The WAFL Explained: West Australian Football

The WAFL is the top senior Australian rules football competition in Western Australia. It was founded in 1885 as the West Australian Football Association, took the WAFL name in 2001, and now runs ten clubs through roughly twenty home-and-away rounds from April to late August, with a five-club finals series that ends at Optus Stadium in September. Nine of the ten are independent community clubs. The tenth is the West Coast Eagles reserves side, which entered in 2019.

The short version of what the WAFL is today: a competition that used to be the highest level of football in Western Australia and is not any more. West Coast's entry into the national competition in 1987 and Fremantle's in 1995 took the best players, the audience and the broadcast attention, and the WAFL became a feeder league within a decade. It survived that, and the ten clubs still play in front of their own supporters at their own grounds, but nobody in Perth pretends the WAFL is what it was in the 1960s.

This page covers all ten clubs and their grounds, the competition's history from the goldrush era to the present, exactly how the West Coast and Fremantle arrangements work, the top-five finals system, the Sandover Medal, the money, and how to watch. For how the WAFL sits alongside the other second-tier competitions, see the guide to state leagues below the AFL, and for the South Australian equivalent see the SANFL explained.

From rugby to Australian rules in 1885

Football in Perth started as rugby. In 1885 several of the leading rugby clubs decided the code was not much of a spectacle and switched. Fremantle made the decision at a meeting in the Cleopatra Hotel and three other clubs followed, and out of that came the West Australian Football Association. Rovers won the first premiership.

The competition that resulted was small and local for its first decade. Western Australia in the mid-1880s was a colony of a few tens of thousands of people, and the football played reflected that.

What changed everything was gold. The discoveries of the 1890s brought a large population from the eastern colonies, and a substantial number of them had played football in Victoria and South Australia. Standards rose sharply. A separate Goldfields Football League formed in 1896 and for a time was strong enough to hold its own representation on the national football council, which it kept until 1919.

The ten clubs

Nine clubs are traditional and one is an AFL reserves entry. Home grounds carry commercial naming rights that change frequently, so the suburb is the reliable identifier. Note that Leederville Oval is shared by two clubs, and Lathlain Park by another two.

Club	Nickname	Home ground suburb	Founded	Joined	Flags	Last flag
East Fremantle	Sharks	East Fremantle	1898	1898	30	2023
West Perth	Falcons	Joondalup	1891	1891	20	2022
East Perth	Royals	Leederville	1906	1906	17	2002
Subiaco	Lions	Leederville	1896	1901	16	2021
South Fremantle	Bulldogs	Fremantle	1900	1900	15	2025
Claremont	Tigers	Claremont	1906	1926	12	2012
Swan Districts	Swans	Bassendean	1934	1934	8	2010
Perth	Demons	Lathlain	1899	1899	7	1977
Peel Thunder	Thunder	Mandurah	1996	1997	3	2024
West Coast Eagles	Eagles	Lathlain	2019	2019	0	—

The competition has been through a lot of clubs that no longer exist. Rovers, Unions, Imperials, Metropolitan, North Fremantle, Midland Junction, Centrals and Victorian all played WAFA or WAFL football at some point between 1885 and 1917 and none survived. The current field has been stable since Peel Thunder's entry in 1997 apart from West Coast's addition in 2019.

• 1885Year founded
• 10Clubs in the League grade
• 20Home-and-away rounds
• 5Clubs in the finals

Structural figures for the competition in its most recent completed seasons. These are counts of how the competition is put together, not measurements of participation, attendance or standard. Round counts vary slightly year to year and the club total has changed twice since 1997.

East Fremantle and the number 30

East Fremantle has 30 premierships, more than any other club in Western Australian football and twice as many as any club except West Perth. Most of that total was built in the first half of the twentieth century, when East Fremantle was the dominant side in the state and won flags in long clusters.

The club's most recent premiership came in 2023, which broke a long modern drought and mattered a great deal in East Fremantle. Its home ground on the hill above the river is one of the older senior football grounds in the country and looks it, in the good way.

The Fremantle derby against South Fremantle is the competition's oldest and sharpest rivalry, two clubs a short distance apart with 45 premierships between them and a shared history reaching back to 1900.

East Fremantle30

West Perth20

East Perth17

Subiaco16

South Fremantle15

Claremont12

Swan Districts8

Perth7

Peel Thunder3

League grade premiership totals for the nine clubs with at least one, drawn from competition premiership lists. West Coast Eagles is omitted because it has none. Premierships won by clubs that have since left the competition are not included.

Show the numbers

WAFL premierships by current club

Item	Value
East Fremantle	30
West Perth	20
East Perth	17
Subiaco	16
South Fremantle	15
Claremont	12
Swan Districts	8
Perth	7
Peel Thunder	3

The rest of the field

West Perth, with 20, is the second most successful club and now plays out of Joondalup in the northern suburbs, a long way from the inner-city ground it started at. It won in 2022.

