About

The Melbourne Football Club, nicknamed the Demons or colloquially the Dees, is a professional Australian rules football club based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It competes in the Australian Football League (AFL), the sport's premier competition and plays its home games at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). Melbourne is the world's oldest professional club of any football code. If we are to accept contemporary accounts from the news of the day the club's founding father is James Bryant (1826-1881), an Australian cricketer who played first-class cricket matches for Surrey and Victoria. Bryant used Melbourne's Bell's Life newspaper to call for the young men of Melbourne to assemble at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) at one o’clock on the 31st July 1858 to play a game of football, and after, further assemble to form a committee to draw up a short code of rules. Tom Wills was one of the men who assembled at the MCG that day. Other fresh evidence makes clear that on the 21st May 1859, Bryant continued his quest for a football playing club called Melbourne to be established with codified rules. Elected to Bryant's newly minted Melbourne Football Club's rules committee on the 21st May 1859, were Messrs Wills, Hammersley, Bruce, Smith and Wray. Mr Sewell was appointed treasurer, and Mr J.B. Thompson secretary of the club. Bryant's hotel, the Parade Hotel on Wellington Parade, near the Melbourne Cricket Ground, is where the first laws of the game were codified by members of the Melbourne Football Club also on the 21st May 1859. Instrumental in rules committee's work was Tom Wills, when Wills and three other members codified "The Rules of the Melbourne Football Club"—the basis of Australian rules football. The club was a dominant force in the early years of the game and a foundation member of the Victorian Football Association (VFA) in 1877 and the Victorian Football League (VFL) in 1896, now the national AFL. Melbourne has won 13 VFL/AFL premierships, the latest in 2021. The club was a foundation team of the AFL Women's league (AFLW), and won its first AFLW premiership in 2022 season 7. The football club has been a sporting section of the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC) since 2009, having previously been associated with the MCC between 1889 and 1980.