History
The first group of Champions of Australia competitions were held between the Victorian Football Association and South Australian Football Association premiers while from 1907 until 1914, the final competition for 54 years, it was contested between the premiers of the VFL and SAFL. Port Adelaide were champions a record four times during this period. The inaugural Championship was a best-of-three-game series but all future tournaments were decided by a Grand Final. The premier teams from other states were not included in these tournaments.
In 1968 the Championship returned under the same format but the Australian National Football Council refused to grant it official status as teams from Western Australia and Tasmania were not competing and it thus couldn't be referred to as a Championship of 'Australia'. Both states' premiers joined the tournament from 1972 onwards to make it a four-club championship. For Tasmania, it was the premier of the Tasmanian State Premiership that was invited to the Championship – except in 1974, when no state premiership was held and a composite team of players from the premier clubs of the various Tasmanian leagues took part. All games were held in Adelaide, but VFL clubs won every Championship from 1968, except in 1972 when South Australia's North Adelaide Football Club upset Victoria's Carlton Football Club to win by a point. [2]
In 1976, the National Football League abandoned the post-season Championship of Australia concept by establishing the NFL Night Series. It was contested on weekday nights concurrently with the 1976 premiership season by twelve clubs – five from the VFL, four from the SANFL and three from the WAFL – who qualified based on their 1975 positions. It is sometimes seen as a natural extension of the Championship of Australia, although 13 of the 15 games in the series were played in Adelaide which continued to provide the SANFL clubs with an advantage over their VFL and WAFL counterparts.
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