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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.
In 1994, the Fremantle Football Club was formed in Western Australia; they joined the AFL in 1995, becoming the fifth interstate club. In 1996, the VFL/AFL celebrated its centenary; the Australian Football Hall of Fame was established and the VFL/AFL Team of the Century was named. However, several Victorian clubs were in severe financial ...
The AFL is recognised by the Australian Sports Commission as being the National Sporting Organisation for Australian rules football. There are also seven state/territory-based organisations in Australia, most of which are affiliated to the AFL. Most of these hold annual semi-professional club competitions while the others oversee more than one ...
Gillian Hibbins in the AFL's official account of the game's history published in 2008 for the game's 150th celebrations sternly rejects the theory: Understandably, the appealing idea that Australian Football is a truly Australian native game recognising the indigenous people, rather than deriving solely from a colonial dependence upon the ...
The AFL also hope to develop the game in other countries to the point where Australian football is played at an international level by top-quality sides from around the world. The AFL has hosted an International Cup regularly every three years, beginning in 2002, with the third game in 2008 corresponding to the 150th anniversary of the code. [167]
Australia is unique among major sporting markets in having four football codes competing for market share. The irony is that the two international games, football (soccer) and rugby union, are getting trounced by the two parochial codes, rugby league and Australian Football, which are both fast and furious, and both built on deep tribal roots.
A strong rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne has existed since the Victorian gold rush, when the latter first outgrew its older sister.With the rapid growth of Victorian rules, Sydney journalists panned it in 1868, protesting that the "old English game of football" would be preferable to Sydneysiders than any game imported from the rival colony. [17]
It is home to the second oldest football league in Australia, the semi-professional Victorian Football Association founded in 1877 which, like the AFL has also begun to expand nationally. While Victoria in 2017 accounted for just 30% of all players worldwide, and 40% of Australian players, more than 60% of professional AFL players are recruited ...