State Leagues Below the AFL: VFL, SANFL, WAFL and More
The AFL state leagues explained: the VFL, SANFL, WAFL, QAFL and NTFL, how AFL reserves sides fit into each, and why Tasmania closing its league mattered.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Below the AFL19 min read
- Second-tier competitions
- VFL SANFL and WAFL
- Clubs in the 2026 VFL
- 22
- Clubs in the SANFL and WAFL
- 10 each
- Oldest of them
- SANFL formed in 1877
- WAFL formed
- 1885 as the WAFA
- NEAFL absorbed into the VFL
- 2021
- Tasmanian State League closed
- after the 2024 season
- NTFL season runs
- October to March
Below the Australian Football League sit six senior competitions that most people outside their home state could not name. The AFL state leagues are the Victorian Football League, the South Australian National Football League, the West Australian Football League, the Queensland Australian Football League, a Sydney-based competition covering New South Wales, and the Northern Territory Football League. They are where AFL clubs park their reserves, where undrafted twenty-two-year-olds keep playing, and where a good number of towns and suburbs get the only elite football they will ever watch in person.
The short answer to how the AFL state leagues work is this. There is no promotion and no relegation. Nothing you win in a state league gets you into the AFL, and nothing you lose there gets you out. What the state leagues actually do is three things at once: run a genuine club competition with its own hundred-and-fifty-year history, host the reserves teams of AFL clubs, and act as the last serious level of football for players who are not on an AFL list. Those three jobs pull against each other constantly, and most of the arguments about state league football come down to which one should win.
This page maps the whole tier. It covers what each league is and where it plays, how AFL reserves sides are distributed across them, why the VFL now contains clubs from four states, what happened when Tasmania closed its own competition, and how the money and the pathway actually work. The two largest non-Victorian leagues get their own deep guides: the SANFL explained and the WAFL explained.
What a state league actually is
The phrase is misleading in two directions. A state league is not a second division, because there is no ladder connecting it to the AFL. And several of them are not confined to one state any more.
What they have in common is that each was, historically, the top level of football in its own place. The SANFL was the championship of South Australia. The WAFL was the championship of Western Australia. The VFL, before it renamed itself the AFL in 1990, was the championship of Victoria and then of the country. When the national competition pulled away, these bodies did not dissolve. They kept running their own competitions and, in South Australia and Western Australia, kept governing the game in their state as well.
That dual role matters. The SANFL is not only a ten-club league, it is the body that administers football across South Australia from junior level up. The WAFL sits under the West Australian Football Commission in a similar arrangement. The VFL, by contrast, is now run by the AFL itself, which is a substantially different relationship and shows in how the competition is managed.
The three that carry the weight
Three of the six do the heavy lifting: the VFL, the SANFL and the WAFL. They have the crowds, the broadcast deals, the club histories and the players.
The VFL is the largest by a distance, with 22 clubs in 2026, and the only one that spans multiple states. The SANFL and the WAFL each carry ten clubs and each play what is essentially a closed round-robin with a five-team finals series. All three finish in September, all three play their grand finals in a major stadium rather than at a suburban ground, and all three are semi-professional.
The other three are a different order of competition. The QAFL and the Sydney competition are strong local leagues in markets where Australian football is the fourth or fifth code, and the NTFL is a summer competition of about ten Premier League clubs serving a population smaller than a single Melbourne council area.
- 6Senior state-level leagues
- 22Clubs in the 2026 VFL
- 10Clubs in the SANFL
- 10Clubs in the WAFL
A structural count of senior state and territory level competitions and their club numbers for the most recent announced season. Club numbers change between seasons, particularly in the VFL. This is not a count of participation or attendance.
The VFL: an old name doing a new job
The current Victorian Football League is not the competition that became the AFL. It is the descendant of the Victorian Football Association, the body the AFL's founding clubs walked out of in 1896. The VFA carried on for another century as Victoria's second-tier competition, and in 1996 it took the VFL name for itself once the senior competition had vacated it. The full story of the original split is set out in the VFL to AFL history.
For most of its post-1996 life the VFL was what you would expect: a Victorian competition of suburban clubs, with AFL clubs gradually attaching reserves teams to it. The change came in 2021, when the North East Australian Football League was wound up and folded in. The NEAFL had covered Queensland, New South Wales, the ACT and the Northern Territory. Its collapse sent the reserves sides of Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sydney and Greater Western Sydney into the VFL, along with the Queensland clubs Southport and Aspley.
The 2026 season added a fourth state. The Tasmania Football Club, granted the AFL's nineteenth licence, entered the VFL as a full club two years before its scheduled AFL debut. That made 2026 the first season in which clubs from four different states played in the same VFL competition, which is a strange sentence to write about a league with the word Victorian in its name.
