Victorian AFL Clubs: Every Club and What Defines It
A guide to the ten Victorian AFL clubs, with founding years, home grounds, colours and premiership counts, plus the clubs Victoria lost along the way.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Clubs & rivalries20 min read
- Victorian clubs
- Ten of the eighteen AFL clubs
- Oldest club
- Melbourne formed in 1858
- Foundation members remaining
- Six of the eight 1897 foundation clubs are still Victorian
- Most premierships
- Carlton Collingwood and Essendon on sixteen each
- Longest active drought
- St Kilda since 1966
- Only club outside Melbourne
- Geelong at GMHBA Stadium in South Geelong
- Largest membership
- Collingwood with 112068 members in 2025
- Premierships to Victorian clubs
- 104 of the 129 decided between 1897 and 2025
Ten of the eighteen AFL clubs are Victorian, and nine of those ten are Melbourne clubs. That single fact explains more about the competition than any rule in the book. The Victorian AFL clubs were the whole league until 1982, they still supply the majority of its members and the majority of its premierships, and they share two stadiums between them in a way no other football competition in the world attempts.
The ten are Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Geelong, Hawthorn, Melbourne, North Melbourne, Richmond, St Kilda and the Western Bulldogs. Six of them were in the room in 1897 when eight clubs broke away from the Victorian Football Association to form the VFL. Between them the current Victorian clubs have won 104 of the 129 premierships decided between 1897 and 2025. Three of them, Carlton, Collingwood and Essendon, sit level on sixteen each.
What follows is each club in turn, with the founding year, the ground, the colours and the honour board, but also the thing that actually defines it: the suburb it came from, the crisis it survived, or the decade it owned. There is also the other half of the story, the three Victorian clubs that are no longer in the competition, because you cannot read a Melbourne honour board without them.
The ten Victorian clubs at a glance
| Club | Founded | Joined VFL/AFL | Main home ground | Colours | Premierships to 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Melbourne | 1858 | 1897 | Melbourne Cricket Ground | Navy blue and red | 13 |
| Geelong | 1859 | 1897 | GMHBA Stadium, South Geelong | Navy blue and white hoops | 10 |
| Carlton | 1864 | 1897 | MCG and Marvel Stadium | Navy blue with white monogram | 16 |
| North Melbourne | 1869 | 1925 | Marvel Stadium | Royal blue and white stripes | 4 |
| Essendon | 1872 | 1897 | Marvel Stadium and the MCG | Black with a red sash | 16 |
| St Kilda | 1873 | 1897 | Marvel Stadium | Red, white and black | 1 |
| Western Bulldogs | 1877 | 1925 | Marvel Stadium | Red, white and blue hoops | 2 |
| Richmond | 1885 | 1908 | Melbourne Cricket Ground | Black with a yellow sash | 13 |
| Collingwood | 1892 | 1897 | Melbourne Cricket Ground | Black and white vertical stripes | 16 |
| Hawthorn | 1902 | 1925 | Melbourne Cricket Ground | Brown and gold vertical stripes | 13 |
Two things stand out from that table. The first is the compression of founding dates: seven of the ten clubs existed before 1880, in a city that had barely been settled for forty years. The second is the spread of premierships, from sixteen down to one, which is wider than the equivalent spread in any other Australian competition.
Why Victoria still holds more than half the competition
The AFL became national in name in 1990, but the club list did not change to match. The league added five clubs from other states between 1987 and 1997 and two more in 2011 and 2012, and it subtracted only two Victorian clubs in that whole period, one by relocation and one by merger. The result is a competition with ten clubs in a state of about seven million people and eight clubs spread across the rest of the country.
That imbalance is not an accident of neglect. Every attempt to reduce it has run into the same wall, which is that Victorian clubs are member organisations with large, old and organised supporter bases. When the VFL tried to move Footscray to Fitzroy in 1989 the supporters raised the money to stop it. When the AFL supported a Hawthorn and Melbourne merger in 1996, Hawthorn members voted it down. Relocations have been proposed to the Gold Coast and to Tasmania and none has happened since 1982.
The practical consequence for a new supporter is that Victorian clubs play each other constantly. Each club plays twenty-three home and away matches against seventeen opponents, so nine of those matches are guaranteed doubles. In Melbourne, the doubles are almost always against other Victorian clubs, which is why local rivalries are played twice a year while interstate fixtures often are not. The mechanics of that draw are set out in the guide to AFL rivalries and where they came from.
