Magarey Medal 2026: Winner, Votes, Contenders & Latest Updates

Monday night, Adelaide. A room full of SANFL players in suits that don’t quite fit right, nervous laughs, and one guy who’d been runner-up twice before sitting there wondering if this was finally his year. It was. Nik Rokahr walked out with the 2026 Magarey Medal, and by the time the count was done, he hadn’t just won  he’d put together one of the biggest tallies in the award’s 128-year history.

If you’re here because you missed the count night or you just want the full picture without wading through ten different SANFL club sites, you’re in the right place. Here’s everything on the Magarey Medal 2026: who won, how many votes, who was chasing him, and what it all means.

Magarey Medal 2026: Overview

Quick version, for anyone in a hurry: Norwood’s Nik Rokahr won the 2026 Magarey Medal with 38 votes from 18 games. That’s the biggest haul since Russell Ebert polled 42 back in 1976. Rokahr also became the first player ever to hold both the Magarey Medal and the WAFL’s Sandover Medal a genuinely rare double that says a lot about how good his season actually was.

The Magarey Medal, if you don’t follow SANFL closely, is South Australia’s version of the Brownlow. It’s been handed out since 1898 to the “fairest and most brilliant” player in the state’s top league, as judged by the field umpires. It’s not a fan vote, not a media panel  three umpires per game quietly decide who gets 3, 2, and 1 votes, and those numbers get added up at the end of the home-and-away season.

This year’s count had a bit of everything. A dominant favorite. A tight battle for the minor placings. And a storyline  the Sand over-Magarey double  that nobody had managed to pull off in well over a century of both medals existing. Honestly, that’s the kind of detail that makes a count night worth watching even if you don’t barrack for anyone involved.

There’s also a simpler reason this year’s medal is generating more chatter than usual outside South Australia. Fans in Victoria and WA don’t always pay close attention to SANFL awards night, and fair enough there’s a lot of football to follow in September. But a 38-vote season, and a first-ever cross-medal double, is the kind of thing that travels beyond state lines. People who’ve never watched a Norwood game in their life are suddenly asking who this Rokahr guy is. That’s usually a sign the achievement is bigger than the league it happened in.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the vote count alone tells the full story here. Plenty of players have racked up big tallies in seasons where their team missed finals entirely, and it reads a bit hollow in hindsight. Rokahr’s number came attached to a minor premiership and a stack of other awards from separate voting bodies. That combination is what actually makes this one stick.

Who Won the Magarey Medal 2026?

Nik Rokahr, 31, of the Norwood Football Club. That’s the short answer.

The longer answer is more interesting, though. Rokahr didn’t come out of nowhere. He’d finished runner-up in the Magarey Medal twice before  in 2022 and 2023  then dropped to fourth in 2025 on 18 votes. So there’s a “third time’s the charm” angle here, except it’s really the fourth attempt if you count all his near misses. He’d already won the WAFL’s Sand over Medal as a joint winner back in 2024 during a stint with Swan Districts, which is its own achievement. But nobody had ever managed to add a Magarey to that resume. Now he has.

He’s originally from the Shepparton Bears in country Victoria, which is worth mentioning because his path to this medal wasn’t a straight line. He joined Norwood ahead of the 2020 season, initially playing as a rebounding small defender  not exactly the position you’d predict a future Magarey Medallist to start in. He worked his way into the midfield over a few seasons, picked up two Michael Taylor Medals (Norwood’s own best-and-fairest award) along the way, had that stint at Swan Districts in the WAFL, and came back to Norwood for 2025 after waiting on a clearance. That delay meant an interrupted pre-season. This year, with a full summer of proper preparation behind him, everything clicked.

He’s now the 14th Norwood player to win a Magarey Medal, joining club names like Michael Aish, Andrew Jarman and Garry McIntosh. And he follows his own teammate  Harry Boyd won it in 2024, and the two are close friends. Two Magarey Medals at the same club in three years isn’t nothing.

