The SANFL Explained: South Australian Football

The SANFL is the senior Australian rules football competition in South Australia and, at the same time, the body that governs the game across the state. It was founded on 30 April 1877 as the South Australian Football Association, took its current name in 1927, and is generally accepted as the oldest surviving football league of any code anywhere in the world. Ten clubs contest its League grade, eight of them independent community clubs with suburban home grounds and two of them the reserves sides of the AFL clubs Adelaide and Port Adelaide.

If you want the SANFL in three sentences: it was the top level of football in South Australia for well over a century, it lost that status when the Adelaide Crows entered the AFL in 1991 and Port Adelaide followed in 1997, and it has since settled into a second-tier competition that still draws crowds no other Australian second tier gets near. Port Adelaide has won 36 premierships, a total unmatched anywhere in the code. The grand final has been played at Adelaide Oval since 2014 and pulls crowds in the thirty thousands.

This page covers the clubs, the history, the AFL relationship that nearly broke the league, the final five system, the awards and the practical business of watching a match. For how the SANFL fits alongside the other second-tier competitions, see the guide to state leagues below the AFL, and for the Western Australian equivalent see the WAFL explained.

Founded in 1877, and still going

The South Australian Football Association formed on 30 April 1877, after a series of meetings in Adelaide settled on Victorian-style rules: an oval ball, running with the ball, no pushing in the back. Eight clubs contested the first season. It was the first governing body of its kind for football in Australia, formed a matter of weeks before the Victorian Football Association.

That claim to being the oldest surviving league of any code gets repeated a lot in Adelaide, and it holds up. Older competitions exist on paper but were interrupted, absorbed or dissolved. The SANFL has run more or less continuously for close to a century and a half, through two world wars, the loss of its best clubs' status to the national competition, and the sale of its own stadium.

The name changed to the South Australian National Football League in 1927. The word national in the title is a historical curiosity rather than a claim about geography, dating from a period when the code itself was routinely called Australian National Football.

The ten clubs

Eight of the ten are community clubs of long standing, each attached to a particular part of Adelaide. Two are AFL reserves entries admitted in 2014. Home ground names in South Australia carry sponsor branding that changes almost annually, so the suburb is the reliable identifier.

Club	Nickname	Home ground suburb	Founded	Joined	Flags	Last flag
Port Adelaide	Magpies	Alberton	1870	1877	36	1999
Norwood	Redlegs	Norwood	1878	1878	31	2022
Sturt	Double Blues	Unley	1901	1901	16	2025
North Adelaide	Roosters	Prospect	1881	1888	14	2018
South Adelaide	Panthers	Noarlunga Downs	1876	1877	11	1964
Central District	Bulldogs	Elizabeth	1959	1964	9	2010
West Adelaide	Bloods	Richmond	1892	1897	9	2015
Glenelg	Tigers	Glenelg East	1920	1921	7	2024
Woodville-West Torrens	Eagles	Woodville South	1990	1991	5	2021
Adelaide	Crows	Adelaide Oval	2014	2014	0	—

Woodville-West Torrens is the youngest of the traditional clubs, formed in 1990 by merging Woodville and West Torrens after both had struggled through the 1980s. Central District is the newest genuine addition, admitted in 1964 to serve the northern suburbs around Elizabeth, and it took until 2000 to win its first flag before dominating the following decade.

Port Adelaide36

Norwood31

Sturt16

North Adelaide14

South Adelaide11

Central District9

West Adelaide9

Glenelg7

Woodville-West Torrens5

Career premiership totals in the SANFL League grade for the ten current clubs, as recorded in league premiership lists. Totals for clubs formed by merger include only the merged entity's own flags. Adelaide is omitted because it has none. Premierships won by clubs no longer in the competition are not shown.

Show the numbers

SANFL premierships by current club

Item	Value
Port Adelaide	36
Norwood	31
Sturt	16
North Adelaide	14
South Adelaide	11
Central District	9
West Adelaide	9
Glenelg	7
Woodville-West Torrens	5

Port Adelaide and the number 36

No club in Australian football has won as much as Port Adelaide. Thirty-six SANFL premierships, plus four Championship of Australia titles won in 1890, 1910, 1913 and 1914 in the era when the best club in each colony played off for a national title.

The runs are what make the total. Port won six consecutive flags from 1954 to 1959 under Fos Williams and another five in a row in the early 1960s, and then took another sustained block in the 1980s and 1990s under John Cahill. There is no comparable sequence in the SANFL and few anywhere in the code.

Alberton Oval, the club's home since the nineteenth century, is a genuinely intimidating ground for visiting teams and remains the base of the Magpies side. The last SANFL premiership came in 1999, which is a long time by Port standards and reflects what happened to the club's state league team once the AFL side took priority.

