When did the AFL start

Australian rules evolved as a new football code during the third quarter of the nineteenth century in Melbourne. From 1859 to 1877 it was largely a Victorian game, and it continued to be known as Victorian rules - or Melbourne rules - until the 1880s. The most durable myth concerning the origins of Australian rules football is that it derives from Gaelic football, even though the latter was codified well after the Australian game. Unidentified forms of football had been played by Irish soldiers in Sydney in 1829 and by Victorian goldmines in the early 1850s, but these games probably resembled the ones played in English, Irish, and Scottish villages for centuries. They contributed nothing to the origins of Australian rules. Neither did the early schoolboy games played in Melbourne. A plaque in Yarra Park outside the MCG commemorates the match played there between Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar in August 1858 as the first organised game of football in Australia between schools or clubs (even though a match was played two months earlier between Melbourne Grammar and St Kilda Grammar). These historic schoolboy matches were not uniquely Australian, but were modelled on the football played in the English public schools, especially Rugby.

In between the schoolboy matches of June and August 1858 a man who umpired both games, Thomas Wentworth Wills, wrote a letter to a new sporting weekly, Bell’s Life in Victoria. In his letter Wills, who had returned to Melbourne in December 1856 from seven years’ schooling at Rugby, suggested that a men’s football club be formed. Wills was an outstanding cricketer who could not abide six months without games in the winter, and he even suggested a rifle club as an alternative to football for sharpening the eye and tuning the reflexes. Shooting would not do much for general fitness, but it did accord with a prominent new concern, namely, promoting a sense of manly courage. Whereas Wills had tried with little success to promote football in 1857, his efforts were well received a year later when they had the added impetus of the new creed of Muscular Christianity, for Tom Brown’s Schooldays was being avidly read in Melbourne in 1858.

After a handful of games among Melbourne cricketers and others in 1858, formal rules were delineated in May 1859. The seven men who formulated the first rules were all members of the Melbourne Cricket Club. Four of them served on its committee between 1858 and 1861, and several had played football in the British public schools. They had attended a variety of schools, but two of them (J. B. Thompson and W. J. Hammersley) did share a Cambridge University connection. Thus they emulated the Trinity College meeting of 1848 when they consciously perused the rules of Eton, Harrow, Winchester, and Rugby in May 1859 in order to create their own compromise. The codification of Australian rules in 1859 grated Harrow and Winchester concepts on to Rugby’s by determining that handling was permitted at any time, but that the man with the ball could run no further than was needed to kick the ball, i.e. two or three yards.if the ball was cleanly caught from a kick, the man who marked could take a free kick (without interference from opponents). Apparently for the sake of keeping the game simple, the founders postulated no offside rule; this facilitated the development of a more open style of play since team-mates as well as opponents could mark the ball. Perhaps as a concession to those who feared too much handling, throwing the ball was banned from the start. This eventually led to the unusual Australian method of hand passing, where the ball is held in one hand and punched with the closed fist of the other. The key innovation that made Australian rules unique was formalised in 1866 when a new rule once again allowed running with the ball (after a technical prohibition since 1860). However, the runner was required to touch the oval-shaped rugby ball *used exclusively after 1867) to the ground or bounce it every five or six yards. This rule ironically was designed to restrict the very fleet of foot, some of whom had been running up to forty yards with the ball, albeit illegally, before kicking it. One such harrier, H. C. A. Harrison (a cousin of Thomas Wentworth Wills) was delegated the task of writing the 1866 set of rules - which were thought to be the original until the 1859 rules were discovered in the early 1980s. Despite the re-enforced emphasis on handling, the rules were amended in 1874 so that goals had to be kicked rather than the ball carried through the goal-posts (which were seven yards apart, without a crossbar). Another rule change that year penalised players if they continued to hold the ball when tackled; holding an opponent, when he was not in possession of the ball, had been prohibited in 1859.

One of the most noteworthy features of Australian rules was that it tamed the most brutal aspects of rugby. Hacking and tripping - the aspects of play most likely to lead to serious injury - were banned in 1859; ‘rabbiting’ (stooping in order to up-end an opponent) and ‘slinging’ (throwing an opponent to the ground) were disallowed in the mid-1870s. Climatic arguments (less rainfall and harder grounds in Melbourne) have been posited to explain the Victorian city’s propensity for a more open, flowing game in contrast to Sydney’s preference for rugged, unadulterated rugby. The more likely explanation is that Australian rules, though based on rugby, was modified as an off-season pastime for middle-class cricketers. As J. B. Thompson declared, ‘Black eyes don’t look so well on Collins Street.’ Blackened eyes and hacked shins were especially unsuitable for middle-class cricketers who could not afford injury-induced leisure time in the Antipodes. Even with these modifications, the Australian game in its first few years still bore a close resemblance to rugby and was commonly referred to in the press as a variant of that code. Physical strength remained the single most important component of the game for the first decade or two, and newspaper commentators regularly compared competing teams in terms of average weight - a key factor in determining the outcome of scrimmages.