Think about what that means for a second. Two teammates, on the same list, two seasons apart, both getting handed the same medal in front of the same crowd. That’s not a coincidence built on one lucky umpiring panel  that’s a midfield group that’s been the best in the competition for a couple of years running, and the votes are just catching up to what Norwood fans have probably known for a while.

It’s also worth sitting with how unlikely his early career path made this look. A kid from Shepparton, playing bush footy in country Victoria, doesn’t usually end up as a rebounding half-back flank type for an interstate SANFL club, let alone the eventual Magarey Medallist. Plenty of players get typecast in a role early and never break out of it. Rokahr spent his first couple of seasons doing exactly that  running the ball off half-back, not really the guy racking up midfield touches before the coaching staff clearly saw something more and pushed him forward into the engine room. That’s a slow-burn development story, not an overnight one.

Magarey Medal 2026 Winner and Vote Count

Thirty-eight votes. From eighteen games. Let that sink in for a second, because in a competition where votes get spread thin across ten clubs and dozens of contenders every week, that’s a serious number.

Here’s how it built. Rokahr already had 17 votes banked by the end of Round 9  a decent start, but not miles ahead of the pack. Then he caught fire. He polled votes in eight consecutive games between Rounds 12 and 19, which is the kind of stretch that decides medals. Ten of his votes across the season came from best-on-ground performances. When you’re getting maximum votes that consistently, the count basically writes itself by the back half of the season.

His actual output backs up the medal tally, too  he averaged 32 disposals, six clearances, five marks and five tackles a game. That’s genuine workhorse midfield numbers, not a guy who floats in and out of games. And it wasn’t a solo campaign for personal glory, either: Norwood finished the year as minor premiers, and Rokahr was a big part of why.

The medal wasn’t the only hardware he picked up this season. He also won the R.O. Shearman Medal (the coaches’ vote, which is a nice cross-check against the umpires’ opinion), The Advertiser’s Player of the Year award, the SANFL Now Player of the Year award, and he was named rover in The Advertiser’s SANFL Team of the Year. When four separate awards from four separate voting groups all land on the same guy, that’s not a coincidence  that’s a genuinely outstanding year, agreed on by umpires, coaches and media alike.

It’s worth pausing on why that cross-award agreement matters more than people usually give it credit for. Umpires vote purely on what they see in the moment, match after match, without knowing what anyone else is doing that round. Coaches vote with a totally different lens they’re often rating impact on structures, defensive effort, the stuff that doesn’t always show up as a flashy touch. Media awards lean toward the eye-test and the highlight reel. When a player sweeps all three, you’ve basically ruled out the possibility that one particular voting group just happened to be a fan. Nobody’s “just” the umpires’ favourite here.

And the disposal numbers back all of it up without needing any spin. Thirty-two touches a game isn’t just “a lot”  it’s the kind of number that usually means a player is either dominating uncontested ball in space, or winning it hard at stoppages and then using it well. Add in six clearances and you’re looking at someone who’s doing the unglamorous stuff  fighting at the coalface  as well as the stuff that shows up on a stat sheet at the end of the night. Five tackles a game on top of that tells you he wasn’t coasting defensively either. That’s a complete season, not a stat-padded one.

Magarey Medal 2026 Top Contenders

Rokahr’s 38 votes put real distance between him and everyone else, but the chase for second was tight enough to matter.

• Tom Lewis (Sturt) — the reigning 2025 Magarey Medallist finished runner-up in 2026 with 23 votes. Going back-to-back is brutally hard in any best-and-fairest award, so finishing second again after winning it last year is still a strong season, even if it wasn’t quite enough.
• Kobe Ryan (West Adelaide), Angus Schumacher (North Adelaide), and Ted Clohesy (Woodville-West Torrens) all tied for third with 22 votes apiece. Three different clubs, three very different playing styles, all landing on the same number  that’s the kind of coincidence that count nights are made of.

I’ll be honest: a 15-vote gap between first and second is a landslide by Magarey standards. Most years the top two or three are separated by a handful of votes, sometimes even sharing the medal outright (it’s happened plenty of times  more on that below). This year wasn’t close at the top, even if the minor places were a genuine three-way scramble.