Norwood, Sturt and the rest

Norwood is the other historically dominant club, with 31 flags and the second-longest continuous membership of the competition. Its home at Norwood Oval sits in the middle of a busy eastern suburbs high street, and matchdays there feel more like an English football ground than a suburban oval.

Sturt's peak came under Jack Oatey in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of sustained success that gave South Australian football one of its defining coaching figures. Sturt won again in 2025, defeating Glenelg in the grand final at Adelaide Oval before a crowd in the mid-thirty thousands for a sixteenth premiership.

Glenelg, based at the beachfront end of the tram line, took flags in 2024 and remains one of the better supported clubs. North Adelaide won in 2018, West Adelaide in 2015 and Woodville-West Torrens in 2021, which tells you something useful about the competition: over the last decade, the premiership has moved around.

South Adelaide is the outlier. It has 11 premierships and has not won one since 1964, the longest drought in the competition by a wide margin.

The competition below the League grade

The SANFL is not just ten senior teams. Each of the ten clubs runs a reserves side and an under-18 side in parallel competitions, so a club fields three or four teams on a matchday.

Beneath that, the SANFL governs a second-tier statewide men's competition, the metropolitan Adelaide Footy League with dozens of clubs across many divisions, and around two dozen country leagues covering regional South Australia. The SANFLW provides the senior women's competition, and the same club names appear across all of it.

That is the difference between the SANFL and a league like the VFL. The VFL is a competition run by the AFL. The SANFL is a governing body that happens to run a competition, and it makes decisions about junior football, umpiring, facilities and pathways across the whole state.

• Community clubs80.0%
• AFL reserves entries20.0%

A structural breakdown of the current SANFL League grade. Community clubs are independent organisations with their own memberships and boards. AFL reserves entries are the Adelaide and Port Adelaide sides that joined in 2014. Port Adelaide is counted as an AFL reserves entry because its senior side now functions as Port Adelaide's AFL reserves team, though the club itself long predates the arrangement.

Show the numbers

The ten League clubs by type

Item	Value
Community clubs	8
AFL reserves entries	2

Football Park: the league builds its own ground

For most of its first century the SANFL played its finals at Adelaide Oval, which it did not own and did not control. Ground was broken on its own stadium at West Lakes in 1971 and Football Park opened on 4 May 1974, with Central District playing North Adelaide in the first match.

It was, for a while, exactly what the league wanted: a purpose-built football ground with capacity for very large crowds, owned outright by the SANFL. The 1976 grand final between Sturt and Port Adelaide drew 66987, the record SANFL attendance.

It also turned into a financial problem. Football Park was a long way from the city, it was expensive to maintain, and once AFL football arrived it became a venue the SANFL owned but the AFL clubs used. When the Adelaide Oval redevelopment brought AFL football back into the city in 2014, Football Park's purpose evaporated. The last SANFL grand final there was played in October 2014, Norwood beating North Adelaide for back-to-back flags.

1990: Port Adelaide goes to the AFL alone

The single most consequential event in modern SANFL history was a set of private negotiations. In 1990 Port Adelaide, the strongest and best supported club in the state, opened talks with the AFL about taking a licence in the national competition on its own account.

When this became known the other SANFL clubs called a crisis meeting. The objection was not that South Australia should stay out of the AFL. It was that Port Adelaide going alone would strip the SANFL of its biggest drawcard, take its supporters with it, and leave the remaining clubs to run a diminished competition with no compensation.

The SANFL's response was to counter-offer. Instead of Port Adelaide, it proposed a composite South Australian club that the league itself would control, drawing players from every SANFL club and representing the whole state. The AFL took the deal. The Adelaide Football Club entered the AFL in 1991.

What it cost

The counter-offer worked in the narrow sense that the SANFL kept control. It did not protect the competition.

SANFL attendances fell about 45 per cent between 1990 and 1993. South Australian supporters had a new club playing at the top level and a great many of them switched their Saturdays to it. The one club that went the other way was Port Adelaide, which increased its crowds by roughly 13 per cent over the same period, because its supporters treated the Magpies as the SANFL's standard-bearer against a manufactured rival.

Port Adelaide eventually got what it had wanted. It won the second South Australian licence in December 1994 and entered the AFL for the 1997 season, becoming the only pre-existing SANFL club to enter the national competition under its own name. The story of that expansion from the AFL's side is in AFL clubs outside Victoria.

Two clubs, one name

Port Adelaide's dual existence created a problem nobody had faced before. The club was now running an AFL team called the Power and a SANFL team called the Magpies.

The SANFL insisted for years that the two operations be kept apart, to stop Port Adelaide gaining an advantage in the state competition from its AFL list. Unselected Port AFL players were distributed among other SANFL clubs rather than playing for the Magpies. In November 2010 the two operations formally merged off-field, and in September 2013 the Magpies became Port Adelaide's official AFL reserves side.