Melbourne: the club that wrote the rules
Melbourne is the oldest club in the competition and, uniquely, the club whose members wrote the game. In May 1859 Tom Wills, William Hammersley, J. B. Thompson and Thomas H. Smith set down the Rules of the Melbourne Football Club at a hotel near the MCG. Everything played since descends from that document, including the mark, which no other football code kept.
The club has played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground since 1889 and remains its most closely associated tenant. Its colours are navy blue and red, taken from a set of red stockings a member brought back from England in 1872. Melbourne's honour board holds thirteen premierships, but they are unevenly spread: six came between 1955 and 1964 under Norm Smith, whose name is now on the Grand Final best-on-ground medal.
Then came the drought. Melbourne won in 1964 and did not win again until 2021, fifty-seven years later, when it beat the Western Bulldogs by seventy-four points at Optus Stadium in a Grand Final relocated to Perth by border closures. The club that invented the game had to win its next flag five thousand kilometres from home. Ground history and the fixture that surrounds it are covered in the Melbourne Cricket Ground guide.
Geelong: the only club outside Melbourne
Geelong was founded on 13 April 1859, second oldest of the eighteen, and is the only AFL club whose home ground is not in a capital city. It has played at Kardinia Park, now GMHBA Stadium, since 1941, and successive redevelopments have taken the venue to about forty thousand seats, which is large for a city of around a quarter of a million people.
The navy and white hooped guernsey is usually explained as seagulls over the water of Corio Bay. The nickname is the Cats, and the club's honour board runs to ten premierships across three quite separate eras: the 1920s and 1930s, the early 1950s under Reg Hickey, and the modern run of 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2022.
That modern run is the more instructive one. Geelong lost the 2008 Grand Final in the middle of it and still won four flags in sixteen seasons while playing more home matches outside Melbourne than any other Victorian club. Its home ground advantage at GMHBA Stadium has been among the strongest in the competition for most of that period, which is one reason the AFL has resisted moving more of its fixtures to the MCG.
Carlton: the navy blues and the weight of sixteen
Carlton was founded in 1864 and is one of the eight VFL foundation clubs. Its guernsey, navy blue with a white CFC monogram, has been essentially unchanged since 1909, and the club is known as the Blues or, less politely, the Baggers.
The honour board reads sixteen premierships, level with Collingwood and Essendon, and the eras are spread across the whole history: three in a row from 1906 to 1908, back-to-back in 1914 and 1915, then a long modern period from 1968 to 1995 that produced nine. The last of them, in 1995, came from a season in which Carlton lost twice.
Since then the club has won nothing, and it spent much of the 2000s at the bottom of the ladder after being penalised for salary cap breaches, which cost it draft selections across several seasons. Carlton also left Princes Park, its home since 1897, and now splits home fixtures between the MCG and Marvel Stadium, keeping Princes Park as a training base and AFLW ground. For a club whose identity was built on a suburban fortress, that has been the hardest adjustment of the modern era.
Collingwood: the biggest membership in Australian sport
Collingwood was formed on 12 February 1892 in a working-class inner suburb and has carried that association ever since, even though its supporter base is now national. The black and white vertical stripes were taken from the plumage of the Australian magpie; the club reversed the guernsey in 2001 so that black rather than white is the dominant colour.
Sixteen premierships include the only run of four consecutive flags in the competition's history, from 1927 to 1930. After 1958 the club went thirty-two years without another, a period long enough to acquire its own name in Melbourne folklore, before winning in 1990. It has since added 2010 and 2023, the latter by four points over Brisbane.
The number that separates Collingwood from every other club is membership. It passed 106,000 in 2023, 110,000 in 2024 and 112,068 in 2025, figures no other Australian sporting club approaches. Collingwood played at Victoria Park from 1892 to 1999 and has used the MCG as its home ground since 2000, with a couple of fixtures a year at Docklands. Its Anzac Day fixture against Essendon regularly draws more than ninety thousand.
Counts clubs whose home base was in Victoria at the start of each listed season. The drops reflect University withdrawing, South Melbourne relocating to Sydney and Fitzroy merging into the Brisbane Lions.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| 1897 | 8 |
| 1908 | 10 |
| 1915 | 9 |
| 1925 | 12 |
| 1982 | 11 |
| 1997 | 10 |
| 2025 | 10 |
Essendon: the red sash and the wait since 2000
Essendon was established in 1872 by the McCracken family in Ascot Vale and joined the breakaway VFL as a foundation club. The red sash was added over a navy jumper in 1877 so that players could be told apart from opponents, and the nickname the Sash Wearers came from that. Bombers arrived much later, in 1940, from Windy Hill's position near Essendon Aerodrome.
