AFL Wildcard Round: 52 Sides Have Started the Finals From 7th or 8th Since 2000, and One Won the Flag
Two new games, four more clubs, eleven finals where there were nine. It is a genuinely new door — and the record of every league that has ever cut one, the AFL's own included, is remarkably consistent about what sits on the other side of it. Only the 2016 Western Bulldogs have ever come through this deep and finished the year holding the cup.
Wildcard means the strict thing: a club that reached the play-offs without winning its own division or conference bracket. The tallies run to the end of each league's most recent completed season — the NFL from 1970 (the 1982 strike tournament, which had no divisions, is left out), MLB from 1995, the NHL under its current format from 2014, MLS under its current format from 2023. The AFL figures are the final-eight era, 2000 to 2025. The wildcard round's own rules are the AFL's own, as announced.
The read
The four clubs are Melbourne, seventh; the Western Bulldogs, eighth; Collingwood, ninth; and Carlton, tenth. The Bulldogs meet Collingwood on Friday night and Melbourne meet Carlton on Saturday, both at the MCG. Two of the four join the top six as the seventh and eighth seeds. The other two are done for the year.
There is a version of this story that is just a shrug — nine finals became eleven, good luck to whoever gets one. There is a better one, and it starts with the fact that the AFL is not doing anything new here. It is doing something four other leagues have already done four hundred times over, and something it has quietly been doing itself for twenty-six years.
Take every club that has gone into the play-offs in the NFL, MLB, NHL or MLS without topping its own division or bracket. Four hundred of them. Twenty-nine got as far as the last game of the year. Fifteen won it. That is one champion for every twenty-seven clubs that came in through the side door — and the side door has been open in the NFL since 1970.
| League | Period | Wildcard teams | Reached the decider | Won it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NFL | 1970–2025 | 240 | 11 · 4.6% | 7 · 2.9% |
| MLB | 1995–2025 | 104 | 16 · 15.4% | 8 · 7.7% |
| NHL | 2014–2026 | 44 | 2 · 4.5% | 0 |
| MLS | 2023–2025 | 12 | 0 | 0 |
| All four | — | 400 | 29 · 7.3% | 15 · 3.8% |
| AFL · 7th or 8th | 2000–2025 | 52 | 1 · 1.9% | 1 · 1.9% |
Why baseball is not the number to hold onto
More than half of those fifteen titles belong to baseball, and baseball is the only reason the average sits as high as it does. The explanation is not that baseball's wildcards are better teams. It is that baseball is the sport where the best side in the league still loses sixty games a year, so across three hours in October the distance between first and ninth is the shortest distance in professional sport. Australian football does not work like that. The best sides here win most weeks, and they win them clearly.
The NFL number is the one that will get quoted, and it deserves to be quoted properly. An NFL wildcard is not a modest team. The 1997 Broncos won twelve games and the 1999 Titans won thirteen — they are wildcards because the league is cut into four-team divisions and somebody has to finish behind an elite neighbour. The AFL has no neighbour to finish behind. One ladder, eighteen clubs, and a side that ends the year 9th is the ninth-best team on the evidence of the whole season. The American percentages are the friendliest figures on the board, and the team they are describing is a stronger animal than the one a wildcard round lets in.
Since the final eight came in for the 2000 season, fifty-two clubs have started the finals from 7th or 8th. One of them won the flag.AFL · 2000–2025
What the Bulldogs actually proved
The 2016 Western Bulldogs were the first side in VFL/AFL history to win a premiership from seventh, and they are still the only one. Eighth has not produced a Grand Finalist in twenty-six years. Ninth and tenth have never had the chance to try.
And the Bulldogs are worth reading properly, because they get cited as proof that a low seed can win it when they are proof of something far more useful. That was not a modest team that got hot. It was a side that won fifteen games, finished seventh in a tight year, and then beat clubs above it four weekends running — in Perth, at the MCG, in Sydney, and back at the MCG on the last day. What 2016 shows is not that seventh can win it. It is what a club already has to be, in August, for seventh to mean anything at all in September.
Five weeks, five wins
Then there is the arithmetic the new round quietly adds. The road from the wildcard round to the last Saturday in September runs five games: the wildcard, an elimination final, a semi-final, a preliminary final, and the Grand Final. Nobody has ever had to win five. The deepest run the competition has ever seen was four, and it took a side that had already won fifteen games to make it.
Our fans love finals games.Andrew Dillon, AFL chief executive, on why the wildcard round exists
None of which is an argument against it, and the AFL has never claimed otherwise — the pitch was finals football for more supporters, not a shortcut to the cup. Measured against that, the four hundred read as a good news story rather than a caution. Fifteen of them won a title. All four hundred got a season that did not end in August, and that is the thing the wildcard round is actually handing over: four clubs a year who spend the winter doing the numbers now get one more week where the sums still matter.
The record does not say the door is welded shut. It says know what kind of door it is. Fifty-two clubs have found the room on the other side of it. One of them found the cup.