Brownlow Medal 2026: Start Time, How to Watch, and Why Five Banned Players Can Still Win
🔴 This page expires tonight, on purpose. The count begins at 8pm AEST on 21 September and the winner is announced about 10.10pm — roughly five hours after publication. From that moment the start times are history and the open question this page is built around has an answer. The plan is to rewrite it on the same slug as a result page: winner, final tally, the full club-by-club votes, and whether the eligibility question ended up mattering. Do not let it sit as a preview past Monday night.
Everything else on the page is unaffected; the figures below still say when they were read.
- 🔑 The count is tonight — Monday 21 September, Crown Palladium in Melbourne. Broadcast from 7.30pm AEST, votes from 8pm, winner at about 10.10pm.
- Channel Seven and 7mate free-to-air, 7plus for streaming inside Australia, watchafl.com.au outside it.
- Umpires award 3, 2 and 1 votes after every home-and-away match. Finals do not count, and the votes stay sealed until they are read out round by round on the night.
- 🔴 The five Sydney players suspended in August can still poll and can still win. Only an AFL Tribunal suspension makes a player ineligible — a club-imposed ban does not.
- The AFL did rule them out of All-Australian selection, which is a separate award with separate rules. The two decisions point in opposite directions and both are correct.
- Last year Matt Rowell won it with 39 votes, the second-highest tally ever under the 3-2-1 system, with Nick Daicos seven votes behind him.
- There are no betting odds anywhere on this page.
The 2026 Brownlow Medal is counted tonight. Votes start being read at 8pm AEST and the medal is presented at about 10.10pm, from Crown Palladium in Melbourne.
The live question going in is not only who wins it. It is whether five players who have not kicked a ball since August are allowed to.
What time does the Brownlow start?
| AEST | Local | |
|---|---|---|
| Red carpet arrivals | 5.15pm | — |
| Broadcast begins | 7.30pm | — |
| Count begins | 8.00pm | 7.30pm ACST, 6.00pm AWST |
| Mark of the Year | 8.35pm | — |
| Goal of the Year | 9.00pm | — |
| Jim Stynes Community Award | 9.25pm | — |
| Medal presented | about 10.10pm | — |
| Broadcast ends | 10.45pm | — |
Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane all run on the AEST column. Adelaide and the Northern Territory start half an hour earlier by the local clock, Perth two hours earlier — the ceremony is pinned to eastern time, so the further west you are the earlier your evening begins.
How to watch
| Where | How |
|---|---|
| Australia, free-to-air | Channel Seven and 7mate |
| Australia, streaming | 7plus |
| Outside Australia | watchafl.com.au |
The AFL also runs a live vote tracker on its own site, which lets you follow the count round by round and filter it by club — useful, because the broadcast reads the rounds in order and the leaderboard swings a long way before it settles.
How the voting actually works
The umpires decide it, not the coaches, the media or the players.
After every home-and-away match, the officiating umpires confer and award 3 votes to the player they judge best afield, 2 to the second best and 1 to the third. That is the entire mechanism.
Two consequences are worth holding on to:
- Finals do not count. A player can have an enormous September and it will not move his tally by a single vote. The medal is a home-and-away award.
- Nobody knows the numbers until the night. The votes are sealed as they are cast and stay sealed. The count is read out round by round, which is why the ceremony takes two hours and why leads change hands repeatedly.
It also means the award measures something slightly narrower than “the best player of the season”: it measures what three umpires thought in the minutes after each match, twenty-odd times.
Can the suspended Sydney players still win it?
Yes. And this surprises almost everyone, because it looks like it should be the opposite.
In August, Sydney suspended five players — Isaac Heeney, Chad Warner, Nick Blakey, Riley Bice and James Jordon — for the remainder of the season, including finals, for breaching the club’s standards of behaviour.
They remain eligible for the Brownlow. Every vote they polled across the season counts, and any one of them could win it tonight.
Why, exactly
The rule turns on who did the suspending.
A player suspended by the AFL Tribunal during the home-and-away season is ineligible to win the medal. A player suspended by his own club is not.
That is the “fairest” half of fairest and best doing its work, and it is deliberately narrow: it disqualifies players sanctioned by the league’s own judicial process for what they did on the field, not players disciplined internally for anything else.
