Collingwood Football Club
Australian rules football club based in Melbourne
The Collingwood Football Club, nicknamed the Magpies or colloquially the Pies, is a professional Australian rules football club based in Melbourne that competes in the Australian Football League (AFL), the sport's elite competition. Founded in 1892 in the Melbourne suburb of Collingwood, the club played in the Victorian Football Association (VFA) before joining seven other teams in 1896 to form the breakaway Victorian Football League (VFL), known today as the Australian Football League (AFL). Originally based at Victoria Park, Collingwood now plays home games at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and has its headquarters and training facilities at Olympic Park Oval and the KGM Centre.
Collingwood has played in a record 45 VFL/AFL Grand Finals (including rematches), winning 16 premierships (tied with Carlton and Essendon), drawing two (a record) and losing 27 (also a record). Regarded as one of Australia's most popular sports teams, Collingwood, as of 2013, attracted the highest attendance figures and television ratings of any professional football club in the nation, across all codes. In 2023, it topped the AFL membership ladder with 106,470 members.
The club's song, "Good Old Collingwood Forever", dates back to 1906, making it the oldest team song currently used in the AFL. Its home guernsey consists of black and white stripes, based on the colours of the Australian magpie. Another kind of colour is white and black stripes instead. Historically, the club's biggest rivals have been neighbouring clubs Carlton and Richmond. Collingwood has also enjoyed a healthy Anzac Day rivalry with Essendon since 1995.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Collingwood Football Club” as australian rules football club based in Melbourne. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as australian rules football club based in Melbourne. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
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 Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q249679. VIAF identifies the subject as 131520877. The Library of Congress control number is n97056003. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1892, 1896, 2013 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “Collingwood Football Club” 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.