Sixteen premierships place Essendon level at the top, with back-to-back flags in 1911 and 1912, 1923 and 1924, 1949 and 1950, and 1984 and 1985. The most recent came in 2000, a season in which Essendon lost one match all year and won the Grand Final by sixty points. It is one of the most complete seasons the competition has recorded.
Nothing since. The club left Windy Hill for the MCG in 1992 and now plays most home matches at Docklands, keeping the MCG for Anzac Day and other large fixtures. The supplements affair of 2013 to 2016 cost it a season of senior players and a great deal else, and the drought since 2000 is now the longest of the three clubs on sixteen.
Richmond: Punt Road, the drought and the 2017 to 2020 run
Richmond formed at the Royal Hotel in Richmond on 20 February 1885 and entered the VFL in 1908. It played at Punt Road Oval until 1964 and has used the MCG, barely a kilometre away across Yarra Park, ever since. The colours are black with a yellow sash and the nickname is the Tigers.
Thirteen premierships divide neatly. Ten came between 1920 and 1980, including a run of four in eight seasons under Tom Hafey. Then came thirty-seven years of very little, a period in which Richmond became the standard Australian example of a large club that could not convert support into success. It made finals rarely and lost quickly when it did.
The 2017 to 2020 period reversed that completely. Richmond won the premiership in 2017, 2019 and 2020, the last of them in the pandemic-shortened season with the Grand Final played at night at the Gabba. Three flags in four years from a club that had won none in thirty-seven is the sharpest reversal in the modern competition.
Hawthorn: the 1925 newcomer that became a dynasty
Hawthorn was founded in April 1902 and admitted to the VFL in January 1925 alongside North Melbourne and Footscray. It was, for its first three decades, the least successful club in the competition and finished last repeatedly. The brown and gold vertical stripes date from 1914.
The first premiership came in 1961. Twelve more have followed, including 1971, 1976, 1978, then a period from 1983 to 1991 that produced five flags and seven Grand Final appearances, and then the modern three-peat of 2013, 2014 and 2015 under Alastair Clarkson. Thirteen premierships from a club that had none before 1961 is the most compressed honour board in the competition.
Hawthorn also came closest to disappearing. In 1996 the club agreed to merge with Melbourne as the Melbourne Hawks; a campaign led by former captain Don Scott persuaded Hawthorn members to reject it while Melbourne members narrowly approved. The club moved from Glenferrie Oval to Princes Park in 1974, to Waverley Park in 1992 and to the MCG in 2000. Since 2007 it has also played several home matches a year in Launceston under an arrangement with the Tasmanian government.
North Melbourne: shinboners, mergers and survival
North Melbourne traces itself to 1869, played at Arden Street from 1882 and was admitted to the VFL in 1925 as the third of that year's newcomers. The colours are royal blue and white stripes and the older nickname, the Shinboners, comes from the district's abattoir workers.
The club waited fifty years for a first premiership, winning in 1975 and again in 1977 under Ron Barassi, then adding 1996 and 1999. Four flags is modest against the Melbourne giants but it includes two in four years at the end of the 1990s, when North had one of the strongest lists in the competition.
North has also been the club most often asked to move. It rebranded simply as the Kangaroos from 1999 to 2007 to broaden its market, played home matches in Sydney and later in Hobart from 2012, and in 2007 rejected an AFL-backed proposal to relocate to the Gold Coast. It plays its Melbourne home matches at Marvel Stadium and retains Arden Street as its training base.
St Kilda: one premiership in a century and a half
St Kilda was formed on 2 April 1873 and is a foundation member of both the VFA and the VFL. Its colours are red, white and black, and its record is the starkest in the competition: one premiership, won by a single point over Collingwood in 1966, in a club history that now runs to more than 150 years.
The near misses are as much a part of the identity as the win. St Kilda has lost six Grand Finals, including 2009 to Geelong by twelve points and the 2010 series against Collingwood, which was drawn and then lost in the replay. It has also finished bottom of the ladder more often than any other club, a combination that produced the label of perennial underachievers.
