1883 VFA season

1883 premiership season
Teams	6
Premiers	Geelong (5th premiership)
← 1882 1884 →

The 1883 Victorian Football Association season was the seventh season of the Australian rules football competition. The premiership was won by the Geelong Football Club. It was the club's fifth VFA premiership in just six seasons, and was the second in a sequence of three consecutive premierships won from 1882 to 1884.

Following the disbanding of the East Melbourne Football Club in late 1882, the senior metropolitan membership of the Association (including Geelong) was reduced from seven to six clubs in 1883: Carlton, Essendon, Geelong, Hotham, Melbourne and West Melbourne.

At this time, three other provincial senior clubs were full Association members represented on the Board of Management, for a total membership of nine: Ballarat, Albion Imperial and Horsham Unions. Due to distance, these clubs played too few matches against the rest of the VFA to be considered relevant in the premiership.

The 1883 premiership was won by the Geelong Football Club. Geelong won fifteen and drew three of its twenty-one matches for the season. It was named premiers ahead of runners-up South Melbourne, whose record of eighteen wins and three draws from twenty-five matches was almost equally meritorious. Carlton finished third.

The below table details the playing records of the six clubs in all matches during the 1883 season. Two sets of results are given:

The clubs are listed in the order in which they were ranked in the Sportsman newspaper. The VFA had no formal process by which the clubs were ranked, so the below order should be considered indicative only, particularly since the fixturing of matches was not standardised; however, the top three placings were later acknowledged in publications including the Football Record and are considered official.

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