List of AFL premiers

This page is a complete chronological listing of Australian Football League premiers. The Australian Football League (AFL), known as the Victorian Football League (VFL) until 1990, is now the elite national competition in Australian rules football.

Each year, the premiership is awarded to the club which wins the AFL Grand Final. The Grand Final has been an annual tradition in its current format since 1931, and some form of Grand Final has been played in each season except for 1897 and 1924.

Since the introduction by the League of equalisation policies of a salary cap and draft in the late 1980s, every AFL club (except for Gold Coast, which joined the league in only 2011) has made a preliminary final. This has had a significant impact on the spread of premierships: eleven clubs won premierships in the eighteen seasons from 1990–2007, compared with only five clubs in the twenty-three seasons from 1967–1989.

The following is a list of the premiers, and the Grand Final results and circumstances. Most conventional Grand Finals are a single match at the end of a finals series where the winner of the match wins the premiership.

Under the early VFL finals systems in 1898-1923 and 1925-1930, the circumstances of the Grand Final were often different: in twenty-nine of these thirty-two years, the minor premiers had the right to challenge the winner of the finals series for the premiership, meaning the Grand Finals of this era were a mixture of challenge matches, non-challenge matches (which would have been followed by challenge matches had the minor premier been defeated), while in 1901, 1903 and 1906 there was no right of challenge. Regardless of the circumstances at that time, all of these games are now recognised as Grand Finals.

This table summarises all senior premierships won by each team. The "Grand Final Matches" column includes all Grand Finals and Grand Final Replays listed in the previous section, and because of this, the column will not necessarily equal the sum of the premierships and runners-up columns.

Table correct to the end of the 2016 season

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