AFL News, Predictions & Tips

The AFL is the most popular professional sporting league in Australia, capturing the hearts and minds of sports fans across the country for six months across the middle of every year. Unsurprisingly, that popularity means that it’s also one of the most common sports to bet on, and betting sites offer a huge range of markets for punters to sink their teeth into for every game of the season. 

At MyBettingAustralia, we provide AFL tips throughout the year, as well as detailed insights for every game. Below, we take a look at a range of things related to our AFL expert tips, including how we come up with our predictions, and how you can best use them for your betting.  

The number of different betting sites in Australia has reached monumental proportions in recent years, with new independent bookmakers popping up left, right and centre and attempting to match it with the big bookies. Typically these smaller new betting sites won’t have quite the range of sports available as their bigger counterparts, but one thing you can bet on is that they will have plenty of different AFL markets available.

What exactly constitutes the best AFL betting sites can vary from person to person. For example, some might offer quality odds for the most popular markets like moneyline and line bets, but not offer much in the way of player props. Alternatively, if you like to search for value in disposal and goal markets, you’ll find plenty more options with some bookies than others.

Our AFL tips and predictions do tend to focus on the more straightforward markets, generally sticking to game results, and if you’re following those then your main concern should be finding a betting site with the best odds. But a wide range of markets can be valuable, too, broadening your selection of potential bets. 

Below are some of our preferred AFL betting sites, those that we tend to use for our AFL tips.

At MyBettingAustralia, we aim to provide tips on AFL throughout the course of the season, with our AFL tips and predictions being delivered prior to the first bounce of every round of the year. But these are more than just simple AFL tips. 

Our expert punters dive into every single game taking place over the course of a weekend, providing numerous AFL tips for each game, and directing you to the best betting site to place each individual bet. More than just jotting down the best AFL tips, we walk you through our reasoning to try to add a little more validity to our AFL match predictions.

Oh, and did we mention that these are for every game. We don’t just throw out a couple of quick tips for the big games of the weekend – we look at all nine that take place over most weekends throughout the course of the season, providing a run down of how it’s likely to play out, what the betting sites are predicting will transpire, and where we think that you can find a little bit of value. 

Every tipster has their own method for coming up with their tips, but at the end of the day it all comes down to a couple of things; knowledge of the game, and an understanding of how to find value. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we hit on all of our AFL tips – betting sites, as you probably well know, are also pretty good at predicting what is going to happen.

But through a deep understanding of the game which comes with growing up with the sport, as well as some meticulous research, we can provide you with some free AFL tips that are well worth taking a look at – at least, we certainly think that they are!

We take a deep dive into every game, analysing some of the factors that we think are most important when trying to provide quality AFL game predictions. Of course, anyone who follows this great sport knows that there is a whole lot of randomness involved, and there is plenty that will transpire across the course of every game that simply can’t be predicted.

But betting, as we know, is a game of odds. While we certainly don’t claim to be a group of Nostradamus’, what we can do is try to track down any edges that we think exist against the AFL betting sites. And while there is an element of ‘feeling’ that leads us to our tips – some intangible factors – there are also plenty of specific things that we consistently look at for every game, and in the below section we discuss these in greater detail.

There are a number of different things that have an impact on AFL results, and when we are AFL betting predictions, we take a look at the factors that we think are the most important. Below, we outline what some of these are.

Team Form

Whatever sport it is that you’re betting on, team form is obviously going to play a major role if you’re betting on the overall result. This can be both short and long-term – obviously the quality of the team on the whole influences their result, but taking a look at how both sides have been performing over the past week or two is also prudent when analysing a match-up.

Player Form

The form of particular players is something that we generally look into when we’re providing tips on AFL, and for a couple of reasons. For starters, the form of key players – and fringe players, for that matter – obviously has an impact on team performance, and if, for example, the Lions’ star players have all been firing on all cylinders for a few weeks, that is generally going to mean the team overall is in good form too. This impacts betting markets like moneyline and the line.

Further to that, however, player form is pivotal if you want to start diving into player props, and we love taking a look at these to see if there are any trends which could give us an edge. For example, has a particular player changed role recently, resulting in a lot more touches of the footy? If so, maybe there will be some good value odds for them to get, for example, 25 possessions – maybe they haven’t done it much in the past but have for the past two weeks running, and the value for them to do it this week is still based around how often they have historically got to that number, rather than how often they are getting there in their new role.

Match-up

The way two teams match-up is where we really get into the nitty gritty on the road to making our AFL tips this week, and rely on a lifetime of following this great game. Footy is very much a sport where the way two teams match-up against one another is important – does one team have a really strong contested midfield which is likely to overpower a smaller, inexperienced opposition? 

