St Kilda bosses have reportedly met with the AFL to discuss ending the Academy programs in the northern states of Queensland and New South Wales, as the club deem the AFL's "bias" to grow the game up in non-AFL dominated states has swung an imbalance to the competition.

It is the first club to push for major draft reform as list managers prepare for one of the most compromised first rounds in AFL draft history, with numerous top talents tied to Northern or Next Generation Academies.

Reported byย AFL.com.au's Callum Twomey, Saints president Andrew Bassat and chief executive Carl Dilena fronted the AFL Commission last week and presented various recommendations for change to the current draft and academy systems.

In their club update meeting, St Kilda called for the level of compromise in the draft to be reduced and suggested the AFL should review the NGA zoning and change the access Northern Academies have to home-grown talent.

In 2024, Gold Coast were happy to trade away their top draft selections to land major recruits in Daniel Rioli and John Noble, while maintaining enough draft points to bid and select highly-touted Academy graduate Leo Lombard.

St Kilda's hope is that Academy criteria must be similar to that of Victorian clubs' NGA limitations, being that the players must be of Indigenous or multicultural background to gain priority access.

It would mean potential early first-round selections Zeke Uwland (Gold Coast) and Dan Annable (Brisbane) would be in the pool of openly available talent.

St Kilda doubled down and also recommended that Northern Academy zones be rid of entirely before the 2025 AFL draft, have clubs be only able to match one bid in each draft on any Academy or father-son pick and have clubs that finish in the top four blocked from matching a bid on an Academy or father-son pick in the first round of that year's draft.

However, St Kilda are not expecting "wholesale change" before the 2025 draft, and the AFL have already made changes to the draft points system for this year to make it more difficult to match bids on multiple Academy-tied or father-son talents.

Carl Dilena said that the presentation wasn't to "blow up" the whole current draft system, but to identify the biases that are allowing northern state clubs greater access to top-end talent in comparison to clubs such as St Kilda.

"We're not trying to blow everything up," Dilena said.

"We're trying to have the least amount of compromise as possible. Everyone recognises the bias to northern states to grow the game. We'd like to see the pendulum switch back."

The presentation comes in the same month Saints coach Ross Lyon named Gold Coast as "nepo babies", beginning a verbal feud between the teams.

St Kilda's current draft hand consist of Picks 5, 41, and 61 (received from Essendon); however, it is subject to change with the Saints and Bombers' ladder positions to continue to move until season's end.