🔑 The AFL applied a different rule to a different award, and both decisions stand. The same five players were ruled out of All-Australian selection — a separate honour with separate criteria, where the AFL has discretion it does not have over the Brownlow. So one body has said they cannot be named in the team of the year, while the medal’s own rules say they can win the medal. Those are not contradictory. They are two sets of rules doing two different jobs.
Heeney in particular is regarded as a genuine top-ten chance on the votes he had already banked before August.
What the suspension was and was not
Worth being precise, because the two things get run together.
- The club’s sanction was for breaching its own standards and expected behaviour. Sydney said the players could face police questions about drug use.
- Separately, Victoria Police has an ongoing investigation into an alleged sexual assault at the hotel where the team was staying in August.
- 🔴 Reporting has not suggested that any of the five is accused of that assault, and none has been charged.
This page is about a football award, so that is as far as it goes.
What happened last year
A useful calibration for tonight’s numbers.
| 2025 | Player | Votes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Matt Rowell (Gold Coast) | 39 |
| 2 | Nick Daicos (Collingwood) | 32 |
| 3 | Bailey Smith (Geelong) | 29 |
Rowell’s 39 is the second-highest winning tally ever under the 3-2-1 system, behind Patrick Cripps on 45 in 2024. Daicos finished seven votes back, having led parts of the count.
Those two numbers — 45 and 39, in consecutive years — are worth knowing before tonight, because the winning score has been drifting upwards and a tally in the high thirties is no longer the outlier it once was.
One thing this page will not give you
There are no odds here.
The Brownlow is one of the most heavily bet-on nights in Australian sport, and most previews are built around a market price. This site does not publish betting or prediction-market odds in any category, so you will not find a favourite quoted at a number anywhere above.
What is here instead is the schedule, the mechanism, and the rule that decides who is allowed to win.
The bottom line
Eight o’clock, Channel Seven, umpires’ votes read round by round for two hours, medal at about ten past ten.
And the answer to the question being asked most often today: yes, they are eligible — because the rule was written to exclude players the Tribunal punished, and the Tribunal did not punish these ones.
How we verified this
🔴 This page was written before the count and says so throughout. Publication is roughly three hours before the first vote is read and five before the medal is presented. It contains no winner, and no projection of one.
🔴 There are no odds here, from any bookmaker or prediction market, and that is a standing rule on this site rather than a decision about this article. Widely quoted coverage frames one player as an “unbackable favourite” at a specific price. That is a market quote and it is not repeated. Where this page describes recent form it uses finishing positions and vote tallies from counts that have already happened.
✅ The eligibility rule was checked against the rule rather than against the coverage of it, because the distinction is the whole point. A player suspended by the AFL Tribunal during the home-and-away season cannot win the medal — that is the “fairest” half of “fairest and best” — but a player suspended by his own club can, and does still poll. The five Sydney players were suspended by Sydney, not by the Tribunal. Reporting on the night confirms all players are able to receive votes and all votes count.
⚠️ The reason for that suspension is stated narrowly and deliberately. The five were suspended by their club in August for breaching its own standards of behaviour, with the club saying they could face police questions about drug use. A Victoria Police investigation into an alleged sexual assault at the hotel where the team was staying is ongoing. 🔴 It has not been suggested in reporting that any of the five is accused of that assault, and none has been charged. Detail circulating about what is alleged to have happened in the room is not reproduced here: it is untested allegation, it concerns a live investigation, and it has no bearing on a football award.
✅ Times are from the AFL’s own published schedule and are given in AEST with the other states converted from the same source, rather than calculated here. Perth and Adelaide run earlier in local clock terms because the ceremony is fixed to eastern time.
✅ The 2025 figures are from the completed count: Matt Rowell 39, Nick Daicos 32, Bailey Smith 29, with Rowell’s 39 the second-highest under the current system behind Patrick Cripps on 45 in 2024. The seven-vote gap quoted here is that year’s arithmetic, not an estimate.
⚠️ The header image is a floodlit Australian rules ground at night and is not the venue. The count is held in a ballroom at Crown Palladium in Melbourne, not at a stadium. The photograph is used because it is unmistakably this sport, carries no club branding, no sponsor and no identifiable person; an alternative rejected first was a round football with a visible brand mark, which is the wrong sport entirely.