Despite being called the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the stadium has been and continues to be used much more often for Australian football, which reflects that football is Melbourne's most popular sport, winter or otherwise. Indeed, spectator numbers for football are larger than for any other sport in Australia.
Although the Melbourne Cricket Club members were instrumental in founding Australian football, there were understandable concerns in the early days about the damage that might be done to the playing surface if football was allowed to be played at the MCG - after all it was a cricket ground. Therefore, football games were often played in the parklands next to the cricket ground.
This was the case for the first documented football match to be played at the ground. Noted Melbourne cricketer Thomas Wills wrote a letter to the sporting newspaper, Bell's Life in Victoria, on July 10, 1858, suggesting a football club be formed so cricketers could keep fit during the winter months.
The MCC committee was enthusiastic about the proposal and delegated a sub-committee comprising Wills, W.J. Hammersley, J.B. Thompson and T.H. Smith to devise a set of rules. The quartet produced the nine "Melbourne Rules" which were the basis of the Australian code.
It wasn’t until 1869 that football was played on the MCG proper, even though it was only a trial game involving a police team. It was not for another 10 years, in 1879, after the formation of the Victorian Football Association, that the first official match was played on the MCG and the cricket ground itself became a regular venue for football. Night matches were even played that year using specially erected light towers.
In those early years the MCG was the home ground of the Melbourne Football Club, Australia’s oldest, established in 1859 by the founder of the game itself, Thomas Wills.
A founding member of the Victorian Football Association in 1877, Melbourne won five premierships in the early years using the MCG as its home ground. Melbourne originally played in white and were known as the ‘Invincible Whites’ but became the ‘Redlegs’ in 1872 and eventually the ‘Demons’ after World War II.
The first of nearly 2200 Victorian Football League/Australian Football League games to be played at the MCG was on May 15, 1897 with Melbourne beating Geelong.
Melbourne Football Club won its first VFL premiership in 1900 and was not successful again until 1926. However after two golden eras (1939-41 and 1955-64) the club had won 12 flags. The club made it to the grand final in 1988 and 2000, losing to Hawthorn and Essendon respectively.
In the modern era the MCC pioneered today's multiple use of grounds system in 1965 when, in response to a Richmond Football Club initiative, it was decided that Richmond could adopt the MCG as its home ground on alternate Saturdays.
The move proved beneficial to all parties and was the forerunner to today's multiple-club home ground usage of the stadium.
The current MCG tenant clubs are Melbourne, Richmond, Collingwood (since 1999) and Hawthorn (2000). North Melbourne (in 1985) and Essendon (1992) have vacated the MCG to become tenant clubs at Etihad Stadium.
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