The arrangement is unusual and worth understanding properly. The Magpies are not a separate club that shares a name. They are the same club, playing in a second competition, with a hundred and fifty years of its own history and a premiership record its AFL side has no claim on.

2014: the Crows join and the grand final moves

Two things changed at once in 2014. Adelaide entered a reserves side in the SANFL, taking the competition to ten clubs and giving both South Australian AFL clubs a state league outlet. And the grand final moved back to a redeveloped Adelaide Oval.

The second change was straightforwardly good for the competition. Adelaide Oval is a better venue than Football Park in every respect that matters to a spectator, it is in the city, and the SANFL decider now takes place in a stadium that fills properly. Crowds in the thirty thousands are the norm.

The first change is still argued about. Adding two AFL reserves sides raised the standard and gave the competition a fixture list that includes professionally prepared teams. It also meant two of the ten clubs are not clubs in the ordinary sense, with no members, no supporters of their own and no stake in the competition beyond player development.

The season

The home-and-away season opens in late March and runs to late August across roughly eighteen to nineteen rounds. With ten clubs and an odd round count, the draw is not perfectly balanced, and clubs play some opponents twice and others three times.

The ladder works on premiership points and percentage in the standard Australian football way: four points for a win, two for a draw, and points scored divided by points conceded as the separator. Percentage matters more in a ten-team competition than an eighteen-team one, because a small ladder produces more ties on points.

Matches are played across suburban grounds from Elizabeth in the north to Noarlunga in the south, with Adelaide Oval used for selected fixtures including an Anzac Day match.

How the final five works

Five clubs qualify and the series runs four weeks. It is the same shape used in the WAFL and, in an earlier era, in the VFL.

1. 1Week one qualifying finalThe second and third placed clubs meet. The winner goes into the second semi-final with a chance to reach the grand final directly and the loser drops to the first semi-final.
2. 2Week one elimination finalThe fourth and fifth placed clubs meet in a straight knockout. The loser is out of the season and the winner goes into the first semi-final.
3. 3Week two first semi-finalThe loser of the qualifying final plays the winner of the elimination final. The loser is eliminated and the winner survives to the preliminary final.
4. 4Week two second semi-finalThe minor premier enters here against the winner of the qualifying final. The winner goes straight to the grand final and the loser drops to the preliminary final.
5. 5Week three preliminary finalThe loser of the second semi-final plays the winner of the first semi-final for the second grand final place.
6. 6Week four grand finalThe two survivors meet at Adelaide Oval for the Thomas Seymour Hill Premiership Trophy.

The current top-five structure. The minor premier does not play in week one and enters at the second semi-final. Exact scheduling and venues vary by season and some finals are played at Adelaide Oval and others at club grounds.

The structure gives the top two clubs a double chance and gives fourth and fifth nothing at all. A club that finishes fifth has to win four consecutive knockout matches to take the flag, which is why it happens so rarely. Compare that with the eight-team system described in the AFL finals system explained and the difference in protection for a high finish is obvious.

Grand final day

The decider is played in the penultimate weekend of September, deliberately clear of the AFL Grand Final. The prize is the Thomas Seymour Hill Premiership Trophy, and the best player on the ground receives the Jack Oatey Medal, named after the Sturt coach whose sides defined the 1960s and 1970s.

The 2025 grand final was Sturt against Glenelg. Sturt won 16.9 to 11.8, a margin of 31 points, before 34426 at Adelaide Oval, taking a sixteenth premiership and a tenth minor premiership in the same season.

Those crowd numbers are the reason the SANFL is described as the second most attended Australian football competition behind the AFL. No other second-tier football competition in the country puts thirty thousand people in a stadium for a club match.

The Magarey Medal

The SANFL's individual award is older than any comparable honour in the code. The Magarey Medal has been presented since 1898, to the fairest and most brilliant player of the season, and is named after William Ashley Magarey, then chairman of the league.

It predates the Brownlow by twenty-six years and the Sandover by twenty-three. A Magarey Medal is a permanent marker of standing in South Australian football, and the list of winners includes a large number of players who never played a game at national level because the national level did not exist yet or because they chose to stay.

Voting has changed format several times over more than a century, which makes cross-era comparisons awkward. What has not changed is the weight the award carries in the state.

What SANFL players earn

Semi-professional is the honest description. Most senior SANFL footballers work full-time, train two or three evenings a week and pick up match payments and a retainer on top of their wage. The better players at the stronger clubs can earn a useful supplementary income. Nobody in the competition is a professional footballer on SANFL money alone.

The AFL-listed players are the exception, and their presence distorts things. An Adelaide or Port Adelaide reserves player is paid by his AFL club under the AFL's own list and payment rules, and none of that money touches the SANFL's arrangements. Set that next to the AFL salary cap and the distance between the two tiers is clear.

