The 2022 Brownlow Medal was the 95th year the award is presented to the player adjudged the

best and fairest In Australian sport, the best and fairest award recognises the player(s) adjudged to have had the best performance in a game or over a season for a given sporting club or competition. The awards are sometimes dependent on not receiving a suspensi ...

player during the

Australian Football League The Australian Football League (AFL) is the pre-eminent professional sports, professional competition of Australian rules football. It was originally named the Victorian Football League (VFL) and was founded in 1896 as a breakaway competition ...

(AFL) home-and-away season. It was won by Carlton midfielder

Patrick Cripps Patrick Cripps (born 18 March 1995) is a professional Australian rules footballer playing for the Carlton Football Club in the Australian Football League (AFL). Cripps won the Leigh Matthews Trophy in 2019, and is a dual Brownlow Medallist, fo ...

. The 2022 Brownlow Medal count was originally scheduled for Monday 19 September, its traditional date on the Monday before the grand final. It was rescheduled to Sunday 18 September at a week's notice, to avoid a clash with the funeral of Elizabeth II. The event returned to its conventional format and venue—a gala dinner at the Crown Palladium in Melbourne—after having been held virtually for the previous two seasons due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

. Cripps' win was not without controversy. Cripps was initially suspended by the Match Review Panel and AFL Tribunal in Round 21, for rough conduct in a front-on contest against '

Callum Ah Chee Callum Ah Chee (born 9 October 1997) is an Australian rules footballer who plays for the Brisbane Lions in the Australian Football League (AFL). Early life Ah Chee was born in Derby, Western Australia, Australia. His mother is Indigenous Aust ...

, which ruled him ineligible and would have seen him miss the final rounds, in which he polled the winning votes; Carlton had appealed the suspension to the AFL Appeals Board and was successful in overturning it. West Coast, which finished 17th with a 2–20 record, polled only 15 votes across all of its players combined, the lowest-ever tally for any club under the 3–2–1 voting system in a season of any length.

Leading vote-getters

Voting procedure

The three field

umpires An umpire is an official in a variety of sports and competition, responsible for enforcing the rules of the sport, including sportsmanship decisions such as ejection. The term derives from the Old French , , and , : (as evidenced in cricke ...

(those umpires who control the flow of the game, as opposed to goal or boundary umpires) confer after each match and award three votes, two votes, and one vote to the players they regard as the best, second-best and third-best in the match, respectively. The votes are kept secret until the awards night, and they are read and tallied on the evening.

Allegations of illegal betting

Several raids and arrests, including of second-year field umpire Michael Pell, were made in November 2022 after suspicious betting patterns into spot bets on the votes from many games Pell had umpired were investigated by sports corruption police. As of September 2023, investigations were ongoing and no charges have been formally laid, and Pell was no longer employed by the AFL.

References

2022 Australian Football League season

2022 The year began with another wave in the COVID-19 pandemic, with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant, Omicron spreading rapidly and becoming the dominant variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus worldwide. Tracking a decrease in cases and deaths, 2022 saw ...

2022 awards in Australia 2022 sports awards {{AFL-stub