1878 VFA season

1878 VFA premiership season
Premiers	Geelong (1st premiership)
← 1877 1879 →

The 1878 Victorian Football Association season was the second season of the Australian rules football competition. The premiership was won by the Geelong Football Club, after it defeated Melbourne in a playoff match on 5 October. It was the club's first VFA premiership, and the first in a sequence of three consecutive premierships won from 1878 to 1880. Geelong was unbeaten during the year.

There were seven senior metropolitan clubs in the Association in 1878: Albert-park, Carlton, Essendon, Hotham, Melbourne, St Kilda and West Melbourne. Essendon and West Melbourne had been leading junior teams in 1877 and competed as seniors in 1878. Additionally, several provincial teams – including premiers Geelong – competed as senior clubs affiliated with the Association.

Among the metropolitan clubs, Melbourne had the best record, finishing with eleven wins and five draws from its twenty-three matches, ahead of Carlton, whose record was seventeen wins and one draw from twenty-four matches.

While Carlton had a numerically superior record, at the time, Melbourne and Carlton were considered to be by far the strongest of the metropolitan clubs, so Melbourne's position as the top club was based almost entirely on head-to-head matches between the two clubs – of which Melbourne won all four.

Among the provincial clubs, Geelong was by far the strongest, having gone through the season undefeated with fifteen wins and one draw from sixteen matches. However, it had played only three games against metropolitan clubs – wins against Carlton, Hotham and Albert-park – and its provincial opponents were not considered as strong as the metropolitan competition, so whether or not its record was strong enough to claim the premiership was a point of debate.

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