East Perth has 17 flags and has not won since 2002, a drought that ran through the years of its West Coast alignment. Subiaco was the dominant club of the 2010s, winning repeatedly and taking a further flag in 2021, and shares Leederville Oval with East Perth.

South Fremantle won the 2025 grand final by two points over East Perth at Optus Stadium, in front of 23752. Claremont's most recent flag was 2012 and Swan Districts' was 2010. Perth, at Lathlain, has the longest drought in the competition, with no premiership since 1977.

Peel Thunder is the outlier. Founded in 1996 and admitted for 1997 from Mandurah, an hour south of the city, it spent its early seasons at the bottom of the ladder before the Fremantle alignment transformed it.

What the Eagles did to the WAFL

The West Coast Eagles entered the national competition in 1987 as one of the first two interstate clubs, alongside Brisbane. In 1992 they became the first interstate club to win an AFL premiership. Fremantle followed in 1995.

For the WAFL this was close to an extinction event. The best players went to the AFL clubs. So did the crowds, the newspaper coverage, the sponsorship and the sense that the WAFL grand final decided anything of consequence. The competition went, in the space of a decade, from being technically the equal of any league in the country to a feeder competition.

The attendance figures tell it plainly enough. The WAFL recorded a season attendance over 960000 in 1967 and drew 55517 to the 1981 grand final. The 2005 grand final drew 22570. The 2025 figure was 23752, in a much larger stadium.

That is not a criticism of the AFL clubs, who did what they were licensed to do. It is what happens to a state competition when a national one takes its market. South Australia went through the same thing four years later, as covered in the SANFL explained, and the broader pattern is set out in state leagues below the AFL.

How West Coast and Fremantle use the WAFL now

Both AFL clubs need somewhere for unselected listed players to play. Neither sends them to Victoria. The arrangements have changed several times and are easy to get wrong, so here is the sequence.

Until 2014 the AFL clubs had no formal alignment and their players were distributed through the WAFL under various arrangements. In 2014 both entered direct alignments: West Coast with East Perth and Fremantle with Peel Thunder. Under an alignment, unselected AFL players turn out for the host WAFL club, wearing that club's colours.

East Perth terminated its West Coast alignment in July 2018. West Coast then lobbied the WAFL council of presidents to enter a standalone side, which was unanimously endorsed, and the Eagles became the competition's tenth club in 2019.

Fremantle kept the Peel arrangement. So today the WAFL has one AFL reserves side under its own name and one WAFL club acting as a host, which are meaningfully different models with different consequences.

1. 1Junior club footballA player comes through a local junior club and then a WAFL club's junior and colts program, usually from primary school age.
2. 2WAFL coltsThe under-18 grade attached to each WAFL club, where the state's best juniors play against each other under recruiter attention.
3. 3State under-18 championshipsWestern Australia sends a team to the national under-18 carnival, which is where recruiters compare WA prospects directly against interstate ones.
4. 4WAFL league debutA draft-year prospect is often promoted to senior WAFL football, playing against experienced adults, which is the hardest test available before the draft.
5. 5National draftClubs select from the national pool. Some mature-age WAFL players are taken at this point instead, after several seasons of senior football.
6. 6Reserves football on an AFL listA drafted West Australian usually returns to the WAFL, this time for West Coast or Peel Thunder, until selected in an AFL senior side.

A simplified account of the usual route. Most drafted players come through the under-18 pathway rather than through senior WAFL football, and top-end draftees often play only a handful of league games before being selected.

The season and the ladder

The home-and-away season runs roughly twenty rounds from early April to late August. With ten clubs, twenty rounds gives slightly more than a double round-robin, so some fixtures are played three times a season and the derbies get a good airing.

The ladder is decided on premiership points and percentage in the standard Australian football way. There is a single table with no divisions, no conferences and no promotion or relegation, which is the same structure the AFL itself uses above it.

Below the League grade each club runs reserves and colts teams in parallel competitions, and the WAFLW provides the senior women's competition. Outside Perth, a large number of country and regional leagues cover the rest of the state, and the game in the north-west and the goldfields has its own long history.

The top five finals system

Five clubs qualify. The minor premier gets the first week off and enters directly at the second semi-final. Second plays third in a qualifying final, with the winner joining the minor premier in the second semi-final and the loser dropping down. Fourth plays fifth in an elimination final, a straight knockout.

Week two is the two semi-finals, week three is the preliminary final and week four is the grand final at Optus Stadium.

