Harry Sheezel, Noah Anderson and Will Ashcroft largely continuing as expected.
New entrants with strong first seasons include Melbourne’s Harvey Langford, Fremantle’s Murphy Reid and Brisbane’s Levi Ashcroft. Single seasons are inherently less reliable as a basis for projection, but their careers so far have them already looking a strong chance of having a very valuable career.
The big drop from last year’s projections is unsurprisingly from Errol Gulden who missed most of the year with a broken leg. Availability is a huge factor for career projections.
We can also look to a shorter time period and see how players project for the next few years.
This look assumes all players continue to play for five years, unlike the main PAPLEY projections which includes a retirement curve to the valuation.
For many clubs a five year projection is more useful than a career long look. That’s because premiership windows tend to open and close faster than a full decade, as does the careers of most list management staff.
This split is most obvious for Max Gawn, who is old enough that our model expects players his age to retire in a pretty short period of time. If he were to play five seasons to his 38th year, at an assumed lower level over time, would still be one of the most valuable players across that period.
Something that stands out this year among this list is the young age of the elite players of the competition. In the past the best in the comp tended to be closer to late 20s than early.
This year the median age of the top end is just 24 years old, with only four players being 27 or older. HPN has commented in previous years about the striking high value of the junior crop of players compared to the previous decade. That same cohort is starting to hit prime age and looming as dominating the competition for the next few seasons. In the past HPN has tracked draft classes and there is often overperformance for particular junior years.
It remains to be seen if the next groups of young players are able to follow the trend.