Melbourne Hawks

The Melbourne Hawks were a planned Australian Football League (AFL) team that would have consisted of the merger between the Melbourne and Hawthorn clubs at the end of the 1996 season. Out of all the proposed merger combinations in the 1990s, it was seemed as ideal as it was known that Hawthorn had a football team which had success (8 premierships in the previous 25 years), but were in a dire financial situation, as opposed to Melbourne which had a sound financial base but were a club which had not won a premiership for over 30 years.

Since the mid-1980s, the formerly all-Victorian Victorian Football League (VFL) competition had undertaken a large expansion program which saw the league expand from being a state-based competition (centred around the inner suburbs of Melbourne) to a national competition. The decision to undertake this expansion was in response to elite national leagues being run by other sporting codes (for example the Australian Rugby League, the National Basketball League, and the National Soccer League), which threatened to undermine interest in football at both a junior, and elite level. The VFL expansion included new teams from Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane, in addition to the relocation of South Melbourne to Sydney, and saw the league change its name from the VFL to the Australian Football League (AFL).

The expansion led to Victoria holding a disproportionately large number of teams relative to the other states. By the mid-1990s, there were eleven teams based in Victoria – ten of those in the inner suburbs of Melbourne – and concerns were raised about the long term viability (both on the field, and economically) of some of the weaker Melbourne-based clubs. Members of the AFL Commission (the governing body for the competition) began to worry that, relative to the new interstate clubs and more powerful Victorian-based teams, the weaker Melbourne-based clubs would not have a sufficiently large supporter base to survive in the new national competition. Statistics published in newspapers like the Herald Sun showed that several Melbourne-based clubs (including Hawthorn and Melbourne) only had a fraction of the membership base of either their interstate or cross-town rivals. It was suggested by some at the time that the Melbourne market could realistically support no more than six to eight teams.

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