AFL finals series
end of season tournaments to decide the winner of the AFL premiership
The Australian Football League finals series, more generally known as the AFL finals, and known from 1897 until 1989 as the Victorian Football League finals series or VFL finals, is a playoff tournament held at the end of each AFL season to determine the premier. Based on the home-and-away season results, the top teams qualify for the finals which culminate in the AFL Grand Final. The finals series is traditionally held throughout September.
The finals have been conducted under the AFL finals system since 2000, the final eight system until 2025, expanding to ten teams in 2026. When the Victorian Football League was established in 1897 the league experimented with different systems before utilising the four-team Argus finals system from 1901 until 1930. Different variations of the McIntyre system were used from 1931 until 1999, beginning with four teams and expanding gradually to ten. These systems have typically been combinations of single- and double elimination tournaments designed to give higher ranked teams an easier path to the premiership.
Inception
The Victorian Football League was established at the end of 1896 by eight clubs which seceded from the Victorian Football Association, which had previously been the peak competition and administrative body for football in Victoria. As part of its arrangements, the league introduced a system of finals in its inaugural season, to be contested after the home-and-away matches by the top four teams. The new system meant that the premiership could not be decided until the final match had been played, generating greater public interest at the end of the season; by comparison, the VFA system awarded the premiership to the team with the best win–loss record across the season, with the provision for a single playoff match only if two teams were tied for first place.
“AFL finals series” enters the record as end of season tournaments to decide the winner of the AFL premiership. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what finals, series and season can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“AFL finals series” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, finals, series and season provides the most credible route into that argument.
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 Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q27064258. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1897, 1989, 2000 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “AFL finals series” 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.