The club has moved more than most. Junction Oval was home until 1964, Moorabbin from 1965 to 1992, Waverley Park through the 1990s and Docklands since 2000. Sixty years on from 1966 it holds the longest active premiership drought in the AFL.
Western Bulldogs: Footscray, Fightback and 2016
Footscray was formed in 1877, won the VFA premiership in 1924, beat VFL premiers Essendon in a challenge match and was admitted to the VFL the following year. It won its first VFL premiership in 1954 and then waited sixty-two years for the second.
In between it nearly stopped existing. In 1989 the club was insolvent and a merger with Fitzroy was agreed at board level. A public campaign led by lawyer Peter Gordon raised enough money in a fortnight to keep the club independent, and the episode is still referred to in Melbourne as Fightback. The club adopted the trading name Western Bulldogs in 1996 to reflect a supporter base spread across Melbourne's western suburbs.
The 2016 premiership is the outlier of the modern era. The Bulldogs finished seventh, won an elimination final in Perth, a semi-final in Sydney, a preliminary final in Melbourne against Greater Western Sydney by six points and then the Grand Final against Sydney. No other club has won a flag from seventh. The club plays home matches at Marvel Stadium and takes a fixture each year to Mars Stadium in Ballarat, with Whitten Oval retained for training and AFLW.
- 10Victorian clubs in the AFL
- 104Premierships to current Victorian clubs
- 129Seasons contested since 1897
- 6Foundation clubs still Victorian
Structural counts rather than measurements. Premiership figures cover the 129 seasons from 1897 to 2025 inclusive and exclude any 2026 result.
The clubs Victoria lost
Three Victorian clubs left the competition, and each departure changed the shape of it.
| Club | In the VFL | Premierships | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| University | 1908 to 1914 | 0 | Withdrew after a run of heavy defeats and the loss of players to the First World War |
| South Melbourne | 1897 to 1981 | 3 | Relocated to Sydney for the 1982 season and became the Sydney Swans |
| Fitzroy | 1897 to 1996 | 8 | Merged with the Brisbane Bears at the end of 1996 to form the Brisbane Lions |
South Melbourne's move is the one that made the competition national. The club was losing about $150,000 a year, had a small home crowd at the Lake Oval and was, in the VFL's view, the only viable candidate for an untapped market. The VFL approved the relocation on 29 July 1981 and the club played all its 1982 home games in Sydney. The full story of that move and the seven clubs that followed it is in the companion guide to interstate AFL clubs.
Fitzroy's end was slower and less planned. The club had no permanent home ground from the 1960s onwards, moved repeatedly, and by 1996 was in administration with the AFL running its football operations. Its eight premierships, won between 1898 and 1944, still sit on the competition's honour board under the Fitzroy name.
Where the Victorian clubs actually play
Nine Victorian clubs share two stadiums. The Melbourne Cricket Ground is the nominated home ground for Collingwood, Hawthorn, Melbourne and Richmond, and hosts a share of Carlton, Essendon and Geelong home matches as well. Marvel Stadium at Docklands is home for North Melbourne, St Kilda and the Western Bulldogs, plus a share of Carlton and Essendon fixtures.
This is unusual and it has consequences. Home ground advantage in Melbourne is mostly a crowd effect rather than a familiarity effect, because both teams often train and play at the same venue. It also means the phrase home game can be close to meaningless in a Collingwood against Richmond fixture, where both clubs are MCG tenants and the crowd splits roughly down the middle.
The suburban grounds that these clubs left, Victoria Park, Windy Hill, Arden Street, Punt Road, Moorabbin, Whitten Oval and Princes Park, are all still standing and most are still used for training, AFLW or VFL football. Waverley Park, built by the VFL as its own stadium and once intended to host Grand Finals, was sold and partly redeveloped after 1999.
Colours, guernseys and clash strips
Most Victorian club designs predate the First World War, which creates a modern problem: several of them look alike on television. The AFL requires a clash guernsey where two clubs' primary designs are hard to separate, which is why Essendon, Richmond and St Kilda all carry alternate strips, and why Collingwood and Port Adelaide have argued for decades about black and white stripes.
A few designs carry meaning worth knowing. Essendon's sash was a practical fix in 1877 rather than a symbol. Geelong's hoops are usually explained through Corio Bay. Collingwood's stripes come from the magpie. Melbourne's red came from a member's English stockings. Carlton has effectively worn the same guernsey since 1909, longer than any other club in the competition.
