Four Teams, Four Blueprints: What Separates the 2026 AFL Contenders

On June 25, Brisbane Lions beat Sydney at the Gabba by 43 points — Sydney’s heaviest loss of the season. A week later, they beat Geelong by 22 at GMHBA. Then Port Adelaide, then the Western Bulldogs, then Essendon by 90. Five straight wins, and a team that had spent most of May and June looking like the back-to-back had finally caught up with them was suddenly sitting fourth and climbing. The turnaround didn’t change the nature of this competition’s top tier. But it did clarify it.

With five rounds remaining, four clubs have separated themselves from the rest of the field. Fremantle are 15-2 and eight competition points clear at the top. Sydney at 13-4 have won their last four and hold the best closing-quarter record in the competition. Hawthorn sit third with a statistical profile — first in time in possession, second in total disposals, third fewest turnovers in the league¹ — that belongs in a different era of AFL football. And Brisbane, back-to-back premiers who went into July outside the top four, have won five straight. Eighth-placed Collingwood sit 22 points behind fourth. The gap is real, and it’s getting harder to bridge.

What makes the race interesting isn’t just who’s there. It’s that the four blueprints barely resemble each other.

This is, in part, a product of the game environment the 2026 season has produced. The centre bounce — a structural feature of Australian football since 1887 — was replaced by an umpire throw-up this year. Combined with five interchange players instead of a substitute and stand rules that opened up the ground, the result has been a season of historic low pressure² and wide-open scoring corridors. More space in the game doesn’t mean any one style dominates. It means a greater range of approaches can work. Hence four clubs at the top, each doing it differently.

In 2023, Fremantle ranked 14th in the AFL for points scored per game. In 2024, 10th. In 2025, 9th. Through Round 19 of 2026, they sit around seventh and have hit triple figures in more than eleven games — a total that exceeded their full-season output in each of the previous three years.³ The improvement is real and it’s been measurable at every step. But the jump from the 2025 season to 2026 is the sharpest, and the reason is specific: the forward line of Jye Amiss, Josh Treacy and Patrick Voss.

Amiss marks and leads cleanly on the goal line. Treacy wins contested ball at the top of the square. Voss provides the emotional charge and the goal-sense. The combination is what Justin Longmuir has been building toward for three seasons, and the 2026 version of Fremantle is the first to have all three components working simultaneously. Caleb Serong and Andrew Brayshaw provide what is arguably the cleanest midfield pair in the competition. Luke Ryan and Alex Pearce anchor a defence that rarely concedes in chunks.

Their two losses tell you almost as much as their fifteen wins. The first came on March 14, when Geelong beat them 16.14 (110) to 14.16 (100) at GMHBA — Fremantle’s opening game of the season, 10 points, away from home. The second came on July 4, when GWS won 16.13 (109) to 13.10 (88) at Manuka Oval, a ground that holds fewer than twelve thousand people, against an opponent sitting eleventh on the ladder.⁴ Both losses came away from Optus Stadium, both came against lower-ranked opponents, and neither hinted at a structural problem within the team. What followed the GWS loss made that even clearer: Fremantle hosted Sydney the following week on July 9 and won 15.21 (111) to 10.13 (73), a 38-point statement against the second-placed team at the first time of asking between the competition’s top two clubs.

“We’re not our best version yet,” Longmuir said after the 124-point demolition of North Melbourne in June. “There’s still improvement in the group.” They’re 15-2 and eight points clear. It is a genuinely frightening sentence.

Sydney’s four losses this season came against Geelong (a 27-point defeat on May 23, when Geelong were fourth), Brisbane (a 43-point beating at the Gabba on June 25), Brisbane again, and Fremantle (38 points at Optus Stadium on July 9, the head-to-head between the top two clubs). The calibre of those opponents is defensible. The margins are harder to explain away.

When physical teams play through them and build double-digit leads before the last quarter, the Swans have struggled to recover. That’s not a new observation — it was a feature of the teams that came close to a premiership in recent years too — but the 2026 version of it is more pronounced. The 43-point loss to Brisbane and the 38-point loss to Fremantle weren’t close games that got away. They were dismantlings.

What the Swans do have is a closing-quarter record that makes them dangerous in almost any other context. Dean Cox redesigned Sydney’s offensive patterns in the preseason after the club missed finals in 2025 for only the third time in sixteen years — and those adjustments are visible when the Swans are chasing games in the last quarter rather than defending them. Isaac Heeney has been their most consistent performer; Charlie Curnow, signed from Carlton before the season, has provided the aerial forward presence Sydney lacked in their near-miss years; Jake Lloyd at 285 games remains the experienced closer under pressure. At 13-4 with ten wins from their last thirteen games at the SCG, they’ll have home finals. The question is whether they can win the kind of game they couldn’t win against Brisbane or Fremantle.