Or maybe they have a couple of big, bustling key forwards for whom the opposition is going to struggle to find a good match-up. Taking a look at these factors can help us to get a good gauge on how a game might play out, and plays a big role in our AFL tips and predictions.

Head to Head History

Head to head history is an interesting factor, and one which different people attribute a different amount of importance to. Often there will be no major trend in matchups between two teams, but sometimes, you’ll find that one side has had the edge over another for a really long time.

Take the Kennett Curse, for example. When the Hawks surprisingly beat the Cats back in the 2008 Grand Final, Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett made a claim about his teams superior mental drive to that of Geelong which prompted the Cats leaders to swear to never again lose to Hawthorn. Of course, that did not transpire, but the Cats did go on to beat the Hawks an incredible 11 times in a row, many of them in thrilling finishes. 

Clearly there was a mental component to that which transcended the individual situations of those teams. That was an extreme example, and while long-term history doesn’t necessarily influence what will happen in this weekend’s games, the Kennett Curse does show how much of sport can be decided between the ears.

Performance at Venue

Where a game is played is something which needs to be considered in every sport, and footy is no different. Obviously there are teams, particularly those outside of Victoria, who have a major advantage when they play against interstate games in their home state, and conversely tend to struggle when they have to fly elsewhere.

Even within states, however, grounds can have some impact, most notably in Victoria. Some MCG-based teams, for example, have tended to struggle at Marvel Stadium when forced to head out to the Docklands, the Tigers a notable example after former coach Damian Hardwick referenced their collective dislike of the venue a few years ago during their dynasty – a comment which would be referred back to plenty of times over the ensuing years when they struggled there.

Game Significance

This one only has an impact at certain points in the year, and it is, of course, generally factored into the odds too, so we do take that into consideration. But sometimes there are games that are simply much more significant for one team to another, and it can be hard for betting sites to quantify just how important that is.

For example, one team in a game might already be resigned to missing the finals if it’s later in the season, while the other could be fighting for a spot in the eight. Alternatively, the higher ranked team might be pretty much locked inside the top two – take the Swans in 2024, for example, who established such a significant lead at the top of the ladder in the first half of the season then fell in a heap with, realistically, probably a drop in motivation.

Once we have done our research, we will put together an article giving a run down of each upcoming game, as well as our AFL predictions for that week. You can expect our AFL predictions for this week to come out a few days before the round kicks off, so with that happening on Thursday or Friday night most weeks of the season, that means that you can expect our AFL betting tips to come out in the early parts of the week.

Because we provide both a detailed rundown of each game as well as actual AFL bets, it gives you, as the punter, a bit more autonomy in terms of how you use the information. Of course, with a couple of AFL tips given for each game, you can simply directly follow our bets.

Alternatively, because we provide a fair bit of analysis about the games too, you can also use our research to inform your own bets. Maybe you already have your own inclinations that will be either validated or the opposite by what we say; maybe you will combine what you read on our site with some other sources of information; or maybe you will do something else entirely.

But whichever route you take, the fact remains that by providing both in-depth analysis as well as free AFL tips, we help you to build your pyramid of information about upcoming AFL games, helping you to hopefully beat the bookie.

The use of historical AFL performances and trends is a rabbit hole that you can no doubt end up going far too deep into when betting on the AFL, but it is still worth taking a look at. Mostly, this refers to a couple of things that we mentioned above that we consider when making our AFL expert tips.

As mentioned earlier, we will generally take a look at match-up history between two sides when coming up with tips on AFL, while we will also consider historical performance at a particular ground.

If we are looking to create some AFL multi tips, then we might look deeper into player performance too – perhaps considering things like how a player has historically performed against the team they will be playing against, or at the ground they’re playing at. We will also consider trends such as whether they are in good form, be that possession gathering or goalkicking.

The analysis of historical performances and trends is not the be all and end all and there are more immediate things to consider when coming up with AFL betting tips. They can, however, be useful tidbits of information that help to inform our AFL tips and predictions. 

As you well know by now, we focus on providing high quality free AFL tips every week of the season. But weekly tips are not the only thing that we offer. Most AFL betting sites will also offer futures bets on things which run all season long, and these can be a really fun way to have an investment on the entire AFL season.

These futures bets cover a wide range of things and bank on your ability to make AFL season predictions. They can be on anything from which team will make the top eight, the top four, or win the Premiership, or they can be on individual player awards such as the Brownlow Medal. Most AFL betting sites will have similar futures to bet on, but the best ones will have more futures than the smaller betting sites.

Below, we answer some of the most commonly asked questions about the AFL, and more specifically, betting on it.