Heritage rounds and Indigenous rounds have added further variations, so a supporter buying a guernsey should check whether the design on sale is the current home version. Guernsey design and clash rules sit under AFL competition regulations rather than club discretion.
Membership, crowds and how the clubs are sized
Victorian clubs are member organisations, not franchises, and membership is the number that matters commercially. Collingwood leads, at more than 112,000 in 2025. Richmond, Carlton, Essendon and Hawthorn are the other traditionally large memberships, while North Melbourne and St Kilda are consistently the smallest of the Victorian ten.
Crowd size does not track membership exactly. Fixture placement matters as much: a Friday night MCG match between two large clubs will draw more than a Sunday afternoon Docklands match between two small ones, regardless of ladder position. That is why fixture allocation is one of the most contested subjects at AFL commission level, and why smaller clubs argue that the draw entrenches the gap rather than reflecting it.
Ladder position is calculated on premiership points and then percentage, and the way that interacts with an uneven draw is explained in the guide to the AFL ladder and percentage.
How the Victorian clubs compete for players
Every Victorian club works within the same national system: a salary cap, a list size limit, a national draft, a trade period and free agency. None of that is state-based, and a Victorian club has no advantage in the draft over a Western Australian one. What it does have is geography. Roughly half of all AFL-listed players come from Victoria, so a Victorian club recruiting a Victorian teenager is not asking anyone to move interstate.
That advantage cuts both ways. Interstate players drafted to Victorian clubs are the ones most likely to request a trade home later in their careers, and the trade period each October is dominated by those requests. The mechanics are set out in the guides to the AFL draft, the trade period and the AFL salary cap.
Victorian clubs also carry the father-son rule more heavily than interstate clubs, simply because their lists have longer histories. A club that has existed since 1864 has far more eligible sons than one founded in 2009.
Reading a Victorian honour board in context
Premiership counts flatter old clubs, and it is worth knowing why. Between 1897 and 1924 there were never more than ten clubs and often nine, and every one of them was Victorian. A flag won in 1907 was won against seven other clubs, all within a few tram stops. A flag won in 2025 was won against seventeen clubs across five states and a territory.
That does not make the early premierships fake, but it does mean a straight comparison of sixteen against four is not a comparison of like with like. The more useful modern measure is premierships since 1990, when the competition became national. On that measure the leaders are the Brisbane Lions and Hawthorn, and three Victorian clubs on sixteen have won three flags between them in thirty-six seasons.
The other measure worth applying is Grand Final appearances, because they reward sustained quality rather than one September. On that measure Collingwood, Carlton and Essendon still lead comfortably, and St Kilda's six losses read very differently to a bare count of one premiership.
How a newcomer should pick a Victorian club
There is no polite way to say this: in Melbourne, club choice is usually inherited rather than chosen. If you are picking one from scratch, three practical filters help. The first is geography, because the suburban origins still map onto where people live, and going to a home ground in the right part of the city is a different experience to watching neutrally at the MCG.
The second is venue. If you would rather sit under a roof in wet July weather, a Marvel Stadium club is the sensible choice. If you want the big crowds, an MCG club will give you more of them. Geelong is the only option that offers a genuine one-club town atmosphere.
The third is tolerance for waiting. Carlton, Essendon and St Kilda supporters have been waiting a long time and the wait is part of the identity. Guides to going to a match, the rules and the season shape are collected on the Australia sport hub, and the basics of the game itself are covered in AFL rules explained for beginners.
What defines each club in one line
Melbourne wrote the rules and then waited fifty-seven years for a premiership. Geelong is the only club that never had to move to a capital city. Carlton has the oldest unchanged guernsey and the longest current wait among the sixteen-flag clubs. Collingwood is the largest sporting membership in the country. Essendon has the sash and a perfect season in 2000 that it has not come close to repeating.
Richmond spent thirty-seven years as the best-supported underachiever in the competition and then won three flags in four years. Hawthorn was the worst club in the VFL for thirty years and has since won thirteen. North Melbourne has survived more relocation proposals than any other Victorian club. St Kilda has one premiership from 150 years. The Western Bulldogs nearly ceased to exist in 1989 and won from seventh in 2016.
Those ten sentences are not a substitute for the detail above, but they are the shorthand a Melbourne crowd uses. Understanding which one applies to the club sitting next to you in the stand is most of what you need to follow a conversation at the football. Broader coverage of Australian sport, including cricket at the same grounds, sits under Sports and Cricket in Australia.