Greedy wildcard weekend won’t solve the real problem facing AFL
Wildcard weekend is officially coming, but don’t get it twisted, this isn’t about helping the game or the mid-tier clubs, and it’s about to make September way more predictable. HAVE YOUR SAY
It’s the curse of the digital generation - the need to feel entertained every single waking moment of the day.
That impatience, together with financial greed, is why AFL fans will have a wildcard round thrust upon them next year.
It’s not a good move for the game.
It’s not going to help the teams that finish seventh and eighth on the ladder after a marathon 24 home-and-away rounds.
Good luck to the winners of the wildcard games against teams that will clearly be fresher for week one of the finals.
The introduction of the pre-finals bye in 2016 made it an eight-team race for the flag in September. The pre-finals bye might have hurt the top four teams’ chances, but it lifted the intensity of the premiership race to its highest level in history as teams from fifth to eighth used the break to gather themselves for a four-week, all-out assault.
The AFL has just reduced that to a six-team contest with the introduction of the wildcard round.
Forget about the drama of the Western Bulldogs winning the premiership from seventh in 2016 or Hawthorn making a stirring run from eighth to the preliminary final this year. That just won’t happen anymore.
The pre-finals bye boosted September. A week off to freshen the game’s best players for the biggest games of the year.
And the week off for fans only fuelled our hunger for finals. This September was full-house after full-house around the country as more than 500,000 people attended the first three weeks of the finals.
But the AFL says we must have more and the TV rights holders will love that. Money, money, money.
The league would do well to remember that more does not always equate to better.
The NRL had its best season in years in 2025 and it seems the AFL has panicked. It’s jumping at the sizeable shadow thrown by Peter V’landys. The rugby league supremo spooks the AFL like halloween a thousand times over.
It’s disturbing the AFL feels so insecure when it still has the best product in the land.
If the AFL feels it has to “do something” to combat the NRL, it should be doing more to lessen the divide between its best and worst clubs rather than pull an end-of-August gimmick out of its hat.
If the league really wants to get to the root of its problems it is looking in the wrong direction.
Instead of dangling a carrot to teams in the lower reaches of the ladder to finish ninth or 10th and qualify for the wildcard round, league headquarters should be fixing its supposed equalisation measures which are not only failing, they are causing bigger problems.
The national draft in its current state does not help battling clubs enough and free agency rules are widening the gap between the best and the rest at a phenomenal rate.
Over the past two seasons the bottom three teams on the ladder have won a combined 21.5 games. It’s a pitiful total. And that’s with the introduction of a 23rd home-and-away game in 2023!
Since the final eight started in 1994, only the birth of new franchises Gold Coast (2011) and Greater Western Sydney (2012) helped produce a two-year period of such poor performance among the bottom three.
The teams near the bottom of the ladder are far too uncompetitive and are stuck in such ruts for far too long.
It’s a blight on the game that North Melbourne can wallow in the bottom three in each of the past six seasons and register just 20 wins and two draws across that period.
West Coast is following a similarly woeful path with just 11 wins from its past four seasons.
If you don’t think such disparity needs fixing, just remember that West Coast’s captain, Oscar Allen, left the Eagles last month at age 26 and after 105 games to join the Brisbane Lions.
The vehicle that helped land him at the premier team of the past two seasons - free agency.
- Jamie Tate is the Herald Sun Weekend Sports Editor
Originally published as Greedy wildcard weekend won’t solve the real problem facing AFL
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