AFL's Finals Just Got Longer — Here's What the New 5-Week Format Actually Means for Overseas Fans

September 11, 2026

If you've followed AFL finals in past years and the calendar feels like it's dragging on longer than usual this year, that's not in your head. For 2026, the AFL expanded its finals series from the traditional 4 weeks and 8 teams to a genuinely new 5-week series featuring the top 10 clubs — the first time this format has ever been used. If you're following the finals from outside Australia and trying to work out when the season actually finishes, that change matters more than it might seem.

The real, practical effect: an extra week of finals means an extra week of games landing at unfamiliar hours for anyone overseas, and a genuinely later end to the season than in previous years — the Grand Final now falls on September 26, later than AFL fans outside Australia may be used to.

This week's real fixture is a good, concrete example of how the new format plays out. Fremantle — this year's minor premier, after finishing the home-and-away season on top of the ladder — hosts Geelong in a semi-final on Friday, September 11, at 7:10pm AWST at Optus Stadium in Perth. For a fan in the UK, that lands at a very civilized 12:10pm — an easy lunchtime watch. For someone in the US Eastern time zone, it's a 7:10am start — early, but genuinely doable before the workday if you know it's coming.

That last part is the real point. The new, longer format means more of these real, one-off finals fixtures, each with their own venue and kickoff time decided only once the previous week's results are known — genuinely harder to track by memory than a fixed, months-in-advance regular season schedule.

SportzCal handles the finals series the same way it handles the rest of the season — real fixture data, converted to your own timezone, with Always Current subscribers getting each new finals matchup added to their calendar automatically as it's confirmed. With an extra week of finals this year, that's genuinely one more week of not needing to work out Perth or Melbourne kickoff times by hand.

Get your team's finals fixtures converted to your timezone for $2.99 as a one-off, or subscribe to Always Current for $19.99 a year and let the rest of this extended finals series take care of itself.