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Sport Nation
Rewarding mediocrity: Wildcard round, what next?
Mark Duffield • November 10th, 2025 7:00 pm
So we are going to have a wild card round in the AFL in 2026 as the AFL searches for ways to keep more teams involved deeper into the AFL season.
Is this a way to add interest and intrigue to the AFL season? Or is this just rewarding mediocrity. It certainly is the latter – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it shouldn’t be done.
We may not call them finals – but the two wildcard games played – 7th v 10th and 8th v 9th will effectively be finals – just as Fremantle’s Round 24 clash with the Western Bulldogs at Marvel Stadium this year was effectively a final.
So what are the pros – they are pretty obvious – you get at least two extra marquee games and you probably get more than that because in many years it will bring 11th, 12th or even 13th into the reckoning for the big games to be played at the end of August and into September.
That certainly won’t hurt the value of the broadcast rights – it gives more teams hope.
Until this announcement we didn’t think West Coast were likely to play finals before the 2027 season or even 2028 – could something like this – maybe a 10 or 11 win season – scrape them into 10th place and a spot in a wildcard game?
And could that in turn give their fans hope and perhaps even more significantly their players hope? Could playing in a wildcard game convince players like Harley Reid and the expected to be drafted Willem Duursma to stay put rather than looking towards their homes back east?
So there are a few boxes that get ticked by this.
From a selfish WA perspective it increases the chance of games – and big games being played at our stadium which helps the stadium economy – helps to justify WA Footy getting a cut of the money generated by footy at the stadium and we think that cut could be a sum as big as $14 million a year as of next year.
I get all of that and all of those things are legitimate pluses that this creates but if you asked me after hearing this what my first thought is – my first thought is that I don’t like it.
It feels like rewarding mediocrity – 10 of the 18 teams get to play in the business end of the season. What next? Do 11th and 12th and their fans get elephant stamps, free tickets in the chook raffle?
And it also feels like it might be a way of deflecting attention away from the real structural integrity issues facing the AFL – that their draw remains unequal and that can blur the true performance of clubs within a season – sometimes it can even determine the top eight. And that their draft doesn’t really work any more because of the glut of academy picks topped off by father-sons.
The noise from some clubs about the competitive advantages gifted to the northern states has been increasing – does the AFL think it can shut them up by increasing the chances of clubs playing in some form of play off footy?
Teams that find themselves down the bottom are staying their for longer. Teams that find themselves at the top are staying there for longer too as the AFL has diluted its draft concessions given to struggling clubs.
West Coast and North Melbourne look anchored to the bottom. Meanwhile Brisbane has played in the last three grand finals, Geelong have played in two of the last four. There were no triple premiership dynasties in the 1990s. There were just the Brisbane Lions in the decade after the turn of the century. There were two triple premiership dynasties in the teens and who would bet against Brisbane winning again next year?
