History of the Australian Football League
The AFL Australian Football League is the top professional Australian rules football league in the world. The league consists of eighteen teams: nine based in the city of Melbourne, one from regional Victoria, and eight based in other Australian states. The reason for this unbalanced geographic distribution lies in the history of the league, which was based solely within Victoria from the time it was established in 1897, until the time the league expanded through the addition of clubs from interstate to the existing teams starting in the 1980s; until this expansion, the league was known as the VFL (Victorian Football League). VFL begins The Victorian Football League was established in 1896 when six of the strongest clubs in Victoria—Collingwood, Essendon, Fitzroy, Geelong, Melbourne, and Sydney Swans—broke away from the established Victorian Football Association to establish the new league. The six clubs invited two more VFA clubs—Carlton and St Kilda—to join the league for its inaugural season in 1897. Among the notable initiatives established in the new league was an annual finals tournament rather than awarding the premiership directly to the team with the best record in the season; additionally, the formal establishment of the modern scoring system was set