The new code was not played much by workers for its first twenty years because the lower class did not have enough leisure time, nor could they afford to purchase a leather-encased pig’s bladder. Village football had been a game played largely by peasants and handcraft workers, but not until the 1880s and the 1890s with the extension of the Saturday half-holiday from government offices and banks to include tradesmen and shopkeepers - did the lower classes participate in Australian rules football. What made Australian rules the people’s game almost immediately, however, was that it was played in open parklands. This meant that for its first two decades there was no admission charge to watch the game, contrary to cricket and many other sports. The initial parkland venue of Australian rules was responsible not only for its popularity but also for much of its early development. The plain area was originally rectangular, for example, and did not become oval until the game shifted on to cricket grounds in the late 1870s and 1880s. Large parklands allowed for considerable length and width of playing area. Length was unlimited until 1866 when a maximum of 200 yards was imposed; width was restricted to 150 yards in the same year. The size and shape of the field helped make play essentially defensive. This defensive outlook continued to dominate Australian rules for two decades after a shift to oval fields eliminated the depth of forward pockets. Since goals were at a premium for the first half-century of Australian rules, incessant scrimmages were a common defensive tactic in the second half of the unusually low-scoring, therefore close, games. Until 1869 the first team to score two goals won the match, regardless of whether it took two hours or two days. High marking, like high scoring, did not become a notable feature of Australian rules until the game moved out of the parklands in the 1880s and on to the cricket ovals, where there were no gum trees to restrict long or high kicks. Even then, the ‘little mark’ (after the ball had travelled only two or three yards) was a common means of moving the ball from a forward pocket towards the front of the goals. The move to enclose arenas coincided with charging the growing number of spectators, including a substantial proportion of women. By the early 187s crowds of 2-3000 at football matches were common, and occasionally as man as 10,000 watched. To realise the significance of these numbers, it is worth noting that only 2000 people watched the Football Association Cup in London in the mid-1870s. By 1880 when the FA Cup attracted 6000 spectators, 15,000 had already attended a football match in Melbourne, while 34,000 saw South Melbourne play Geelong in 1886.

In May 1877 seven of the Victorian clubs - Melbourne, Carlton, St Kilda (formerly South Yarra), Hotham (later North Melbourne), Albert Park (later South Melbourne), Geelong, and Barwon - formed the Victorian Football Association (VFA) in order to regulate the game throughout the State and to promote intercolonial matches. Simultaneously, the SA Football Association was established; it adopted the Victorian code, even though a soccer-style game had been prevalent in Adelaide two years earlier. Sydneysiders, however, consciously resisted a game that had originated in Melbourne, and rebuffed Victoria’s proselytising activity. NSW’s retention of rugby decisively swayed its northern neighbour towards that code for the sake of intercolonial competition, even though Victorian rules had prevailed in Queensland schools and football clubs until the early 1880s.

The VFA’s limited success in spreading Australian rules football was matched by its inability to balance conflicting interests between its waker and more powerful clubs. Most of the weak clubs attracted few spectators and small revenues, especially during the depression of 1893-95, and were consequently critics of the clandestine professionalism which was prevalent among most of the stronger clubs as they competed for success. Despite strenuous resistance by VFA secretary T. S. Marshall, the examples of England’s Football Association (which accepted professionalism in 1885) and Rugby League (which was founded in 1895 largely over this issue) secured the future of professionalism in Australian rules football and foreshadowed the gradual demise of the VFA.

Making the game viable, commercial, and appealing to spectators was the main reason for founding the Victorian Football League (VFL) in 1897 by the eight clubs with the largest followings, Melbourne, Essendon, Geelong, Collingwood, South Melbourne, Fitzroy, Carlton, and St Kilda broke away from the VFA because the did not want to ‘carry’ the economically unviable clubs. Although the VFA continued to exist and took in new members to make up for the clubs which had left, the far more powerful VFL dominated Australian rules both in Victoria and throughout Australia. In order to make it more attractive to those who were paying to watch, the new VFL immediately altered the game, which was still very slow in the mid-1890s. Behind posts, originally twenty yards either side of the goal-outs, had been added in the 1870s as a defensive stratagem. Whenever the ball passed between a goal post and a behind post, it could be cleared with a free kick. After 1897 each behind counted as a point (goals were henceforth worth 6 points). The tallying of behinds reduced the probability of a draw in low-scoring matches and the consequent reliance on defensive scrimmages. Two other modifications in 1897 were designed to speed up play and eliminate congestion. The number of players on the field was reduced from twenty to eighteen per side (a substitute, or nineteenth man, was first allowed in 1930, and a second substitute was permitted on the bench in 1946; until 1978, however, they could only replace injured players and could not be freely interchanged). Second, the ‘little mark’ was abolished; henceforth, a kick had to travel at least two yards in order to be marked. The resultant longer kicking added to the high marking and made the game even more distinctive, open, and appealing as a spectacle. With the advent of the stab pass (a low-trajectory kick) in 1902 systematic play of an offensive nature was entrenched, and goal-scoring steadily increased.

By 1906, the game had progressed to the point where the Australian National Football Council (ANFC) was created to regulate interstate movement of players through clearances and permits. Although the ANFC organised interstate matches to determine a national Australian champion, the annual carnivals to find a winner were usually contests to see who came second to Victoria. Both the ANFC and its successor, the National Football League, have been controlled by the VFL, which has invariable determined the rules and served as a model for Australian rules nationally. Nonetheless, WA and SA, in particular, have maintained significant State competitions and have produced many outstanding players. A national competition finally materialised in the 1980s, but only under the aegis of Victorian football. In 1982 a team from South Melbourne played its home games in Sydney as a prelude to a full move there a year later. In 1987 two new interstate teams, Brisbane and West Australia, were created - the former by drafting existing VFL players, the latter by drawing mostly upon WA players. Thus, the twelve-team VFL was expanded into a fourteen-team national competition, and in 1990 the VFL altered its name to the Australian Football League.

Since the League’s name change, 5 teams have joined the AFL; two Adelaide based teams - the Crows in 1991, and Port Adelaide in 1997, Fremantle joined as the second WA team in 1995, and most recently the Gold Coast Suns and Greater Western Sydney Giants in 2011 and 2012. 1997 also saw a merger with the Fitzroy Lions moving north to combine with the Brisbane Bears, becoming the Brisbane Lions, who quickly became one of the most dominant sides in history, winning the 2001, 2002, and 2003 Premierships.