The WAFL has been in and out of this format. It ran a top five from 1991 to 1994 and then abandoned it in 1995, after the fifth-placed club lost more of its qualifying matches than it won in three of those four seasons, which the clubs took as evidence the format was letting in a team that had not earned it. The competition later returned to it. Set against the eight-team structure described in the AFL finals system explained, a top five is far less forgiving of a mid-table finish.

The Sandover Medal

The WAFL's individual honour has been awarded since 1921 to the fairest and best player of the season, voted by the field umpires. It is the West Australian equivalent of the Brownlow, and in Perth it is treated with comparable seriousness.

Because the WAFL was the top level of football in the state until 1987, the historical roll includes many of the greatest players Western Australia produced, none of whom had a national competition to play in. Since then the Sandover has more often gone to career WAFL footballers or to prospects on their way to an AFL list. Peel Thunder's first winner was Allistair Pickett in 2002 and its second was Hayden Ballantyne in 2008, shortly before Ballantyne was drafted.

The money

The WAFL operates a club salary cap that has sat around 245000 dollars in recent seasons. That figure covers an entire senior list. It is less than a single mid-tier AFL contract, and it is the number that defines what kind of competition the WAFL is.

Most senior WAFL players work full-time and train two or three evenings a week, picking up match payments and a retainer on top of a wage. Better players at stronger clubs earn a genuinely useful supplementary income. Nobody is a professional footballer on WAFL money.

AFL-listed players are the exception and sit entirely outside this. A West Coast reserves player or a Fremantle-listed player at Peel is paid by his AFL club under AFL list rules, which is why an AFL-supplied side can outspend the cap without breaking it. Put the WAFL figure next to the AFL salary cap and the two tiers are barely comparable.

Peel Thunder and the alignment argument

Peel's rise is the sharpest illustration of what an alignment does. The club joined in 1997, spent close to two decades as one of the weakest sides in the competition, aligned with Fremantle in 2014, made its first finals in 2015 and won the 2016 grand final against Subiaco. It won again in 2024.

Supporters of the traditional clubs make a reasonable objection. A side that can call on professional footballers prepared by an AFL club's fitness and coaching staff is not competing under the same constraints as a club whose players finish work at five. The counter-argument is equally reasonable: Peel was a struggling club in a growth corridor with no realistic path to competitiveness, and the alignment saved it.

There is no clean answer. Every state league in the country has some version of this argument, and none has settled it.

State football and the WA record

Western Australia's representative side had a genuinely strong interstate record. It won national carnival titles in 1921 and 1961 and had a strong run through the state-of-origin era from the late 1970s into the 1980s. The 1977 win over Victoria, in which WA inflicted the heaviest defeat a Victorian side had suffered, is still cited in Perth as the moment the eastern states had to take West Australian football seriously.

That era ended for the same reason everything else did. The best West Australians now play for AFL clubs, are not released for representative football and are too valuable to risk. Occasional matches between WAFL and SANFL representative sides survive, and they are a decent contest between the two strongest state leagues, but they are not what state football was.

Going to a WAFL match

It is easy and cheap. Suburban gate prices are low, you can walk up on the day at every ground, several grounds are on the Perth rail network and parking is generally straightforward. The boundary is close enough that you can hear coaches and players, and the clubrooms are open.

The best days are the derbies. East Fremantle against South Fremantle is the pick, and the two Leederville tenants meeting each other has its own edge. Peel at Mandurah is worth the drive if you want to see what an AFL alignment actually looks like on the field.

The grand final is a different proposition. Optus Stadium is a full stadium event with reserved seating and ticketing, and it is the one WAFL fixture worth planning a trip around. The ground doubles as Perth's Test cricket venue, which is covered in the Optus Stadium guide and in the wider Australian cricket grounds guide.

The grounds

WAFL grounds are suburban ovals, not stadiums, and that is most of their appeal. Several have been in use for the best part of a century and the crowd sits close enough to the boundary to hear everything.

East Fremantle Oval sits on the rise above the river and is one of the older senior football grounds in the country. Fremantle Oval, South Fremantle's home, is a short distance away and was for many years the ground West Australian football was organised around. Bassendean Oval, Swan Districts' home in the eastern suburbs, and Claremont Oval in the western ones, are both compact traditional grounds.

Two grounds are shared. Leederville Oval houses both East Perth and Subiaco, an arrangement that came about when both clubs moved from their original homes. Lathlain Park houses Perth and, since 2019, the West Coast Eagles reserves side, West Coast having built its training and administration base there.

Two clubs sit outside the traditional metropolitan pattern. West Perth plays at Joondalup, well north of the city, after moving out of its inner-suburban home. Peel Thunder plays at Rushton Park in Mandurah, roughly an hour south of Perth, and is the only WAFL club based outside the greater metropolitan area.

