1990 VFA season
| 1990 VFA Premiership Season | |
|---|---|
| Teams | 14 |
| Premiers |
Williamstown (12th premiership) |
| Minor premiers |
Preston (7th minor premiership) |
|
← 1989
1991 →
|
|
The 1990 Victorian Football Association season was the 109th season of the Australian rules football competition. The premiership was won by the Williamstown Football Club, after it defeated Springvale in the Grand Final on 30 September by two points; it was Williamstown's twelfth top-division premiership.
After enduring financial difficulties consistently since the early 1980s, the future of the Brunswick Football Club was uncertain at the end of the 1989 season. Its financial position was weak, its facilities at Gillon Oval were of increasingly poor quality, and it had only 300 members. At a special meeting on 2 October 1989, the club met to decide on its future, and by a large margin it decided to enter a merger with the Broadmeadows Football Club; rejected options were continuing in the VFA as a stand-alone club, folding, or merging with Sunshine. Under the terms of the merger, the new club was known as the Brunswick-Broadmeadows Magpies. It remained based at Gillon Oval, as Broadmeadows did not yet have its own home ground.
The Broadmeadows Football Club, known as the Falcons, was a club at an administrative level only. Its executive committee was established in 1987, and it had the support of the Broadmeadows council to develop a new Association-standard venue at the Johnstone Street Reserve, Jacana; but in the three years it had existed, it had never fielded a team in any suburban competition, and it did not have an existing home ground. The club was built entirely around its aspirations to play in the Association, and had made an unsuccessful bid to join for the 1988 season.
The Brunswick-Broadmeadows merger was not a successful venture. Its huge board, which comprised seven former Brunswick committeemen and seven former Broadmeadows committeemen, suffered throughout the year from factional fighting which limited its ability to operate effectively as a unified club. As a result, the club was unable to meaningfully address its debt problems during the year, it failed to meet its financial reporting commitments to the Association, and several committeemen and the general manager resigned from the club as a result of the board's ineffectiveness. On 1 August, the Association intervened; it sacked the club's board, and Association executive director Athol Hodgetts was appointed as the club's administrator. Hodgetts returned the club to a new board in September, but the club was still more than $250,000 in debt and at risk of Broadmeadows withdrawing from the merger. It was the beginning of the end for the club, which did not survive in the Association to the end of 1991.
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