1870 Victorian football season
| 1870 Victorian football season | |
|---|---|
| Senior teams | 5 |
| Premiers | Melbourne |
| Challenge Cup | Albert-park (disputed) |
|
← 1869
1871 →
|
|
The 1870 Victorian football season was an Australian rules football competition played during the winter of 1870. The season consisted of matches between metropolitan football clubs in Melbourne in the colony of Victoria. The premier club was Melbourne.
By convention, the 1870 season is considered the first season of senior football competition in Victoria's history, or at least the first for which a premiership can be officially allocated. The reasons for this are somewhat arbitrary, since the competing clubs, organizational structure of football, and standard of play in 1870 were not materially different from 1869. The view of 1870 as being the inaugural premiership has existed since at least 1889, when The Argus newspaper first published a table of historical premiers and second and third place-getters dating back to 1870 and no earlier. In the article which adjoined the publication of the 1889 table, the reporter commented that the haphazard nature of scheduling, frequency of cancelled matches, and overall lesser standard of play made it difficult to assign a premiership to the seasons during the 1860s. The VFL's official publication, the Football Record, also showed this same list from its inception in 1912 until 1918. In 1919, this was replaced with a new table that showed club placings since 1897, and two supplementary tables showing cumulated placings for the periods 1897 to 1918 and 1870 to 1918. These supplementary tables remained in the Record until 1923, but were omitted from the 1924 editions of the Record, and did not reappear after that.
Since June 2016, the AFL Commission has formally recognised the top level of Victorian football back to 1870 as senior, which applies to both the unaffiliated period from 1870–1876 and the Victorian Football Association from 1877–1896. However, it maintains a distinction between the 1870–1896 period and the history of the VFL/AFL from 1897 onwards, and requires statistics and achievements from those two periods to be delineated, while allowing clubs to recognise these statistics and achievements in their own histories.
Five clubs participated in senior football during the 1870 season: Albert-park, Carlton, Hobson's Bay Railway, Melbourne and South Yarra. They competed in specific matches for the Challenge Cup, and a premier team was selected based on all matches during the season, including Challenge Cup matches.
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