The clubs that did not survive

The current ten-club field is the survivor of a much larger and more chaotic early history. Rovers won the first premiership in 1885 and was gone by 1899. Fremantle played in the association's first two seasons under a name that later reappeared for a different club. Unions, Imperials, Metropolitan, Victorian, High School and Centrals all came and went between 1885 and 1900.

Two lasted longer. North Fremantle played from 1901 to 1915 before disappearing during the First World War, and Midland Junction had two separate stints, from 1905 to 1910 and again from 1914 to 1917.

Since 1934, when Swan Districts joined, the competition has been remarkably stable. Claremont's 1926 admission and Swan Districts' in 1934 completed the eight-club field that lasted until Peel Thunder's arrival in 1997, a period of sixty-three seasons without a change to the membership. Compare that with the churn in the VFL described in the guide to state leagues below the AFL and the WAFL looks positively settled.

Colts, reserves and the WAFLW

A WAFL club is not one team. Each of the ten fields a reserves side and a colts side, the colts being the under-18 grade, in competitions running alongside the league fixture. On a home matchday a club will play three or four games in sequence from the morning through to the main event.

The colts grade matters more than the reserves grade for anyone watching the pathway. It is where the state's best juniors play against each other, where recruiters watch, and where a player is first assessed against his own age group at a serious level. A large proportion of West Australian AFL draftees come out of colts football rather than out of senior WAFL matches.

The WAFLW provides the senior women's competition under the same club names, and has grown substantially alongside the AFLW. Western Australia has produced a disproportionate share of AFLW talent for its population, and the WAFLW is where most of it is developed.

Football outside Perth

The WAFL covers metropolitan Perth and, through Peel Thunder, the Mandurah corridor. The rest of Western Australia, which is a very large amount of the rest of Western Australia, is covered by regional competitions.

There are something in the order of two dozen or more country leagues across the state, running from the south-west through the wheatbelt to the goldfields and up into the Kimberley and the Pilbara. Distances are the defining feature. A country league fixture in the north-west can involve several hours of driving each way, and the football calendar in the far north has to work around a wet season that makes grounds unplayable.

The goldfields deserve a mention on their own. The Goldfields Football League formed in 1896 during the rush and was for a time strong enough to be treated as a competition in its own right rather than a country league, holding separate representation on the national football council until 1919. That is not a claim any country league in Australia could make today.

The WAFL year, month by month

Pre-season training runs through the Perth summer from November, alongside the Big Bash rather than in competition with it, with practice matches in February and March. The home-and-away season opens in the first week of April.

April to June is the grind, with the derbies spread through it. June and July bring the mid-season interruptions: representative fixtures, AFL-listed player availability fluctuating as the AFL clubs manage injuries, and byes. August is when the ladder settles and the fight for fifth becomes the story of the competition, because in a top-five system the difference between fifth and sixth is the difference between a season and nothing.

Finals run through the first three weekends of September and the grand final lands in the third week of the month, timed to sit clear of the AFL Grand Final. Then the state's football stops entirely until November, and the grounds go over to cricket.

Things people get wrong about the WAFL

The first is calling it the Eagles' and Dockers' reserves competition. Eight of the ten clubs have no AFL affiliation whatsoever, and the competition ran for 102 seasons before West Coast existed at all.

The second is expecting promotion or relegation. There is none, and there never has been. A WAFL premiership is an end in itself.

The third is assuming the WAFL is where AFL clubs find players. It is where they confirm them. Almost all West Australian draftees come through the colts and under-18 pathway, and the process is set out in the AFL draft explained. Senior WAFL football matters at the margins, for mature-age prospects and for delisted players trying to get back on a list.

Why the WAFL still matters

Ten clubs, nine of them rooted in a specific piece of Perth or its outskirts, playing in front of people who have supported them for generations. East Fremantle on the hill, South Fremantle by the port, Swan Districts at Bassendean, Perth at Lathlain, West Perth now in the northern corridor. That is what the competition has, and it is not something the tier above it can manufacture.

The WAFL will not be the top level of football in Western Australia again. What it can be is a well-run ten-club competition with a full stadium once a year, a genuine pathway function, and a hundred and forty years of continuous history. On the evidence of the last decade, that is what it is settling into, and it is a more secure position than the competition looked to have in the late 1990s.

The clubs themselves seem to have made peace with it. A WAFL premiership is not an AFL premiership and nobody at East Fremantle or Swan Districts claims otherwise, but it is still the thing the club exists to win, and the people at the ground in September want it as badly as anyone at Optus Stadium in the AFL's grand final week. The two AFL clubs that took the competition's status away are described from their own side in AFL clubs outside Victoria.

For the broader sporting picture these competitions sit inside, start at Australia.