Who actually plays in the VFL
The 22-club field splits three ways, and the distinction matters for anyone deciding which match to attend.
Twelve clubs are AFL clubs running their own reserves side under their own name and colours: Brisbane, Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Footscray, Geelong, Gold Coast, Greater Western Sydney, North Melbourne, Richmond, St Kilda and Sydney. Two are traditional VFL clubs formally aligned to an AFL club, Box Hill with Hawthorn and Casey with Melbourne, which means the club keeps its own identity while hosting another club's players.
Eight are standalone VFL clubs with no AFL alignment at all: Coburg, Frankston, Port Melbourne, Sandringham, Southport, Tasmania, Werribee and Williamstown. These are the clubs that give the competition its remaining character, and several of them have histories running back into the nineteenth century VFA.
- AFL club entries14
- Standalone VFL clubs8
A structural breakdown of the 22 clubs announced for the 2026 VFL season. AFL club entries include both standalone reserves sides and the two traditional clubs formally aligned to an AFL club. Licences have been added and revoked between seasons.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| AFL club entries | 14 |
| Standalone VFL clubs | 8 |
The SANFL in one paragraph
The South Australian National Football League was founded on 30 April 1877 and is generally described as the oldest surviving football league of any code in the world. It runs ten clubs, eight of them long-established community clubs and two of them the reserves sides of Adelaide and Port Adelaide, which entered in 2014. Port Adelaide has won 36 premierships, a record no club in any Australian football competition has approached. The grand final is played at Adelaide Oval and drew a crowd in the mid-thirty thousands in 2025. The full account is in the SANFL explained.
The WAFL in one paragraph
The West Australian Football League began in 1885 as the West Australian Football Association and took its current name in 2001. It also runs ten clubs, nine of them traditional and one of them the West Coast Eagles reserves side, which entered in 2019 after the club's alignment with East Perth ended. East Fremantle has 30 premierships, the most in the competition. The grand final is played at Optus Stadium. The full account is in the WAFL explained.
Queensland: the QAFL
Queensland's senior competition sits at a lower level than the southern three, largely because the two Queensland AFL clubs put their reserves into the VFL rather than into the local league. The QAFL runs around thirteen clubs through a season of roughly eighteen matches over twenty rounds, finishing in September with a four-week finals series involving the top eight.
Its position is awkward. Southport, one of its strongest clubs, moved up to the VFL in 2021 and stayed there. That took the best Queensland club out of the Queensland competition, which is the sort of decision that makes commercial sense for one club and structural problems for everybody else. The QAFL remains the top level of senior football for the great majority of Queensland footballers, but it is not the pathway it once looked like becoming.
New South Wales and the ACT
New South Wales has the weakest state-level structure of the six, which is not surprising in a market where rugby league dominates and Australian football is competing for fourth place. Sydney's senior competition has operated as a metropolitan league rather than a statewide one, and the AFL announced a restructure that will create a Sydney Football League from 2027 with the explicit aim of defining a clearer premier pathway for players, coaches, umpires and officials.
The reserves sides of Sydney and Greater Western Sydney play in the VFL, which means the strongest football played in New South Wales below AFL level is played by two clubs travelling to Victoria most weeks. That is a workable arrangement for the AFL clubs and a difficult one for the local competition, which loses both the standard and the shop window.
The Northern Territory: football in the wet
The Northern Territory Football League was founded in 1916 and does something no other senior league in the country does. It plays from October to March, through the Top End wet season, in the months when the rest of Australia is watching cricket.
The reason is practical. The dry season months from April to September are cricket season in Darwin, so the two codes swapped calendars. The consequence is that the NTFL can recruit footballers from southern competitions during their off-season, and it does. A player who finishes a SANFL or VFL winter can arrive in Darwin in October and play a full second season before the southern pre-season resumes.
The competition is centred on greater Darwin and headquartered at the Marrara ground, with around ten Premier League clubs. It has produced a remarkable number of AFL footballers relative to the Territory's population, particularly Indigenous players from the Tiwi Islands and remote communities.
Tasmania: the league that closed itself
Tasmania is the clearest example of what an AFL licence does to the tier below it. The Tasmanian State League traced its line to a body founded in 1879 and had been revived in 2009 after an eight-year gap. It finished the 2024 season with seven clubs and was then disbanded.
The reason was the Tasmania Football Club. The state does not have the playing depth to run a statewide senior competition and a new professional club simultaneously, and the AFL and the state body chose the professional club. The seven TSL clubs went back into regional competitions, southern sides to the Southern Football League and northern sides to the Northern Tasmanian Football Association.
