From the VFL to the AFL: How the Competition Changed

The competition now called the Australian Football League began as a walkout. In October 1896 eight of the strongest clubs in the Victorian Football Association announced they were leaving to run their own competition, and in 1897 the Victorian Football League played its first season. Everything that followed — a century of Victorian dominance, four decades of interstate expansion, the 1990 renaming and the nineteenth licence granted to Tasmania — sits on top of that original argument about money.

The short version of VFL AFL history is this. A breakaway league of eight Melbourne and Geelong clubs formed in 1896. It grew to twelve Victorian clubs by 1925 and then did not change at all for sixty-two years. Financial pressure and television money forced it outward from 1982, first by relocating South Melbourne to Sydney, then by admitting new clubs in Perth and Brisbane in 1987. The name changed to the Australian Football League in 1990 to match what the competition had become. Adelaide, Fremantle, Port Adelaide, Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney followed, Fitzroy did not survive the transition, and the current eighteen-club structure has held since 2012.

This page follows that arc in order: what the VFA was and why its best clubs abandoned it, how the league consolidated in Victoria, what broke the Victorian model, how each expansion club actually got in, and what the competition gave up along the way. The pre-1896 story — how the game was codified in the first place — is covered separately in the origins of Australian rules football, and the competitions that sit beneath the AFL today are set out in the guide to state leagues below the AFL.

The association that came first

Before there was a league there was an association. The Victorian Football Association was formed in 1877 as the governing body for senior football in the colony, and for nearly twenty years it was the competition. Its clubs were the clubs whose names still appear on premiership lists, and its finals decided the championship of Victoria.

The Association ran on a model that worked well enough while the clubs were roughly equal. Each club kept its own gate takings from home matches. Membership subscriptions, ground arrangements and player payments were club business. The Association fixed the draw, adjudicated disputes and administered the rules.

By the mid-1890s the clubs were not roughly equal any more. Collingwood, Essendon, Carlton, Geelong and South Melbourne drew crowds that the smaller clubs could not approach, and the gap showed in every column of the ledger. A competition in which five clubs can afford to pay players and eight cannot is a competition with a structural problem, and the Association tried to solve it.

Why eight clubs left in 1896

The trigger was a redistribution proposal. The Association's secretary, T. S. Marshall, argued that gross gate receipts should be paid into the Association and shared out among the clubs, so that the poorer clubs could survive. In modern language it was a revenue-sharing scheme, and it was aimed squarely at the clubs that generated the money.

The wealthier clubs made their position clear through the winter of 1896. When the proposal was debated in July, the newspapers reported open hints that pushing it further would end with the prosperous clubs forming their own association. Two special meetings in September, nominally about the timing of the play-off matches, hardened the split further, with Collingwood and South Melbourne warning that the Association could break up.

On 3 October 1896 the eight clubs went public. Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Fitzroy, Geelong, Melbourne, South Melbourne and St Kilda announced the formation of the Victorian Football League. In February 1897, at the last Association meeting they attended, the departing clubs forced a vote on dividing the Association's assets before they left.

Five senior clubs remained in the VFA — Footscray, North Melbourne, Port Melbourne, Richmond and Williamstown — and it recruited replacements to keep going. It never regained the position it lost. From 1897 onwards the league, not the association, was the top level of the game in Victoria.

The 1897 season and the invention of the decider

The new league's first season had eight clubs and, in a change from the Association model, ended with a play-off rather than a simple ladder result. That first finals series was a round-robin among the leading clubs rather than a knockout, which is why 1897 produced a premier without producing a grand final. The first grand final in the modern sense came in 1898.

That decision matters more than the mechanics suggest. Australian football's whole calendar — the September build-up, the preliminary finals, the single Saturday afternoon that ends the year at the Melbourne Cricket Ground — descends from the league's early insistence that the season should end with a scheduled deciding match rather than a mathematical outcome.

Counts of clubs contesting the VFL and then AFL premiership in selected seasons, taken from league season records. This counts licences on the field, not membership, revenue or participation.

Show the numbers

Clubs in the top competition by season

Item	Value
1897	8
1908	10
1915	9
1925	12
1987	14
1991	15
1995	16
2011	17
2012	18
2028	19

Filling out the Victorian twelve

The league expanded twice in its first three decades and then stopped. In 1908 it went to ten clubs, with Richmond crossing from the VFA and University entering from the Metropolitan Football Association. University was a genuine amateur experiment inside a competition that was quietly professionalising, and it withdrew after the 1914 season, leaving nine.

The bigger step came in 1925, when Footscray, Hawthorn and North Melbourne all crossed from the VFA in the same year. That made twelve, and twelve is what the competition stayed for the next sixty-two seasons. Every premiership from 1925 to 1986 was won by one of those twelve Victorian clubs.

