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The history of the AFL

By Mr Dandalooa

As we wind on down the road to finals footy, FootyGoss has taken the time to reflect historically on this game we Australians have grown to love.

Aussie Rules football might be big business nowadays, but it wasn’t always that way.

In WA, with the likes of the West Coast Eagles sporting an ooperating revenue of about $46 million, it’s easy to see how professional the AFL has become.

Eagles chief operating officer Richard Godfrey told FootyGoss financially the club was having a pretty good year in terms of budget.

“We thought it was pretty important during 2009 to focus on our core business, that’s principal and I think it’s probably what a lot of businesses obviously did, and we did that to the best of our ability,” he said.

Big business it is. But how did it all begin?

There is evidence that Australians played some form of football as early as the 1840s.

It is thought to have originated in metropolitan and country Victoria, although there are claims that matches were played Adelaide and Tasmania, which then was called Van Diemen’s Land.

But no-one truly knows how closely it was played to the current game and what those rules were.

A St Kilda Historical Society publication (2008) suggests that English public school football games began to be played in an official structure in Melbourne and surrounding districts in 1858.

This was backed by The Melbourne Book – A History of Now, published in 2003, which suggests the earliest known such match was played in June 1858 between St Kilda Grammar School (now defunct) and Melbourne Grammar School on the St Kilda foreshore.

A letter by Tom Wills was published in Bell’s Life in Victoria & Sporting Chronicle on 10 July 1858, calling for a “football club,” or some other “athletic game,” with a “code of laws” to keep cricketers fit during winter.

Research shows this letter is regarded by many historians as being a catalyst for the development of a new code of football in 1859 today known as Australian football.

The game evolved over the subsequent years, from trees being used for goal posts no rules where fights frequently broke out, to a more structured contest.

While the full rules that were used back then are unknown, some details of matches in1858 survived.

It was played with a round ball, not the oval one used today, and the distance between the goals was approximately four times longer than the modern Melbourne Cricket Ground playing surface. There were 40 players per side.

In August 1879 the first inter-colonial match was played between Victoria and South Australia and by late 1890s the Victorian Football League (VFL), which commenced play in 1897 as an eight-team competition composed of the stronger clubs from the VFA competition, was formed.

By 1925, the VFL consisted of 12 teams, and had become the most prominent league in the game.

According to the Evening Post, in 1914 and 1915 an amalgamation of Australian rules football and rugby league, the predominant code of football in New South Wales and Queensland was considered and trialled.

Both World War I and World War II had a devastating effect on the sport of Australian Rules.

While scratch matches were played by Australian diggers in remote locations around the world, the game lost many of its great players to wartime service.
Some competitions never fully recovered.

World War I saw the game in New Zealand go into recess for three quarters of a century. In Queensland, the state league went into recess for the duration of the war. VFL club University left the league and went into recess due to severe casualties.

The WAFL lost two clubs and the SANFL was suspended for one year in 1916 due to heavy club losses.

The ANZAC Day clash is one example of how the war continues to be remembered in the football community.

As we wind on down the road to 2010 finals football, it’s good to remember these humbe and simple beginning to this national sport.