Spare a thought for Tom Lewis, too, while we’re here. Winning a Magarey Medal is hard. Backing it up with another strong enough season to finish runner-up the very next year is arguably harder, because every opposition team spends the off-season working out how to shut you down specifically. Lewis clearly didn’t let that happen 23 votes is still a genuinely strong tally in most seasons, it’s just that this particular season had a runaway train at the top of it. If Rokahr hadn’t had the year he did, we’d probably be talking about Lewis chasing back-to-back Magareys right now.

The three-way tie for third is its own small story. Ryan, Schumacher and Clohesy come from three different clubs with three different styles of team  West Adelaide, North Adelaide and Woodville-West Torrens aren’t exactly running the same game plan. Landing on the identical number, 22, from completely different weekly matchups says something about how spread the competition was outside the very top spot. It wasn’t a two-horse race for minor placings; it was closer to a pile-up.

How the Magarey Medal Voting Works

This part trips people up if they’re used to fan-voted awards, so here’s the actual mechanic.

After every SANFL match, the three field umpires who officiated that game each independently decide who they thought was best, second-best, and third-best afield. Those three players get 3, 2, and 1 votes respectively. No panel discussion, no media influence  just the umpires’ read on the game, match by match, all season long.

Those votes get tallied up at the end of the home-and-away (minor) round  finals don’t count toward the medal, which surprises some newer fans. There’s also an eligibility rule worth knowing: a player suspended for a reportable offence during the season becomes ineligible to actually win the medal, even though they can still poll votes toward the count. It’s created some awkward count nights over the decades where the “winner” on votes wasn’t allowed to take the medal home.

Try this if you want to follow a count night properly:

• Track the leaderboard round by round, not just the final tally  momentum matters, and a slow starter who catches fire in the back half (like Rokahr this year) tells a better story than the raw number alone.
• Watch for players who get 3s consistently rather than a mix of 3s, 2s and 1s. Consistent best-afield performances compound fast.
• Keep half an eye on the coaches’ award (R.O. Shearman Medal) results too  when it lines up with the Magarey, you’ve usually found the genuine best player of the year, not just the umpires’ favourite.

Simple system. Been working since 1898 with barely any changes. There’s something almost old-fashioned about that in an era where every other award seems to get a new voting format every few years.

That eligibility rule around suspensions has actually made headlines more than once over the decades  a player polling the most votes on count night, only to be told they can’t accept the medal because of a reportable offence somewhere during the season. It’s a strange feeling for everyone in the room when it happens: the votes are read out, the tension builds, and then there’s an awkward asterisk attached to the whole result. It didn’t come into play this year, but it’s exactly the kind of detail that makes the Magarey’s voting system feel a little more human than a straightforward leaderboard. Rules exist for a reason, and sometimes they bite at the worst possible moment.

One more thing that’s easy to miss if you’ve never sat through a count night live: the votes get read out round by round, not just as a final tally. So the room genuinely doesn’t know who’s won until close to the very end. It’s part sporting result, part slow-build reveal. If you’ve only ever seen the final numbers reported the next morning, you’re missing the part where the tension actually builds — and honestly, that’s the fun bit.

Magarey Medal 2026 Voting Results

To lay it out cleanly, here’s how the top of the 2026 count finished:

1. Nik Rokahr (Norwood) — 38 votes
2. Tom Lewis (Sturt) — 23 votes
3. Kobe Ryan (West Adelaide) — 22 votes (tied)
4. Angus Schumacher (North Adelaide) — 22 votes (tied)
5. Ted Clohesy (Woodville-West Torrens) — 22 votes (tied)

Five clubs represented in the top five spots, which is a decent spread across the competition  this wasn’t a count dominated by one or two powerhouse teams. The presentation happened at SANFL’s annual gala event on Monday night, the same setting that’s crowned Magarey Medallists for decades now.

