Wild card (sports)

• 1. Introduction

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  Wild card is the name given to a tournament invitation or playoff berth awarded to a team or individual that could not earn one through direct qualification. The idea sounds simple enough. But the wild card has quietly reshaped the postseason landscape of nearly every major sport on earth, from the Super Bowl to Wimbledon to Olympic judo.

  How did a format that once had no official name become the backbone of playoff sport? Who first put it in writing, and why? And what happens when the team that snuck in through the back door ends up winning the whole thing?

• 2. The NFL Invents the Format

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  The National Football League was the first sports league to use the wild card format. The decision came in 1970, tied directly to the completion of the AFL-NFL merger. Before that point, only division or conference champions had any right to compete for a league title.

  The AFL's final season, 1969, had already pointed toward change. After the New York Jets' upset win in Super Bowl III, critics argued the Jets had an unfair advantage because they were the only team in the entire professional game that season with a bye in the divisional round. The Western Division title in the AFL had been settled by a tiebreaker game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Oakland Raiders, played the same weekend as the NFL's divisional round. The AFL agreed to address this and expanded its 1969 playoffs to include division runners-up, who played cross-division in the semifinals.

  The Chiefs, despite finishing as AFL West runners-up, went on to win Super Bowl IV by defeating the Minnesota Vikings. That outcome underscored both the potential and the controversy of the format.

  When the merged league launched in 1970 with two conferences of thirteen teams each, the sheer arithmetic of alignment forced a reckoning. Three divisions per conference meant the playoff field could not logically consist of only division champions without risking the kind of absurdity that had happened in 1967, when the Baltimore Colts missed the postseason with a .917 winning percentage after losing a tiebreaker to the Los Angeles Rams. Most owners wanted a four-team playoff field in each conference. The solution was to pair the three division champions in each conference with the best second-place finisher.

  Initially, the league did not call this team a wild card at all. The term used was the "Best Second-Place Team" or simply the "Fourth Qualifier." The media began calling it a wild card, and the NFL eventually adopted that label officially.

• 3. How the NFL Format Evolved

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  From 1970 to 1974, the NFL used a rotation to determine which teams hosted playoff games rather than rewarding teams based on record. That principle, now considered standard, had not yet been firmly established; tradition at the time dictated that home field advantage rotate between divisions and conferences regardless of how a team had performed.

  The number of wild card qualifiers expanded to two per conference in 1978. Division winners were granted a bye week, while the two wild card teams played each other, with the higher-seeded wild card hosting. The phrase "wild card round" entered the sporting vocabulary during this era.

  Three wild cards per conference arrived in 1990, which also brought a notable structural change: the lowest-ranked division winner lost its bye but gained the right to host a playoff game. Then in 2002, following the addition of the Houston Texans and the creation of a fourth division per conference, the number of wild cards was reduced back to two. In 2020 the league returned to three wild cards per conference, bringing the total playoff field to fourteen teams.

  Seven wild card teams have won the Super Bowl: the 1980 Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XV, the 1997 Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXXII, the 2000 Baltimore Ravens in Super Bowl XXXV, the 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XL, the 2007 New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII, the 2010 Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XLV, and the 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Super Bowl LV. The 1980 Raiders, the 2005 Steelers, and the 1992 Buffalo Bills each tied for first in their division but lost a tiebreaker, arriving at the wild card slot through no fault of their overall record.

  As of the 2021-22 playoffs, no wild card team had ever faced another wild card team in the Super Bowl. The closest the postseason came to that outcome was in 2010-11, when the Green Bay Packers and New York Jets each entered as the second wild card team in their respective conferences. The Packers won the NFC Championship and then the Super Bowl, while the Jets' run ended with a one-score loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Championship Game.

• 4. Baseball's Wild Card Path

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  Major League Baseball instituted the wild card in 1994, though a labor dispute meant it was not actually used until 1995. The trigger was a reorganization of both leagues into three divisions each. With three division winners per league, a single wild card team per league joined them in the Division Series.

  The system was modified in 2012 to add a second wild card team per league. The two wild card clubs in each league met in a single-game play-in, the MLB Wild Card Game, with the winner advancing to face the division winner with the best record. That format was revised again when a third wild card per league was added and the play-in was replaced by a pair of three-game series in each league. Under the current setup, the division winner with the worst record in each league joins the wild card round, while the other two division winners receive a bye.

  Eight wild card teams have won the World Series: the 1997 Florida Marlins, the 2002 Anaheim Angels, the 2003 Florida Marlins, the 2004 Boston Red Sox, the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals, the 2014 San Francisco Giants, the 2019 Washington Nationals, and the 2023 Texas Rangers. The 2000 New York Mets, the 2002 San Francisco Giants, the 2005 Houston Astros, the 2006 Detroit Tigers, the 2007 Colorado Rockies, the 2014 Kansas City Royals, the 2022 Philadelphia Phillies, and the 2023 Arizona Diamondbacks each reached the World Series as wild cards without winning it.