The pathway question

The SANFL is not where AFL clubs find players. It is where they check them.

South Australian juniors come through the state's talent pathway and the national under-18 championships, and are drafted from there under the process described in the AFL draft explained. A prospect will often play a handful of senior SANFL matches in his draft year, which is a genuinely useful test: an eighteen-year-old playing against thirty-year-old men who tackle for a living tells recruiters something an under-18 carnival cannot.

Where the SANFL matters most is at the other end. Mature-age recruits, delisted players and rookies rebuilding form all pass through it, and a twenty-three-year-old dominating SANFL football is a live draft prospect.

The rivalries

The one that matters most is Port Adelaide against Norwood, the two clubs with 67 premierships between them and a mutual dislike that runs back into the nineteenth century. It is a class and geography rivalry as much as a football one: the port and the workers' suburbs against the eastern establishment. The fixture still draws the competition's biggest home-and-away crowds.

Sturt against Glenelg carries the southern suburbs, and Sturt against Norwood has produced a long series of finals. Central District against North Adelaide is the northern derby, and West Adelaide against Woodville-West Torrens covers the western side of the city. None of these are manufactured. Each maps onto a real division of Adelaide, which is why they survived the arrival of the AFL when so much else about the competition did not.

What South Australian football lost, arguably, was that these rivalries stopped being the biggest games in the state. The Showdown between Adelaide and Port Adelaide took that role from 1997 onwards, and it is a rivalry only three decades old competing with ones a century and a half old.

The Croweaters and interstate football

South Australia's representative side, nicknamed the Croweaters, has beaten every other state at some point and holds one of the strongest interstate records in the code, with a particularly sharp rivalry against Victoria that produced the local phrase about kicking a Vic. For most of the twentieth century, interstate carnivals and state-of-origin matches were the pinnacle available to a South Australian footballer, because there was no national club competition to aspire to.

That ended with the AFL's expansion. The best South Australians now play for AFL clubs, are not released for state duty, and are worth too much in contract terms to be risked in a representative match. Occasional games between SANFL and WAFL representative sides keep the fixture technically alive, and they are a reasonable contest between the two strongest state leagues, but nobody pretends they carry the old weight.

Things people get wrong about the SANFL

The first is assuming it is the Crows' and the Power's reserves competition. It is not. Eight of the ten clubs have nothing to do with either AFL club, and the competition existed for 137 seasons before those two sides entered it.

The second is treating Port Adelaide's 36 premierships as an AFL statistic. They are not. They belong to the Magpies, in a competition the Power has never played in, and the AFL club's own premiership record is entirely separate.

The third is expecting promotion and relegation. There is none. A SANFL premiership is an end in itself, not a step towards anything, which is a structural feature of Australian football that surprises people arriving from football codes organised on the European model. The wider picture is set out in the guide to state leagues below the AFL.

Watching a game

Suburban SANFL football is cheap and easy to get to. Gate prices are low, most grounds are on a train or tram line, you can walk up on the day, and the boundary is close enough that you can hear coaches and players clearly. Clubrooms sell beer and the canteen sells pies.

The grand final is a different proposition and needs a ticket. If you are in South Australia in September and want to see the competition at its best, that is the day.

Adelaide Oval's role as a shared ground means SANFL football and Test cricket occupy the same turf within months of each other, an arrangement covered in the Australian cricket grounds guide and one of the more distinctive features of sport in Australia.

Numbers worth knowing

A handful of figures do most of the work when South Australians argue about their competition. Thirty-six is Port Adelaide's premiership total and the highest in the code. Thirty-one is Norwood's. Sixty-six thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven is the record crowd, set at Football Park for the 1976 grand final between Sturt and Port Adelaide, and it will not be beaten because Adelaide Oval does not hold that many.

Eighteen ninety-eight is the first Magarey Medal, nineteen twenty-seven is the name change, nineteen seventy-four is Football Park opening, nineteen ninety-one is the Crows entering the AFL, nineteen ninety-seven is Port Adelaide entering, and twenty fourteen is the year the reserves sides arrived and the grand final went back into the city. Every significant argument about the SANFL is anchored to one of those dates.

The one that gets forgotten is 1964, the year South Adelaide last won a premiership. Sixty-odd seasons without a flag in a ten-team competition is a statistical event in its own right.

What the SANFL is now

It is a genuinely odd institution and worth taking on its own terms. It is older than the competition above it. It governs a state. It runs ten clubs, two of which are not really clubs. It lost its status as the top level of football in South Australia thirty-five years ago and still fills a stadium.

The clubs that survived the transition did so because they were rooted in specific places, and that has not changed. Port Adelaide is Alberton, Norwood is the Parade, Glenelg is the beach end of the tram, Central District is Elizabeth. That is what the SANFL still has that the tier above it does not, and it is why the competition has outlasted every prediction of its collapse since 1991.