Key Highlights From the 2026 Magarey Medal

A few things worth pulling out on their own, because they’re easy to skim past in the main story:

• The Sandover-Magarey double.
  Rokahr is the first player in history to win both medals. Two separate state leagues, two separate umpiring panels, over a century of combined history between the two awards, and nobody had done it. Until now.
• Second-highest tally since the modern 3-2-1 system began.
  Only Russell Ebert’s 42 votes in 1976 sit above Rokahr’s 38. That’s fifty years of SANFL football between the two biggest individual seasons on record.
• A genuine minor-premiership contributor,
  not just a stat-stuffer on a struggling team. Norwood finished on top of the ladder, and Rokahr was central to that.
• The clean sweep of awards
  Magarey, Shearman, Advertiser Player of the Year, SANFL Now Player of the Year, Team of the Year selection. Different voters, same verdict.
• A milestone season on top of the medal
  Rokahr reached his 100th SANFL League game in Round 6 this year and now sits on 113 matches across six seasons.

I actually think the Sandover-Magarey double is the bigger story here, more than the vote count itself. Big tallies happen every decade or so. A player being the best in two different state competitions, years apart, is rarer than that.

Magarey Medal 2026: Previous Winners

Context helps here, so here’s a look back at recent Magarey Medallists before Rokahr’s win:

Notice how many of those years land in the low-to-mid twenties, and a couple end in ties. That’s the normal shape of a Magarey Medal count. Rokahr’s 38 sitting on top of that list this year isn’t just a good season  it’s an outlier season.

Look at how often the medal gets shared, too. 2024, 2021, and further back 2012, 2009, 2002  joint winners pop up regularly enough that it’s not treated as a fluke result when it happens. That’s actually one of the nicer quirks of umpire voting versus something like a media panel: when two players are genuinely inseparable across a season, the count just reflects that honestly instead of forcing an artificial split.

Zooming out even further, the record for most Magarey Medals belongs to Port Adelaide legend Russell Ebert, who won it four separate times 1971, 1974, 1976 and 1980. Seven other players share the record for three wins each, but nobody has caught Ebert’s four. He’s also the man who set the single-season vote record of 42 in 1976, the number Rokahr’s 38 now sits closest to on the all-time list. Ebert played a club-record 392 games for Port Adelaide, captained and later coached the club, and has a statue outside Adelaide Oval — he’s about as close to royalty as SANFL history gets. When commentators reach for his name on count night, they’re not doing it lightly.

There’s a neat generational thread here, too, if you like that sort of thing. Ebert’s son Brett went on to win his own Magarey Medal in 2003, decades after his father’s run. Football families and football medals tend to overlap more than you’d expect in a league with this much history behind it.

Why the Magarey Medal Matters in South Australian Football

Here’s the thing about the Magarey it’s older than the Brownlow Medal by 26 years. First awarded in 1898 to Norwood’s Alby Green, created by William Ashley Magarey, the SANFL’s inaugural chairman, who wanted to clean up rough play and give umpires more respect on the field. It’s been given out almost every single year since, missing only 1900, 1904 (no surviving record), the World War I years of 1916–18, and the restricted wartime competition of 1942–44.

For a state league medal, that’s an extraordinary run of continuity. Plenty of leagues have come and gone, rebranded, restructured. The Magarey Medal has just kept being handed out, year after year, through depressions and wars and every competition realignment the SANFL’s been through.

It matters because South Australian football has always punched above its weight relative to Victoria’s dominance of the national conversation. Guys like Russell Ebert, Malcolm Blight and Barrie Robran built legendary careers largely within SANFL, and the Magarey Medal is the trophy that measures them against each other. It’s also become a genuine stepping stone  plenty of Magarey Medallists have gone on to strong AFL careers, and plenty of AFL veterans (like Rokahr himself, coming back through the WAFL and SANFL systems) have added a Magarey to careers built elsewhere first.

Is it as nationally famous as the Brownlow? No, not even close. But ask anyone who’s actually followed SANFL for a few decades, and they’ll tell you winning a Magarey means something. It’s judged by the people who watch the closest the umpires, on the field, match after match  and that gives it a credibility that fan votes and media panels just don’t have.

