The 1877 VFA season was the inaugural season of the Victorian Football Association (VFA), the highest-level Australian rules football competition in the colony of Victoria. It was the first season in which football in Victoria was run under a properly constituted administrative body.

The VFA was formed with the view to governing the sport via a collective body, made up of delegates representing the clubs. Although the formation was a significant step in the organisation of football, it was effectively an administrative change only, and there was no significant change to the manner in which matches were scheduled and played – or the premiership decided – compared to the unaffiliated 1876 season.

Carlton won the inaugural VFA premiership after finishing the season with 14 wins from its 21 matches.

The Victorian Football Association was established on 17 May 1877 to provide administration of the game in Victoria. It was the second such body to have been formed, after the South Australian Football Association (SAFA) was formed 17 days prior to the VFA. Prior to 1877, the laws of the game had been agreed to at an annual meeting of club secretaries, however the clubs remained entirely independent and unaffiliated. This meant that when a dispute existed between two clubs, there was no formal means of resolving it or enforcing a decision.

Disputes in the 1870s were common and were often left unresolved for this reason: for example, in 1876, a rule existed to prevent any player from playing with more than one club during the season, but when Carlton broke the rule against Albert-park, there was no means of recourse against it, and the result of a disputed match between Carlton and Melbourne was unresolved, with each club ultimately reporting a different score in its annual report and no central body existing to declare one score as official. Additionally, the matter of whether or not Albert Park won the Challenge Cup in 1870 was never formally resolved.

The new Association was established, and was modelled in large part on the Victorian Cricket Association (VCA), which had been established in September 1875 to provide a similar level of centralised administration over Victorian cricket. The Victorian Football Association comprised one delegate from each senior metropolitan club (and from senior country clubs by proxy) and a vote of those club delegates could make a decision which was binding on any associated club. Junior clubs were also managed by the Association, but did not have representation on the board.

The Association was established with the power to:

The Association comprised a range of senior and junior clubs from Melbourne and around the colony of Victoria. There were five inaugural metropolitan senior clubs: Albert Park, Carlton, Hotham, Melbourne and St Kilda. Hotham was a revival of the former North Melbourne Football Club, which had disbanded and seen many of its players and members join Albert-park in 1876; the revived club was mostly made up of players from the former North Melbourne Football Club as well as some from the Carlton Imperial Football Club, which had folded at the end of 1876.