Convict Shirts — The Yard / AFL Slang & Culture
The History of Australian Rules Football
From a single Melbourne club in 1858 to an 18-team national competition watched by millions — the complete history of how Australian Rules became what it is.
Australian Rules Football is one of the oldest organised football codes in the world, predating rugby league, predating American football, and developing largely independently of the British football codes that shaped most of the rest of the world’s sporting landscape. Its history is distinctively Australian — shaped by colonial cricket clubs, gold rush demographics, and a deliberate effort to create a winter sport suited to local conditions.
The Timeline
1858 — The First Recorded Match
Tom Wills, a cricketer educated at Rugby School in England, helps organise an early football match in Melbourne, partly motivated by a desire to keep cricketers fit during winter. Wills had also observed Marngrook, an Indigenous Australian game involving kicking and high catching, played near his childhood home — a connection that remains part of ongoing historical discussion about the code’s origins.
1859 — The First Rules
Wills, along with H.C.A. Harrison, J.B. Thompson, and W.J. Hammersley, draft the first formal rules of Australian football at the Parade Hotel in Melbourne. These rules establish the foundations of a distinct code, differing from the rugby and association football codes developing in England at the same time.
1877 — The Victorian Football Association
The Victorian Football Association (VFA) is formed, becoming the first organised football competition in the colony of Victoria and one of the earliest football leagues anywhere in the world.
1896–1897 — The VFL Breaks Away
Eight leading clubs break away from the VFA to form the Victorian Football League (VFL), seeking greater financial control and a more competitive structure. The VFL’s first season is played in 1897 — the year now recognised as the start of the modern competition’s premiership history.
1908 — First Interstate Carnival
The Australasian Football Council organises the first national interstate football carnival, formalising competition between Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and other states — spreading the code beyond its Victorian heartland.
1982 — First Interstate Club Move
South Melbourne relocates to Sydney, becoming the Sydney Swans — the VFL’s first deliberate expansion beyond Victoria via club relocation rather than new club formation, signalling the start of a genuinely national ambition for the competition.
1987 — West Coast Eagles & Brisbane Bears
Two new clubs join from Western Australia and Queensland, expanding the competition’s national footprint significantly and beginning the transition from the Victorian-dominated VFL toward a genuinely national league.
1990 — Renamed the AFL
The Victorian Football League is officially renamed the Australian Football League, formally reflecting its national scope after decades of expansion beyond Victoria.
1996–2012 — Further Expansion
Brisbane Bears merge with Fitzroy to form the Brisbane Lions (1996). Gold Coast Suns (2011) and GWS Giants (2012) join as the league’s newest clubs, completing the current 18-team competition and the deliberate push into rugby-dominant New South Wales and Queensland markets.
2017 — AFLW Launches
The AFL Women’s competition begins, providing a national professional pathway for women’s Australian Rules football for the first time and significantly expanding the sport’s reach and participation base.
The Question of Origins
The relationship between Marngrook — the traditional Aboriginal game involving kicking and high catching a possum-skin ball — and the codification of Australian Rules in 1858–59 remains a subject of genuine historical discussion. Tom Wills grew up in country Victoria near Aboriginal communities and is documented to have observed and possibly played versions of Indigenous ball games. Whether and how directly this influenced the specific rules he helped draft is debated among historians, but the connection is increasingly acknowledged as part of the code’s full origin story rather than treated as a separate, unrelated tradition.
Why the History Matters
Australian Rules Football’s development independent of the British codes that shaped rugby and soccer is part of what makes it structurally distinct — no offside rule, the unique handball, the four-post scoring system. These features emerged from a genuinely separate developmental path, shaped by Australian conditions and Australian cricket clubs looking for a winter alternative, rather than being adaptations of an existing British code.
Related Pages
AFL Slang & Culture — The Complete Guide
Read →
Marngrook: The First Nations Game Before the Game
Read →
The Sherrin: History of the AFL Football
Read →