Why the competition stayed Victorian for so long

It is easy to read the long freeze as complacency. It was closer to a governance problem. The league was run by delegates from its member clubs, and any structural change had to be approved by the very clubs that would be diluted by it. Adding a Perth or Adelaide club meant redistributing broadcast income, fixture slots and finals access away from existing members. There was no majority for that.

The other states were not sitting idle. The South Australian National Football League and the West Australian Football League were strong, well-supported competitions in their own right, with their own grand finals, their own crowds and their own identities. Their best players were regularly recruited to Victoria, which was a constant grievance, but the leagues themselves had no reason to want a national competition run out of Melbourne.

Interstate football happened instead through representative matches — state-of-origin games in which Western Australia and South Australia beat Victoria often enough to make the point that the VFL was not, on the field, the whole of the sport. Those fixtures gave the national game a shape that the club competition did not.

What broke the Victorian model

Three pressures arrived together in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The first was money. Player payments rose sharply through the 1970s, and there was no salary cap to slow them. Clubs with small membership bases and no ground revenue could not keep pace, and several of them ran deficits year after year.

The second was Melbourne itself. Twelve senior clubs in one city, several of them within a few kilometres of each other in the inner suburbs, were competing for the same supporters as the population moved to the outer suburbs and away from the old grounds. Fitzroy, South Melbourne and North Melbourne were all exposed.

The third was television. A competition that reached one state was worth far less to a national broadcaster than one that reached five. The commercial value of expansion was obvious, and it was the argument that eventually beat the clubs' self-interest.

The Sydney relocation

South Melbourne was the first club to go. Losing money at the Lake Oval, with a shrinking local base, it was moved to Sydney and played its home matches there from 1982 as the Sydney Swans. It was the first interstate relocation in the competition's history.

The move was contested at the time and remained precarious for years. Sydney is a rugby league city and the Swans were selling an unfamiliar code into it, at the Sydney Cricket Ground, against entrenched competition. The club went through private ownership in the mid-1980s and near-collapse afterwards before it stabilised. It won its first premiership as the Swans in 2005, more than two decades after the move.

For all the difficulty, the relocation established the principle that a licence could be moved. Once that was true, the twelve-club Victorian competition was over as a concept.

1987 and the first genuinely national season

The 1987 season admitted two new clubs: the West Coast Eagles in Perth and the Brisbane Bears in Queensland. The competition went from twelve clubs to fourteen and, for the first time, from one state to three.

The two ventures could not have been more different. West Coast was drawn from a deep and well-organised WAFL talent base and was competitive almost immediately, reaching finals within three seasons and winning a premiership in 1992 at a ground that would eventually be replaced by Optus Stadium. The Brisbane Bears were a start-up in a market where Australian football was a minority code, playing early home matches at Carrara on the Gold Coast rather than in Brisbane, and they spent most of a decade near the bottom of the ladder before the club's fortunes changed at the Gabba.

1. 1Relocate a clubSouth Melbourne is moved to Sydney for the 1982 season and becomes the Sydney Swans, establishing that a licence can leave Victoria.
2. 2Admit new marketsWest Coast and the Brisbane Bears enter for 1987, taking the competition to fourteen clubs across three states.
3. 3Build the equalisation rulesA national draft and a salary cap are put in place so that new clubs can compete and existing clubs cannot simply outspend them.
4. 4Change the nameThe Victorian Football League becomes the Australian Football League in 1990 to match its actual footprint.
5. 5Enter South AustraliaAdelaide joins in 1991 after the SANFL blocks Port Adelaide's earlier approach, and Port Adelaide is admitted separately for 1997.
6. 6Consolidate the weakFitzroy's football operations are absorbed into the Brisbane Bears to form the Brisbane Lions for the 1997 season.
7. 7Take on rugby league heartlandGold Coast enters in 2011 and Greater Western Sydney in 2012, both heavily funded by the league.
8. 8Close the mapTasmania is granted the nineteenth licence and will enter in 2028 after a season-building period in the VFL.

The sequence of structural decisions that turned a twelve-club Victorian league into an eighteen-club national one. Each step is a documented league decision, not an estimate.

The equalisation machinery built alongside expansion

Expansion only works if the new clubs can eventually win. The league built the machinery for that in the same period.

A draft was introduced in stages. A limited version ran from 1981, restricted to interstate players and giving each club two selections in reverse ladder order. The first draft in the modern sense — a general intake allocated in reverse ladder order — was held in November 1986, and it initially operated alongside the old zone system rather than replacing it outright. A salary cap followed, capping what any club could spend on its playing list.

