Clubs
West Coast Fremantle Adelaide Port Adelaide Brisbane Gold Coast Sydney Greater Western Sydney Western Bulldogs Geelong Essendon North Melbourne Carlton Collingwood Melbourne Richmond Hawthorn St KildaThe AFL operates on a single table system, with no divisions, conferences nor promotion and relegation from other leagues.
Many of the current AFL teams date back to the beginnings of the sport of Australian rules football, including the very first club, Melbourne Football Club (1859), a foundation VFL/AFL club whose founders also first codified the sport in 1859. The Victorian Football League, commonly known as the VFL, started in 1897 with eight teams from the Victorian Football Association (VFA): Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Fitzroy, Geelong, Melbourne, South Melbourne, and St Kilda. Richmond and University entered in 1908, but University disbanded in 1915. In 1925, Footscray (later known as the Western Bulldogs), Hawthorn and North Melbourne entered the competition. It remained in this 12-team single-state configuration until 1982 when South Melbourne relocated to Sydney, New South Wales to become the Sydney Swans.
The next phase of national expansion occurred in 1987, with the introduction of the West Coast Eagles from Western Australia and the Brisbane Bears from Queensland. The league was renamed the Australian Football League in 1990 to reflect the expanded nature of the competition. South Australia was first represented in 1991 when the Adelaide Football Club joined the league. The Fremantle Football Club joined as the second WA team in 1995. After the 1996 season the Brisbane Bears merged with Fitzroy, creating the Brisbane Lions in 1996 and the Port Adelaide Football Club joined to maintain the league at 16 teams. In 2011, the Gold Coast Football Club joined the AFL, while Greater Western Sydney expanded the competition to 18 teams in 2012.
Read more about this topic: Australian Football League
Famous quotes containing the word clubs:
“It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Neighboring farmers and visitors at White Sulphur drove out occasionally to watch ‘those funny Scotchmen’ with amused superiority; when one member imported clubs from Scotland, they were held for three weeks by customs officials who could not believe that any game could be played with ‘such elongated blackjacks or implements of murder.’”
—For the State of West Virginia, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Women realize that we are living in an ungoverned world. At heart we are all pacifists. We should love to talk it over with the war-makers, but they would not understand. Words are so inadequate, and we realize that the hatred must kill itself; so we give our men gladly, unselfishly, proudly, patriotically, since the world chooses to settle its disputes in the old barbarous way.”
—General Federation Of Women’s Clubs (GFWC)