Whether that was the right call will be argued in Tasmania for a long time. It is at least an honest reflection of the arithmetic. A statewide league that cannot fill seven competitive lists is not a functioning second tier, and a professional club that cannot field a reserves side is not a functioning AFL club.
The state leagues compared
| League | Covers | Founded | Clubs | Season | Grand final venue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VFL | Vic, NSW, Qld, Tas | 1877 as the VFA | 22 in 2026 | March to September | Varies |
| SANFL | South Australia | 1877 | 10 | April to September | Adelaide Oval |
| WAFL | Western Australia | 1885 | 10 | April to September | Optus Stadium |
| QAFL | Queensland | 1903 lineage | 13 in 2026 | March to September | Varies |
| NTFL | Northern Territory | 1916 | 10 Premier League | October to March | Marrara, Darwin |
| Sydney competition | New South Wales | Metropolitan lineage | Varies | April to September | Varies |
Where AFL reserves go, and why
Every AFL club needs somewhere for its listed players to play when they are not selected in the senior side. The AFL ran its own reserves competition until the end of the 1990s and then abandoned it, on the reasonable ground that running an entire second national competition to give twenty-two players a game each week was an expensive way to solve the problem.
What replaced it is a patchwork. Fourteen AFL clubs place their reserves in the VFL, whether under their own name or through an aligned club. Adelaide and Port Adelaide use the SANFL. West Coast runs a WAFL side. Fremantle supplies Peel Thunder in the WAFL. Every AFL club is covered, but no two states solved it the same way, and the differences trace directly back to how strong the local league was when the question came up.
Three models of reserves, three sets of problems
The standalone model, where an AFL club enters a team under its own name, gives the club total control over selection, coaching and load management. It also drops a professionally prepared side into a competition of part-timers, which is not popular with the clubs that have to play it.
The aligned model, used by Box Hill with Hawthorn and Casey with Melbourne and by Peel with Fremantle, keeps the traditional club alive and gives it access to AFL-listed players. The trade-off is that the host club's own best players get squeezed out of the side by whoever the AFL club sends that week, and the host club's results become a by-product of another club's selection decisions.
The third model is no reserves side at all, which is what the Queensland and New South Wales local competitions effectively have. That is the cleanest competition and the weakest standard.
What a state league season looks like
The rhythm is much the same in all three big leagues. Pre-season runs through summer, alongside the Big Bash rather than in competition with it. The home-and-away season opens in late March or early April and runs to late August, over eighteen to twenty-one rounds depending on the league and the number of clubs.
Ladders are decided on points and percentage in the same way as the AFL, which is set out in the guide to the AFL ladder and percentage. Finals run through the first three weeks of September, and the grand final lands in the third or fourth week of the month, deliberately clear of the AFL Grand Final in most years.
Below the senior grade each club fields reserves and colts or under-18 sides, so a state league club on any given Saturday is running three or four teams through the same ground.
The money
State league football is semi-professional and the numbers are small. The WAFL has operated a club salary cap in the region of 245000 dollars in recent seasons, spread across an entire senior list. That is less than a single mid-tier AFL contract. Compare it against the AFL's own arrangements in the AFL salary cap explained and the gap is stark.
Most senior state league players work full-time and train two or three nights a week. Match payments vary by club and by player, and the better players at the stronger clubs can earn a meaningful supplementary income, but nobody in these competitions is a professional footballer on state league money alone.
The exception is the AFL-listed players. They are paid entirely by their AFL club under the AFL's own list rules, described in AFL list management, and their payments sit outside the state league cap. That is the structural reason an AFL reserves side can be stronger than a state league club without breaking any rule.
Crowds and coverage
The SANFL claims the second-highest attendance of any Australian football competition behind the AFL, which is credible given its grand final crowds at Adelaide Oval. The WAFL is smaller but comparable in shape, with a grand final at Optus Stadium that pulled a crowd in the low twenty thousands in 2025.
Both leagues have carried a match of the round on the Seven Network in recent seasons, with additional matches streamed. VFL coverage runs through AFL platforms. Ordinary home-and-away crowds are modest, typically hundreds to low thousands at suburban grounds, and the atmosphere is closer to serious club football than to a stadium event.
The talent pathway
State league football is not where AFL clubs find players. It is where they confirm them.
The primary talent identification pathway is the under-18 system: the Coates Talent League, the AFL national under-18 championships, and the academies described in the AFL academy and next generation programs. A player is normally drafted out of that system, not out of senior state league football. The mechanics of selection are covered in the AFL draft explained.
Where state leagues matter is at the margins. Mature-age recruits, delisted players trying to get back on a list, and rookies playing themselves into senior form all pass through this tier. A twenty-three-year-old dominating SANFL or WAFL football will get looked at.
- Junior and community footballA player comes through a local club in a suburban or country league, usually from about age nine through to under-16s.
