analysis

The AFL’s Wildcard Round has been met with negative reviews, so why does it exist?

33 minutes agoMon 10 Nov 2025 at 1:48am

Andrew Dillon announcing the AFL’s Wildcard Round on Monday morning. (Getty Images: Michael Willson)

Say what you want about the tenure of AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon, but he has a remarkable ability to bring footy fans together and help them find common ground.

Club loyalties may once have seemed an impenetrable bias to breach, but pause today for a casual glance across the usual battlegrounds of footy opinions and you will discover a ceasefire. Peace at last — a treaty forged from one resounding consensus.

Almost nobody wants a “Wildcard Round”.

Leaked on a Sunday afternoon and confirmed over Monday morning breakfast, Dillon has come in hot with the biggest shake-up to the AFL finals in 25 years.

Gone is the top eight with its familiar stakes and mechanisms. Here — in the fine print, at least — is a top 10 masquerading as an extra “wildcard” week of knockout fixtures.

The response from the general footy fan has been nearly unanimously negative. Few can see the value in extending post-season hope to the 10th-best team in an 18-team competition, and most can see through the confected drama it will apparently provide.

The Hawks and Swans played in Opening Round in 2025. (Getty Images: Michael Willson)

Wildcard Round is Dillon’s latest calendar-extending innovation, following the equally maligned “Opening Round”, which sees the season stutter into life with a handful of games on the east coast, at the small cost of throwing off the balance of the fixture entirely.

This year, if reports are to be believed, Opening Round will feature a game between St Kilda and Collingwood at the MCG, brought about because the Magpies told the league they did not want to travel for their first game again this season.

In that case, innovation has created a spiral of unintended consequences and issues to resolve — can any club simply tell the AFL when and where it feels like travelling now? How much of an advantage is two byes in a season?

Wildcard Round is another example of that flawed principle, a problematic solution to another problem the AFL created.

The pre-finals bye has been in place for nearly a decade now, and has become begrudgingly accepted by fans as part of the calendar.

But for a league determined to own 52 weeks and 365 days of the year, that black hole in the schedule is now unacceptable. And so a fifth week of finals has been created.

All of which takes us back to the main question at hand — why is any of this happening?

Dillon told the media on Monday he wanted “more games of consequence” each season, but you could safely trim that answer in half. Simply “more games” is the objective here.

More games means more tickets sold, more eyeballs on TVs, and a greater package to offer the broadcasters. More money, effectively.

The Lions claimed their second straight premiership in 2025. (Getty Images: Darrian Traynor)

Next season, we will have State of Origin in February before Opening Round begins in early March. There will then be men’s footy every week until the end of September, before we get straight into the all-consuming trade period and the November draft.

If 2026 mirrors the years before, the AFLW season will continue through those spring months. That time slot seems to be actively harming the success of that league, but the AFL’s pursuit of omnipresence is currently outweighing a desire to make the women’s competition all it could be.

With that in mind, any publicity is good publicity for the AFL. With summer creeping in and little more than a week out from an Ashes series, the AFL has still managed to command the sporting public and media’s attention — an irony not lost during the compiling of the very words you are currently reading.

It is a slam dunk for AFL House, then. Debate and rancour in November 2025 and extra footy in September 2026 and beyond — everybody wins.

That the fans are unsettled by yet more innovation for innovation’s sake is of little consequence.

After all, they will all still turn up to watch 12th play 15th in round 22 as the heated season-long race for that coveted 10th spot captures the national imagination. Footy fans, it turns out, will still love footy no matter how bent out of shape it gets.

The sense that devotion is being exploited is palpable, though, and it would not be wise to test it too rigorously. Fans will forgive anything for the love of the game, up until the point they no longer recognise it.