• 5. Tennis and the Individual Wild Card

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  In professional tennis, a wild card means something more personal than a bracket slot. It is a direct invitation to a specific player at the discretion of tournament organizers. Every ATP and WTA tournament sets aside wild card spots in both the main draw and the qualifying draw for players who would not otherwise gain entry through their professional ranking.

  Organizers typically use those spots to invite local players, promising young talents, players with crowd appeal, or former champions returning from injury. High-ranked players can also request a wild card to enter a non-mandatory event after the regular entry deadline has passed, for instance after an early exit from another tournament. This means a wild card entrant can sometimes arrive seeded higher than the field.

  The most dramatic example in tennis history came in 2001, when Goran Ivanisevic won the Wimbledon Men's Singles title after the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club granted him a wild card. Ranked world No. 125 at the time due to a shoulder injury, he had previously reached the Wimbledon final three times without winning. Kim Clijsters won the 2009 US Open on a wild card after having retired in 2007 to start a family. She was a former champion and former world No. 1 but was unranked because she had only played two other tournaments since her comeback, and three tournaments were required to generate a ranking. In 2019, a fifteen-year-old Coco Gauff received a wild card to the Wimbledon qualifying event and advanced to the last sixteen of the main draw. That same year, Canadian teenager Bianca Andreescu became the first wild card winner at Indian Wells.

  The Grand Slam tournaments have a cross-pollination arrangement of their own. The organizers of three of the four Grand Slams, the Australian Open, the French Open, and the US Open, each grant one wild card nomination to each of the other two. Christopher Clarey described this practice as "nothing more than mutual back scratching" and "an outdated symbol of elitism."

• 6. Olympic and International Sport

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  At the Summer Olympic Games, some National Olympic Committees whose countries are underrepresented after qualifying can receive wild card quotas. The Olympic term for these is Universality Places. In track and field and swimming at Olympic and World Championship level, nations are automatically allowed to enter two competitors, which technically puts those entries outside the wild card definition. In sports such as judo, archery, and badminton, the respective international federations administer true wild card entries.

  Wild card victories at the Olympic level are rare but on record. Kye Sun-Hui won gold in judo at the 1996 Summer Olympics as a wild card entrant. Lin Dan won the 2013 BWF World Championships in badminton after entering on a wild card.

  Sometimes wild card places at the Olympics serve a purpose beyond sport. North Korean athletes participated in the 2018 Winter Olympics largely because wild card spots were offered to ease political tension, with most of those athletes not meeting the standard qualification criteria. Equatorial Guinea swimmer Eric Moussambani, who entered the 100-metre event at the 2000 Summer Olympics on a wild card and finished last, became one of the more memorable figures from those Games precisely because the wild card system gave him a stage no standard qualification path would have provided.

• 7. Wildcards Across Other Sports

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  Curling Canada introduced wild card teams at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts and Tim Hortons Brier starting in 2018 as part of a broader expansion to seventeen-team fields. The wild cards are the top two teams in the Canadian Team Ranking System standings that did not win the previous year's tournament or their provincial or territorial championship. Those two teams meet in an MLB-style play-in game before the main tournament to determine the sixteenth entrant. Beginning in 2024, wild card teams at these events lost the "Wild Card" designation and gained the right to represent their member associations on the same basis as any other team.

  In road cycling, a wild card is an invitation extended to a team that would not normally qualify for a top-division race. For the 2022 Tour de France, organizers awarded two wild cards to French teams, Team TotalEnergies and B&B Hotels-KTM, both of which were UCI ProTeams rather than UCI World Tour teams. In January 2015, Team MTN-Qhubeka from South Africa accepted a wild card to participate in the Tour de France, making them the first African team to receive such an invitation.

  In motorcycle racing, wildcards most often appear as one-off entries for local riders competing at their home round of a championship series. Daijiro Kato entered the Japanese 250cc Grand Prix as a wildcard in 1996 and finished third. He returned in 1997 and 1998 to win back-to-back, and went on to become the 250cc World Champion in 2001. In Motorcycle Speedway, six wildcards have won a Grand Prix: Mark Loram in 1999, Martin Dugard in 2000, Hans Andersen in 2006, Michael Jepsen Jensen in 2012, Adrian Miedzynski in 2013, and Bartosz Zmarzlik in 2014.

  In the UEFA European Championship, the format used since the 2016 edition has six groups of four teams with the four best third-placed teams advancing as wild cards to the knockout round. Starting from the 2026 FIFA World Cup, eight wild card teams will qualify for the knockout round from twelve groups of four.