Together these two rules changed the nature of the competition. Before them, a wealthy club could sign whoever it wanted at whatever price it could pay, which was exactly the dynamic that had caused the 1896 breakaway in the first place. After them, the ladder allocated talent and the cap constrained spending. Rugby league took a different path, controlling its market through the NRL salary cap without a draft at all, and the difference between the two systems is still one of the clearest structural contrasts between the codes.

1990: the renaming

By the end of the 1989 season the competition contained clubs in Melbourne, Geelong, Sydney, Perth and Brisbane, and Adelaide had been settled for 1991. The name Victorian Football League no longer described anything. In 1990 the league was renamed the Australian Football League.

The renaming did not break the record books. Premierships, games records and goalkicking records run continuously from 1897 to the present, and clubs count flags won in 1902 and 2023 in the same total. When you see a record described as VFL/AFL, that is what the slash means.

• 8Founding clubs in 1897
• 93Seasons as the VFL
• 18Clubs in 2026
• 8Non-Victorian clubs in 2026

Structural counts, not performance measures. Club and season figures are as at the 2026 season.

Adelaide, Fremantle and Port Adelaide

South Australia's entry was messier than Western Australia's. Port Adelaide, the strongest club in the SANFL, negotiated its own way into the national competition around 1990 without the SANFL's agreement. The SANFL took the matter to court and countered by proposing a composite South Australian side that it would control. That side entered as the Adelaide Crows in 1991 and played at Football Park before the competition moved to a redeveloped Adelaide Oval.

Fremantle followed in 1995 as Western Australia's second club, drawn from the south of the Perth metropolitan area, and Port Adelaide finally received a licence for 1997. Port remains the only club to have crossed directly from a state league into the national competition carrying its own name and colours, which is why its relationship with the SANFL is still a live subject in Adelaide.

Fitzroy: the club expansion cost

Fitzroy was one of the eight clubs that walked out of the VFA in 1896 and it won eight premierships. It was also small, inner-suburban, ground-poor and short of members, and it had no way of generating the revenue the modern competition demanded.

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s the club moved grounds repeatedly, lost money continuously and survived on league support. In 1996 it went into administration. A merger with North Melbourne was proposed and blocked, and instead Fitzroy's football operations were absorbed into the Brisbane Bears, which became the Brisbane Lions for the 1997 season. Fitzroy continues today as a community club outside the AFL.

The uncomfortable point is that Fitzroy was not uniquely badly run. Several Victorian clubs were in comparable trouble in the same decade and were saved by league intervention, ground deals or mergers that did not proceed. Fitzroy was the one that ran out of time.

Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney

The last two entries were the most deliberate and the most expensive. Gold Coast entered in 2011 and Greater Western Sydney in 2012, taking the competition to eighteen clubs. Neither was a response to demand from an existing football community. Both were the league placing clubs in growth corridors inside rugby league territory, with heavy central funding, concessional draft access and multi-year support packages.

The results have been slow, which was expected. Both clubs took roughly a decade to become consistently competitive. The strategic argument the AFL made — that a code which does not contest the fastest-growing population centres in the country will eventually lose them — is the same argument rugby league makes in reverse when it looks at Melbourne, and the codes' overlapping ambitions are part of why the difference between the rugby codes and Australian football is such a persistent subject.

Tasmania and the nineteenth licence

Tasmania supplied players to the VFL for a century without ever holding a licence, and the case for a Tasmanian club had been argued for decades. The AFL granted the nineteenth licence with an entry date of 2028, attached to a condition that a new stadium be built in Hobart. That condition became a lasting political fight in Tasmania and is the main reason the process took as long as it did.

The club did not wait for 2028 to start playing. Tasmania entered the second-tier Victorian Football League for the 2026 season, winning its first home-and-away match against Coburg, so that it arrives at the top level with a list, a coaching structure and an administration already running.

Which clubs entered when

Season	Change	Detail
1897	League begins	Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Fitzroy, Geelong, Melbourne, South Melbourne, St Kilda
1908	Two clubs added	Richmond from the VFA and University from the Metropolitan Football Association
1915	One club leaves	University withdraws, leaving nine clubs
1925	Three clubs added	Footscray, Hawthorn and North Melbourne cross from the VFA
1982	First relocation	South Melbourne plays home matches in Sydney as the Sydney Swans
1987	Two clubs added	West Coast in Perth and the Brisbane Bears in Queensland
1990	Renaming	The VFL becomes the Australian Football League
1991	One club added	Adelaide enters as South Australia's first club
1995	One club added	Fremantle enters as Western Australia's second club
1997	Merger and admission	Fitzroy is absorbed into the Brisbane Lions and Port Adelaide is admitted
2011	One club added	Gold Coast enters
2012	One club added	Greater Western Sydney enters, making eighteen
2028	One club to be added	Tasmania is scheduled to enter as the nineteenth club

The near-mergers that did not happen

The mid-1990s produced a run of merger proposals that are now half-forgotten, and they explain why the era felt so unstable to supporters at the time.

