Build your AFL career.
Spin your starting point, choose your role, and play a whole career against the real record book.
Think you’d beat a real career?
Draft the team that would. Spin an era, choose one player, fill the real roster, and see where the season ends.
Questions people actually ask
Answered straightPlay the whole ride — the offers, the farewell, what comes after. The full AFL career simulator runs every season against the real record book, so you finally see how your career actually reads.
What is the AFL career simulator?
An Australian rules football career you play in the browser, pathway stop to the coaches box. The draft, the first senior season, the flag years and the retirement press conference sit on one continuous age rail, with disposals and goals filling the board.
How long does an AFL career actually last?
We measured it: 4.2 seasons for a completed AFL career across our whole archive — just behind the NFL — with about one career in nine reaching a tenth season. The board keeps the ones that lasted, drawn from a competition running back to 1897, so the names you draft ran far longer than that average. See how every sport compares.
Defender, midfielder, ruck or forward?
Each position gets its own football job and stat line. Defenders post disposals, marks and intercepts; midfielders post disposals, clearances and goals; rucks post hitouts, clearances and marks; forwards post goals, marks and disposals. The elite benches follow those positions too, from 170 intercepts and 950 hitouts to 700 disposals and 110 goals.
How does the AFL draft work here?
Your pathway years build your stock and the national draft returns one overall pick number. The receipt sets the club and competitive setting around your first senior season; the engine does not invent a round or hide reserve seasons behind a later pick.
What is the Leadership chapter?
The years around 28–30, when you choose between the record book, leading the next wave, or one last move. The call changes the ceiling for later numbers and honors without inventing a captaincy receipt the game never showed you.
What are the chapters?
The pathway stop owns ages 16–17, with draft night and the first senior season at 18. Senior footy then runs through 19–21 before four successive bands: 22–24, 25–27, 28–30 and 31–34. The retirement call lands at 35; the coaches-box choice comes later.
Can I win a premiership and a medal?
Both are on the table and both are earned. All-Australian selection follows the seasons that deserve it, and the finish grades the entire career on an SSS–F ladder rather than on one good year.
Is this an AFL career game or a simulator?
Both names point here. It is the browser version — you make every decision and the record book decides what the career was worth.
Is there a free online AFL simulator?
This page is one — an AFL simulator that runs online free, nothing to install. It simulates at the career scale: every senior season from draft night to the retirement call, scored against era-rated footy records. To run a season simulator for a full side instead, the all-time AFL draft board plays one drafted eighteen through the fixture and the finals.
What happens after you retire?
You choose one more year or you walk, then the coaches-box decision joins your card. It can add a leadership receipt, but no extra playing seasons, premierships or salary.
Can I challenge someone?
Send the card — they start from their own pathway stop and their own draft, chasing the result you finished on.
Do I need an app?
No. Free in a browser on any phone or computer, no account, nothing installed, and your career sits in the URL so it survives a reload.
Is the 26-0 game part of this site?
It is — the 26-0 game drafts a full all-time AFL side and asks it to take every match through September, while here one draftee carries a whole footballing life on his own.
How long a career does the AFL record hold?
Australian rules has recorded careers since 1897, and clubs hold players far longer than most sports here — a one-club career across a decade and a half is a recognised shape rather than an anomaly.
What marks a great AFL career in the record?
The Brownlow, All-Australian selection, the Coleman — and in Australian rules, games played carries almost as much weight, because durability across a long career is itself the honour.
How rare is a hall-of-fame AFL career?
336 figures across more than a century. Australian rules has had comparatively few clubs and a great many players, so the hall is a narrow gate.
Is a great AFL career one huge season or many good ones?
Many, and the club matters nearly as much as the count. Australian rules careers are unusually likely to be spent at one club, so the record reads as a story about a place as well as a player.
How does a AFL career usually end?
On the club's terms as often as the player's. List sizes are tight and turnover is deliberate, so delisting ends careers that still had football left in them — plenty of last seasons in the record were not the player's worst.
What is hardest to sustain across a full AFL career?
The body. Australian rules asks a player to cover more ground than almost any football code and to be tackled while doing it, so a long career is a medical achievement before it is a sporting one.
What happens where the AFL record is thin?
What Australian rules counted changed substantially across the century — several categories simply were not recorded in the early decades. A card shows what was kept for that season, and a gap is shown as a gap.
Can a simulated AFL career go badly?
Yes. Injury, form and the list decisions taken around a player all bear on it, and the record holds a great many careers that were better than their final tally makes them look.