Women's Australian rules football
female-only form of Australian rules football
Women's Australian rules football (in areas where it is popular, known simply as women's football, women's footy or women's AFL) is the female-only form of Australian rules football, generally with some modification to the laws of the game. It is played by more than half a million women worldwide and with 119,447 Australian adult and 66,998 youth female participants in 2023 is the second most played code among women and girls in Australia behind soccer.
The first Australian rules football matches involving women were organised late in the 19th century, but for several decades it occurred mostly in the form of scratch matches, charity matches and one-off exhibition games. The first all-female matches began early in the 20th century, and regular competition first emerged after World War II. State-based leagues emerged between the 1980s and 2000s: the first was the Victorian Women's Football League (VWFL) formed in Melbourne in 1981, with others including the West Australian Women's Football League (WAWFL) formed in Perth in 1988 and the South Australian Women's Football League (SAWFL) formed in Adelaide in 1991. The AFL Women's National Championships were inaugurated in 1992.
In 2010 the Australian Football League (AFL) assumed control of the sport with the intention of professionalising it and began restructuring competitions around the country to support an Australian national league, AFL Women's (AFLW), that commenced its inaugural season in 2017. By 2022 all 18 AFL clubs had begun fielding women's teams. The AFLW attracts a large audience of more than one million attendees and over two million viewers, and has managed to maintain its high levels of interest despite moving to primarily ticketed and subscription broadcasting models in 2021. The AFLW competition is one of the most popular women's football competitions in the world with an average attendance in 2019 of 6,262 a game. The record attendance is 53,034 which was set at the 2019 AFL Women's Grand Final which, prior to the 2020 ICC Women's T20 World Cup, held the record for the most attended fixture in Australian women's sport.
The public source identifies “Women's Australian rules football” as female-only form of Australian rules football. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Women's, Australian and rules.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Women's Australian rules football”, the useful work is to connect “female-only form of Australian rules football” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5554023. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2023, 1981, 1988 and 1991.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Women's Australian rules football” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.