The live ladder tells a clean story at the top: Fremantle first on 76 points with a league-best 142.5 per cent, Sydney second on 68. Barring the absurd, the top two is set.
Everything underneath is being decided by a system the AFL has never used before. Ten clubs make the 2026 finals, and the last weekend of the home-and-away season is really a fight over one thing — finishing sixth or better, and skipping the Wildcard Round altogether.
Why sixth is the line that matters
Under the new format, the top six get the Wildcard weekend off and walk into the finals proper fresh. Seventh through tenth have to play an extra elimination game first — 7th hosts 10th, 8th hosts 9th — and two of those four are gone before the qualifying finals are even played.
That turns the old scramble for eighth into something different. Eighth is now survivable but expensive: five straight wins to win a flag. Ninth and tenth need five straight wins away from home. Sixth needs three.
The congestion
Brisbane, Hawthorn and Melbourne are level on 60 points. Geelong and Adelaide sit on 56. Collingwood are eighth on 52, the Western Bulldogs ninth on 50, Carlton tenth on 46 after their draw.
Percentage is doing real work in the fine print: Geelong’s 120.2 leads Brisbane’s 119.5 and Hawthorn’s 117.3. A single result this weekend can move a club from a home qualifying final to a Wildcard game.
The games that decide it
Collingwood hosted Brisbane at the MCG on Friday night in a direct collision between eighth and third. Melbourne, fifth, meet the ninth-placed Bulldogs — a game with finals seeding at both ends of it.
Hawthorn travel to Perth to face West Coast, Adelaide host GWS at Adelaide Oval, and Carlton get top-of-the-table Fremantle at Marvel Stadium with their Wildcard position on the line. Gold Coast opened the round on Thursday with a 14.19 (103) to 12.8 (80) win over St Kilda at Marvel.