There’s a local pride element too, and it’s not a small thing. South Australia has spent a long time watching its best young talent get drafted north and east to AFL clubs, sometimes never coming home. The Magarey Medal is one of the few nights of the year where South Australian football gets to be the main event rather than the feeder system. Adelaide Oval fills up, the local media covers it properly, and for one Monday night in September, SANFL isn’t in anyone’s shadow. That matters more to the people who live and breathe this competition than outsiders probably realise.

I’ll say this plainly, since I promised myself I’d share an actual opinion somewhere in here: I think medals like the Magarey are underrated compared to their AFL-level equivalents, and it’s mostly just a visibility problem, not a quality one. The football is genuinely excellent, the storylines are just as rich, and the history goes back further than almost anything at national level. It just doesn’t get the same media oxygen. That’s a shame, honestly.

Magarey Medal 2026: Latest News and Updates

As of the count night on September 7, the headline story is Rokahr’s win and the Sandover-Magarey double  that’s been the angle every SA sports outlet has run with. Norwood’s now celebrating a minor premiership and a Magarey Medallist in the same season, which is a nice double for the club heading into finals.

Expect a few follow-up stories in the coming days: club tributes from Norwood breaking down his season game by game, comparisons to Ebert’s 1976 record tally, and probably a deeper look at his journey from Shepparton through Norwood, Swan Districts, and back again. If Rokahr also has a strong finals series, don’t be surprised if the “greatest SANFL season in decades” conversation gets louder before the Grand Final.

Worth checking SANFL’s official site or Norwood FC’s news page directly if you want updates as they land  count night coverage tends to get added to and corrected over the following 24-48 hours as more detail comes through from the count itself.

There’s also a wider footy news cycle running alongside this one worth keeping an eye on if you’re following SA sport generally  the SA Football Hall of Fame recently welcomed its first female inductee among a new group of legends, which is its own significant moment for the game in this state. Different award, same broader story: South Australian football having a genuinely big week in the spotlight.

If history’s any guide, expect the “where does this rank all-time” conversation to keep building through finals. Big vote tallies tend to get reassessed once a player’s whole career is done Ebert’s 42 didn’t get talked about as “the record” the moment it happened, it became the record over decades of nobody else getting close. Rokahr’s 38 will probably get the same treatment. Right now it’s the headline. In ten years, it’ll be the number every future contender gets compared against.

FAQs

Who won the Magarey Medal 2026?
Nik Rokahr of Norwood won the 2026 Magarey Medal with 38 votes from 18 games.

How many votes did the 2026 Magarey Medal winner receive?
Rokahr polled 38 votes  the highest tally since Russell Ebert’s 42 votes in 1976.

Who were the top contenders for the Magarey Medal 2026?
Tom Lewis (Sturt) finished runner-up with 23 votes. Kobe Ryan (West Adelaide), Angus Schumacher (North Adelaide) and Ted Clohesy (Woodville-West Torrens) tied for third with 22 votes each.

What is the Magarey Medal?
It’s the award for the fairest and most brilliant player in the SANFL, South Australia’s top Australian rules football competition, voted on by field umpires and presented annually since 1898.

How does Magarey Medal voting work?
After each match, the three field umpires independently award 3, 2 and 1 votes to the players they rate best, second-best and third-best afield. Votes are added up at the end of the home-and-away season; finals don’t count.

When was the Magarey Medal 2026 awarded?
It was presented at SANFL’s count night event on Monday, September 7, 2026.

Who has won the most Magarey Medals?
Port Adelaide legend Russell Ebert holds the record with four medals, won in 1971, 1974, 1976 and 1980.

Which league awards the Magarey Medal?
The South Australian National Football League (SANFL) presents the Magarey Medal each season.

Where can I find the Magarey Medal 2026 voting results?
Full results are available through SANFL’s official website and were covered by South Australian sports media following the count night on September 7, 2026.

Who won the Magarey Medal in 2025?
Sturt’s Tom Lewis won the 2025 Magarey Medal with 33 votes.

Anyway.
Whatever happens for Rokahr in the finals, he’s already banked the kind of season SANFL fans will be comparing new contenders to for years. Ebert’s name got mentioned on count night for the first time in a while, and it wasn’t as a throwaway line — it was because someone actually got close to what he did fifty years ago.