Hawthorn and Melbourne agreed to merge in 1996 and got as far as a proposed name and colours before Hawthorn members voted the deal down at a packed meeting and set about raising money to keep the club independent. Fitzroy's proposed merger with North Melbourne was announced and then blocked, which is how the club ended up in Brisbane rather than at Arden Street. Footscray had survived a merger attempt with Fitzroy a decade earlier, in 1989, only because supporters raised enough money in a few weeks to keep the club alive.

Read together, these episodes show what the league was actually attempting. The commission's judgement was that Melbourne could not sustain ten clubs while the competition simultaneously funded start-ups in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney, and its preferred solution was consolidation. Supporters refused, repeatedly and expensively, and the league accepted the outcome. The current ten Victorian clubs exist because those votes went the way they did.

Where the money comes from

The financial shape of the competition changed as much as its map. In the VFA era and for much of the VFL era, a club lived on its gate, its members and its social club. Broadcast income was marginal, and the argument of 1896 was about gate receipts precisely because gate receipts were the money.

Today the great majority of league revenue is central: broadcast rights sold by the AFL on behalf of all clubs, national sponsorship, and finals income, distributed by the commission according to a formula it controls. Clubs still earn from memberships, matchday revenue and their own sponsors, but the central distribution is what keeps an eighteen-club national competition solvent.

That inversion is the real end point of VFL AFL history. The 1896 breakaway happened because the strong clubs refused to pool their gate money. The modern competition works because almost all the significant money is pooled, and a commission the clubs do not control decides how it is split.

Who runs the competition now

The single most consequential governance change of the modern era was moving authority off the clubs and onto a commission. Under the old model, league decisions were made by delegates the clubs appointed, which meant that expansion, revenue redistribution and fixture reform were all subject to the veto of the parties who would lose from them.

The AFL Commission sits above the clubs. It controls the laws of the game, the fixture, the broadcast agreements, the distribution of central revenue, the granting of licences and the equalisation rules. Clubs are members of the league rather than its owners in any operational sense, and the commission has repeatedly made decisions — relocations, mergers, fixture allocations, funding differentials — that individual clubs opposed.

That structure is unusual by international standards and it is the direct reason the expansion described on this page was possible at all.

How the grounds changed with the competition

The competition's stadium map changed as radically as its club list. In 1970 most Melbourne clubs played home matches at their own suburban grounds, and the grand final crowd of 121696 at the MCG included vast standing terraces that no longer exist.

Today Victorian football is concentrated at two venues, the MCG and Marvel Stadium in the Docklands, with Geelong the exception. Interstate football is played at large modern stadiums in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney, several of which are shared with cricket over the Australian summer — the same rectangle-versus-oval scheduling problem that shapes the Australian cricket grounds guide.

The consequence is that the record crowd is unlikely to be broken. The MCG's current capacity is a little over 100000 with every spectator seated, so a grand final today sells out at a number well below 1970's.

What the transition actually changed

Three things are worth separating out.

The competition became more even. The draft and the salary cap did what they were designed to do, and premierships since 1990 have been spread across far more clubs than in any comparable earlier period. Six of the eight clubs admitted or relocated since 1982 have won a flag.

The competition became more centrally managed. Fixtures are set by the league with commercial and competitive considerations in mind rather than by a simple home-and-away symmetry, which is why an eighteen-club competition playing twenty-three matches cannot give every club the same schedule. That imbalance is a permanent source of argument.

And the competition became less local. Suburban grounds, standing terraces, reserve grade at the same venue and clubs walking distance from their supporters are gone from the top level. Most of that shifted down to the second tier, where it still exists.

Reading VFL and AFL records together

A practical note for anyone using historical statistics. Because the premiership series is continuous, a club's all-time record blends eras that are barely comparable. Scores were far lower in the early decades, seasons were shorter, interchange did not exist, and until 1987 every club was Victorian.

When you see a career games record or a premiership tally, check which era it spans before comparing it to anything. The same caution applies to attendance records, which are shaped by stadium capacity and seating rules more than by demand, and to goalkicking records, which respond to how the game was being coached at the time.

Where to go next

If you want the part of the story that comes before this page — how the game got its rules at all, who Tom Wills was, and what is actually documented about Indigenous football's place in that history — start with the origins of Australian rules football. If you want to know what happened to the competitions the VFL left behind and what sits under the AFL today, the guide to state leagues below the AFL covers the VFL, SANFL and WAFL as they now operate.

For the wider Australian sporting calendar the AFL season sits inside, including how the winter codes hand over to cricket each December, see the Australia sport hub and the sports index. The cricket side of the same shared grounds and the same shared summer is set out in the origin of cricket in Australia and the guide to the Sheffield Shield.