Hawthorn’s statistical profile is the most distinctive in the competition. First for time in possession. Second in total disposals. Second in total marks. Third fewest turnovers. On Easter Monday they beat Geelong by a point in the best individual contest of the season. They’ve beaten Sydney, Brisbane, and the Western Bulldogs in 2026. Sam Mitchell has built exactly the team he said he would build: a high-possession, uncontested, intercept-defending team that wins by controlling the ball and forcing the opposition into turnovers. The model is coherent and it is working.

The Melbourne problem is substantial enough to warrant its own analysis. On May 16, Melbourne beat Hawthorn 18.12 (120) to 12.9 (81) at the MCG — 39 points. On July 4, Melbourne beat them 19.11 (125) to 14.6 (90) at York Park in Tasmania — 35 points. Both games followed an identical structure: Melbourne won the contested ball, won the clearances, and Hawthorn’s possession-based system had no counter. Melbourne currently sit sixth. A September meeting between these two clubs is not remote.

Hawthorn beat Carlton by 64 points on July 11 — a performance that showed their identity doesn’t waver after a loss. Will Day has been working toward full fitness; a healthy Day shifts the contested-ball equation in Hawthorn’s favour. Tom Barrass and James Sicily remain the competition’s best intercept-marking pair. The system is genuinely good. The unresolved question is whether it’s good enough against the one team that has consistently found its weakness.

Brisbane won the 2024 premiership. They won the 2025 premiership. Then they spent most of May and June looking like the back-to-back had finally taken something from the group — consecutive losses, diminished pressure numbers, an inability to execute the territorial game that had defined their two-flag run. They went into July ranked outside the top four.

The five-game winning streak that followed offers a specific kind of evidence about this team. It wasn’t a run built against soft opposition. Brisbane beat the second-placed Sydney by 43, beat a Geelong side that had been sitting fourth by 22, and then dismantled Essendon by 90 points. Will Ashcroft, Cam Rayner, Lincoln McCarthy and Charlie Cameron operating at close to their collective best. The question was never whether Brisbane had the talent — they have two flags’ worth of proof on that — but whether the hunger was still there. Five wins from five suggests it is.

They sit fourth on 44 points, three points behind Hawthorn, and will likely need a top-four finish to secure a home final and the double chance. Chris Fagan has coached more finals games than any other current AFL coach. His list has been in September two years running. That’s a different kind of asset than anything the statistical profile captures — and it’s an asset the Lions carry into the last five rounds of the home-and-away season at a time when the competition is tightening exactly as you’d want it to.

The Four Blueprints, Side by Side

Fremantle win through their forward line. Sydney win through midfield culture and late execution. Hawthorn win through possession control and defensive intercepts. Brisbane win through physical experience and the composure that comes from winning flags. These four approaches share almost nothing in common — and all four have led their respective clubs to separation from the rest of the competition at the same moment in the same season.

Source: AFL Tables, through Round 19, July 12, 2026. Last 5 games excludes byes.

Which Blueprint Wins in September?

The conventional wisdom in Australian football is that September rewards contested ball above everything else — that when the surface is heavy, the crowd is loud and the margin is tight in the last quarter, the team that physically outworks the opponent wins. The 2026 game environment challenges that assumption. Lower pressure, more space and an extended interchange bench have created conditions where kicking efficiency and forward-line execution matter more than they have in years. That’s a surface that favours Fremantle and Hawthorn on paper.

But it’s worth noting what history actually says about teams in Fremantle’s position. St Kilda were 13-0 in 2009 and lost the Grand Final replay to Geelong. Collingwood were 12-1 in 2011 and also lost the Grand Final to Geelong. The salary-cap era is not kind to dominant regular seasons; depth of squad and exposure to close finals-quality games matters at least as much as regular-season record. The difference with Fremantle is that their two losses both came away from home, against opponents outside the top four, and by margins that never suggested a structural ceiling — not a team being found out, but a team having a bad day in difficult conditions. That profile is meaningfully different from the dominant regular-season teams that have historically collapsed in September.

The data points toward Fremantle as the most likely flag winner. Their scoring efficiency, their clean midfield pair, their five-dimensional profile without an obvious weakness, and a home-final path that avoids the SCG and the MCG all point in the same direction. But each of the other three blueprints has a realistic path to September. Hawthorn if Will Day returns fully fit and they avoid Melbourne. Sydney if those heavy losses were anomalies rather than a ceiling. Brisbane if five straight isn’t a hot streak but the back-to-back premiers simply remembering who they are. The data has a favourite. The competition has three legitimate challengers. That’s what the next five rounds are for.