AFL to expand finals with wildcard round revealed for 2026 season

The AFL is moving to a 10-team finals series, with a wildcard round to be introduced for the 2026 season.

The change will see 9th and 10th qualify for the post-season.

Two additional elimination finals, 7th vs 10th and 8th vs 9th, will be played during the current pre-finals bye week to determine who makes the traditional top eight.

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The top six teams would have a bye before the normal schedule resumes with a typical round of qualifying and elimination finals played.

Teams will be re-seeded after the wildcard round meaning the highest-ranked winner will assume 7th place, while the lowest-ranked winner will assume 8th place.

A team finishing 7th – as the Western Bulldogs did in 2016 – will now have to win five finals to claim the premiership. In contrast a team finishing 4th would only need three wins at a minimum.

“We’re thrilled to deliver fans an extra weekend of finals footy, while giving more clubs

and players the opportunity to play finals footy and win a Premiership,” AFL CEO Andrew Dillon said.

“The Wildcard Finals Round reflects our ongoing commitment to evolve our competition

structure building on recent additions like Gather Round and AFL Origin, ensuring our

game continues to grow.

“This also means that all teams who finish in the top eight of ten will host a home final,

giving fans a chance to see their club play at home in September.”

The decision comes after a unique 2025 season where a top-heavy ladder effectively meant just nine teams were in the final race with six rounds remaining.

Since the AFL went to 18 teams, the average 10th-placed team won just under half of its games (11.4 wins and 11.5 losses – stats pro-rated for a 23-game season).

It was widely expected the AFL would expand the finals series at some point with the looming introduction of the 19th team, Tasmania, for the 2028 season.

The VFL has held a wildcard round since 2023, due to having 21 teams, with the highest-ranked wildcard winner becoming 7th and the lowest-ranked winner slotting into 8th.

Just once has a wildcard winner won its elimination final the next week (Williamstown in 2024), suggesting the bye week for the 5th and 6th-placed teams has an impact. Meanwhile in both 2024 and 2025, the 10th-placed team won its wildcard final before being well beaten the next week.

Whether these wildcard games are classified as finals or something else, the change means in reality, over half of the AFL teams will qualify for the finals.

That has happened before, however. The top eight was introduced in 1994, when the league had 15 teams, before Fremantle became the 16th side.

The finals format has been relatively consistent since then, with only the bracket itself tweaked 2000 to what we know today.

This was due to issues with the McIntyre Final Eight – an odd system which saw week one match-ups such as 1st vs 8th, and a setup where some teams would not know if they were eliminated until other games were played.

Under the new top-10 AFL finals format, the teams who finish 7th and 8th will get an additional home final but will be much less likely to win the flag, given they’ll need to win five straight games.

This past season Hawthorn made a preliminary final from 8th, beating GWS (5th) and Adelaide (1st) on the road, but they would’ve needed to first beat the 9th-placed Western Bulldogs if the wildcard round was used in 2025.

The other wildcard final would’ve seen Sydney, who finished 10th with 12 wins (three wins out of the eight, and three wins ahead of 11th) travelling to face 7th-placed Gold Coast.

A top-10 finals system was used by the NRL for one year, in its inaugural 1998 season after the Super League war. The team that finished ninth on the ladder, the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs, made the Grand Final.

The 2026 fixture is expected to be announced late this week.