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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 ...
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.
The Australian Football League (AFL) is the pre-eminent professional competition of Australian rules football. It was originally named the Victorian Football League (VFL) and was founded in 1896 as a breakaway competition from the Victorian Football Association (VFA), with its inaugural season in 1897.
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 ...
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 sport known as football, or "footy", was rapidly increasing in popularity, and Sherrin footballs soon became the icon for being the first ball made for Australian rules football. The new-shaped ball was so quickly accepted that the National Football League of Australia eventually used the size and shape as standard.
On 18 May 1961 the Gold Coast Australian Football League was established and four days later the first Australian rules football club on the Gold Coast was formed, Southport Australian Football Club. On 7 June it was revealed the team would be known as the Southport Magpies and would based at Owen Park. [2]