AFL Tipping

A footy tipping competition for mates — pick your winners, track your form, top the ladder.

Built by someone who watches the grand final and roughly knows the teams. The technology, however, is excellent.

What is this site?

AFL Tipping is a private competition platform for Australian Rules Football fans. Each week you tip (predict) the winner of every AFL match for that round. The more correct tips you land, the higher you climb on the leaderboard.

In plain English:

You log in, you pick winners for each upcoming game.
The app locks your tips before the match starts — so you can't change your mind at the last second, you coward.
If you leave a game blank when tips lock, the away team is auto-picked for you. The system is harsh, but fair.
Scores come in, winners are calculated, the leaderboard updates itself.
You either gloat or quietly reconsider your football knowledge.

At the end of the season the player with the most points wins — eternal bragging rights, or a prize if you're organised enough to arrange one.

2026 AFL Tipping Season — by the numbers

Teams

Rounds

207

Matches

111

Played

Tippers

1020

Tips placed

What it does now

The site has grown well beyond basic tipping. It now handles live discussion, smarter notifications, finals-aware views, richer admin tooling, and a much clearer audit trail when anything gets changed behind the scenes.

Weekly tipping

Tip every match with a clean pick-your-team card UI, live round context, finals-aware labels, and automatic lockouts before bounce in Melbourne time.

Live leaderboard

Scores update automatically and the ladder stays focused on active participants only. Finals rounds, round summaries, and season-end wrap-up states are now surfaced much more clearly.

Live match and results sync

Match schedules, live states, and results are pulled automatically from the Squiggle AFL API, then fed into scoring, round views, and finals presentation throughout the season.

Smarter reminders and notifications

Forgot to tip? The system can send reminders, round digests, results, and season wrap-up notifications. Comment mentions and replies now appear live in-app without forcing a page reload.

Bragging Board and live discussion

Users can post comments, reply in threads, tag other players with @mentions, use rich text, GIFs, images, links, and keep drafts safely while the board updates in the background.

Admin controls and the Page of Truth

Admins can manage users, reminders, notification settings, and user tips. Every important tip adjustment is now surfaced through the Page of Truth audit log so changes are transparent and easy to review.

Built for phones, tablets, and laptops

The experience is responsive across mobile, tablet, and desktop, including tipping, comments, admin tools, reply flows, and live mention notifications.

Better player insight

Profiles now include season stats exports, richer personal history, and clearer round-by-round context so players can see whether they are a genius or just on a lucky streak.

Built with

Laravel 13 PHP 8.3 Bootstrap 5 Squiggle AFL API SQLite / MySQL Laravel Breeze

Built on the latest Laravel release using Eloquent ORM, Blade templating, artisan scheduling, live in-app polling for mentions and replies, audit logging, and Laravel's notification system for email and SMS delivery.

Made by Eddie

This is a personal project — something I built because I enjoy building things that people actually use. Disclaimer: This app was built by someone with a casual relationship with AFL. Think "watches the grand final and roughly knows the teams" level of enthusiasm. The technology, however, is excellent.

It's a real, fully-featured web application designed, architected, and shipped from scratch — because someone has to keep track of who's winning, and it shouldn't be you manually updating a spreadsheet.

This project demonstrates full-stack Laravel development: database design, API integration, timezone-aware scheduling, audit logging, live score syncing, in-app notifications, richer discussion tooling, admin controls, and a polished UI — all production-ready and running on a Synology NAS because why not.

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