- Under-18 talent competitionThe best of that group are picked up by a Talent League club or an AFL academy and play against other elite juniors under recruiter scrutiny.
- State under-18 championshipsNational carnival matches between state and territory teams give recruiters a direct comparison across the country in a handful of games.
- Senior state league debutMany prospects play a few senior SANFL, WAFL or VFL games in their draft year against grown men, which is the sternest test available before the draft.
- National draftClubs select from that pool, and a small number of mature-age players are taken straight out of senior state league football instead.
- Reserves football on an AFL listA drafted player then plays state league football again, this time for an AFL reserves side, until selected in the senior team.
A simplified account of the typical route. Most drafted players come through the under-18 pathway rather than through senior state league football, and the state league stage is often skipped entirely by top-end draftees.
Best and fairest awards
Each league has its own individual honour and they are treated seriously. The SANFL awards the Magarey Medal, first presented in 1898, to the fairest and most brilliant player of the season. The WAFL awards the Sandover Medal, established in 1921 and voted by the field umpires. The VFL awards the J. J. Liston Trophy, which carries the VFA lineage forward.
Grand final best-on-ground medals exist in each competition as well, the Jack Oatey Medal in the SANFL among them. A player who wins a Magarey or a Sandover without ever playing AFL football is a significant figure in that state, and several have been.
Finals systems
None of the big three uses the AFL's eight-team finals structure, because none of them has enough clubs to justify it. The SANFL and the WAFL both use a five-team system in which the minor premier goes straight through, second plays third in a qualifying final and fourth plays fifth in an elimination final. It compresses four weeks of football into a genuinely brutal sequence for anyone finishing fourth or fifth.
The VFL, with 22 clubs, runs a larger series. The AFL's own arrangement is set out in the AFL finals system explained, and the differences are worth noting: a five-team series gives far less protection to a high finish than an eight-team one, which is exactly why the WAFL abandoned a top-five format in the mid-1990s before eventually returning to it.
State representative football
Interstate football used to be the pinnacle of the game for players outside Victoria, and the state leagues were the vehicle for it. South Australia and Western Australia both built long records against Victoria, and Western Australia's 1977 win over Victoria is still cited in Perth.
That tradition largely died when the AFL went national, because the best South Australians and Western Australians now play for AFL clubs and are not available for state duty. Attempts to revive representative football have come and gone. What survives at state league level is the occasional match between SANFL and WAFL representative sides, which is a shadow of what it was but keeps the fixture alive.
Going to a state league match
It is the cheapest elite-adjacent football in Australia. Gate prices at suburban grounds are a few dollars, you can park nearby, you can stand on the fence, and you can hear the players. Canteens sell pies and the bar is usually a converted clubroom.
The grand finals are different. The SANFL decider at Adelaide Oval and the WAFL decider at Optus Stadium are full stadium occasions with reserved seating and ticketing. If you want the atmosphere of a proper crowd, those are the two days to target, and both fall in September.
Interstate clubs and shared grounds
State league football often ends up in the same venues as other sports, which is worth knowing if you are planning a trip. Adelaide Oval hosts the SANFL grand final and Test cricket, as covered in the Australian cricket grounds guide. Optus Stadium hosts the WAFL grand final and Perth Test matches. Victorian state league clubs play at grounds ranging from council ovals to Marvel Stadium for selected fixtures.
That overlap is not incidental. Australian football and cricket have shared ovals since the nineteenth century, which is part of why the football season and the cricket season fit together the way they do right across the country.
What is changing
Three things are worth watching. The Sydney restructure planned for 2027 will reshape senior football in New South Wales for the first time in decades. Tasmania's VFL side will become an AFL club in 2028, which raises the question of what replaces the Tasmanian State League permanently. And the VFL's licence churn continues, with clubs entering and leaving between seasons.
The stable part is South Australia and Western Australia. Both leagues have held at ten clubs, both have absorbed their AFL clubs' reserves without collapsing, and both still fill a stadium on grand final day. Whatever the tier below the AFL looks like in ten years, the SANFL and the WAFL will still be running.
Why the tier is worth your attention
Most of the argument about Australian football happens at AFL level, where the money and the television cameras are. The tier underneath it is where the game is actually still organised the way it was organised a century ago: clubs run by their own members, grounds owned by councils, players who go to work on Monday, and premiership cups that mean as much in Alberton or East Fremantle as a flag means anywhere.
It is also the part of the structure most likely to change in the next decade. The Sydney restructure, the permanent shape of senior football in Tasmania, and the continuing question of whether AFL reserves sides belong in community competitions at all are live issues with no settled answer. Anyone following the game seriously in Australia is better off knowing how this tier works than knowing another statistic about the competition above it.