Football's Forgotten Years

For almost 100 years, the AFL competition has been deemed to start in 1897, the year in which eight clubs seceded from the Victorian Football Association to form the Victorian Football League. This revision of history ignores the years between 1870 and 1896 when 11 of today’s AFL clubs not only participated in the VFA competition but won every premiership!

Author Colin Carter’s extensive research makes it crystal clear that the VFL’s founders, the VFL clubs, as well as journalists and commentators of the time, agreed 1870 to be their competition’s inaugural season. These forgotten years need to be reclaimed because a lot of important football history has been ignored or misplaced.

Football’s Forgotten Years outlines why these foundation years must be included in the AFL competition’s history, and the champions and administrators who set up the game in those years be recognised for their pioneering achievements.

This book is an important document in the never-ending history of Australian football, and, in particular, its formative years in Victoria.

About the Author

Colin Carter is a renowned football administrator, and is one of Australia’s foremost strategic planners serving as a senior vice-president of the Boston Consulting Group until 2001, and in recent years as an advisor. He was significant in the formation of the AFL’s salary cap and player draft system and brought together the VFL and the Melbourne Cricket Club to ensure the development of the Great Southern Stand at the MCG. He served on the AFL Commission from 1993 to 2007 and was later president of Geelong from 2011 to 2020. In 2021, he was commissioned by the AFL to report on the potential of an AFL club from Tasmania. In the 2012 Queen’s Birthday Honours list he was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for “Service to the Indigenous community through the development of employment and economic opportunities, as a supporter of charitable organisations, and to the sport of Australian Rules Football”.

This is his second book. In 2004, with Jay Lorsch, he wrote Back to the Drawing Board designing Corporate Boards for a Complex World (Harvard Business Review Press).