{"id":313826,"date":"2025-11-09T16:22:30","date_gmt":"2025-11-09T06:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/?p=313826"},"modified":"2025-11-09T16:22:30","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T06:22:30","slug":"afl-expands-finals-to-top-10-teams-with-2026-wildcard-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/?p=313826","title":{"rendered":"AFL Expands Finals to Top 10 Teams with 2026 Wildcard Weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The Australian Football League will introduce a Wildcard Weekend in 2026, expanding the finals to include the top 10 teams. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Seventh-placed teams will host 10th, and eighth will face ninth in elimination games on the former pre-finals bye weekend, with winners advancing to join the top six in the final eight bracket. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Top seeds gain byes and double chances, addressing issues like the 2025 season where nine teams were eliminated six rounds early, to heighten late-season competition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Seventh-placed teams will host 10th, and eighth will face ninth in elimination games on the former pre-finals bye weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":241030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10578,35],"tags":[993],"class_list":["post-313826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-afl","category-breaking-news","tag-melbourne"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=313826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313827,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313826\/revisions\/313827"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/241030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=313826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=313826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=313826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}