1960 VFA season
| 1960 VFA premiership season | |
|---|---|
| Teams | 17 |
| Premiers |
Oakleigh (5th premiership) |
| Minor premiers |
Sandringham (1st minor premiership) |
|
← 1959
1961 →
|
|
The 1960 Victorian Football Association season was the 79th season of the Australian rules football competition. The premiership was won by the Oakleigh Football Club, after it defeated Sandringham in the Grand Final on 1 October by 60 points. It was Oakleigh's fifth premiership.
The season was the first in which Association premiership matches were played on Sunday afternoons, a change which dramatically increased the Association's popularity over the following decades.
The Prahran Football Club was re-admitted to the Association in 1960, bringing the number of teams to seventeen. Prahran had been expelled in 1959 when the Prahran Council leased Toorak Park to the Victorian Rugby Union on alternate Saturdays, leaving the football club unable to meet the Association's minimum home ground requirements, but the club was re-admitted once it had secured a winter-long lease for the ground.
It was speculated that the Association would admit an eighteenth team to avoid the need for a bye in the fixture, and because it had previously announced its strategic intention to expand to twenty teams. Several groups interested in applying for the Association were mentioned in the press during 1959, including the North Geelong Football Club, the Altona City Council and a group of locals from Broadmeadows; but, ultimately the Association did not find a club with suitable facilities, so the membership remained at seventeen clubs.
On 1 April 1960, the Association approved for the first time the playing of VFA premiership matches on Sunday afternoons. Amateur football and charity and practice matches had been played on Sundays in Melbourne before, but top level commercial senior football had not. Playing on Sunday had long been seen as a strong opportunity for the Association to improve its popularity, as it would not be competing for gate takings with the Victorian Football League, which was played entirely on Saturdays; however, Sunday trading was still decades away from being legal, and neither councils nor communities widely approved of playing professional and commercial sport on Sundays. The Association had formally considered and rejected playing on Sundays twice before, most recently in 1957 (when night football was introduced as an alternative timeslot in which the Association would not be competing with League matches).
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