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[2] [3] The following year, four members of the newly formed Melbourne Football Club codified the laws from which Australian rules football evolved. Professional historians began taking a serious interest in the origins of Australian rules football in the late 1970s, and the first academic study of the sport's origins was published in 1982.
(See also: Australian football leagues outside Australia.) Today, Australian football is a major spectator sport in Australia and Nauru, although occasional exhibition games are staged in other countries. Some local grand final and carnival type events in Papua New Guinea, Nauru, England and the United States have occasionally drawn attendances ...
The origins of an organised game of football known today as Australian rules football can be traced back to 1858 in Melbourne, the capital city of Victoria. In July 1858, Tom Wills , an Australian-born cricketer educated at Rugby School in England, wrote a letter to Bell's Life in Victoria & Sporting Chronicle , calling for a "foot-ball club ...
Australian rules football is known by several nicknames, including Aussie rules, football and footy. [9] In some regions, where other codes of football are more popular, the sport is most often called AFL after the Australian Football League , while the league itself also uses this name for local competitions in some areas.
Australian rules football holds the match attendance record of any football code in Victoria (121,696), South Australia (66,987), Tasmania (24,968) and the Northern Territory (17,500). The national professional competitions are the men's Australian Football League (AFL) and AFL Women's (AFLW). Nationally these are the most popular football ...
Australian rules football was codified in 1859 by members of the Melbourne Football Club.The first rules were devised by the Australian-born Tom Wills, who was educated at Rugby School; Englishmen William Hammersley and J. B. Thompson, fellow students at Cambridge's Trinity College; and Irish Australian Thomas H. Smith, who played rugby football at Dublin University.
The matches were played with a hybrid set of rules based on Australian rules football and Gaelic football. It also began to pave the way for Gaelic footballers to convert to Australian football; pioneered by Melbourne and known as the Irish experiment, Irish players Sean Wight and Jim Stynes began their successful VFL/AFL careers in the mid-1980s.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics "Children's Participation in Cultural and Leisure Activities, Australia, Apr 2009" estimated that there were only 18,000 Australian rules football participants [125] however the ABS used a small sample size of 20,126 private dwelling in obtaining their data of participation numbers for the 2011/12 season.