2020 AFL Grand Final

The 2020 AFL Grand Final was an Australian rules football match contested between Richmond and Geelong at the Gabba in Brisbane, Queensland, on Saturday 24 October 2020. It was the 125th annual Grand Final of the Australian Football League (formerly the Victorian Football League), staged to determine the premiers for the 2020 AFL season. The match was originally scheduled for the last Saturday of September but was delayed several weeks due to the suspension of the season stemming from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was the first AFL grand final to be staged outside the state of Victoria, and the first to be held at night.

The match was won by Richmond by a margin of 31 points, marking the club's thirteenth VFL/AFL premiership and their third in four seasons. Richmond's Dustin Martin won the Norm Smith Medal as the player judged best on ground, becoming the first player to win three Norm Smith Medals. The match was attended by 29,707 spectators, just short of the reduced capacity allowed at the venue under pandemic guidelines.

In the originally released fixture for the 2020 season, the grand final was scheduled according to convention on the last Saturday in September (26 September, 2:30pm) at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. However, the season and the scheduling of the grand final were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which began to spread in Australia in March 2020. Although the season restarted on 11 June, the fixture was under a constant cloud of uncertainty, and it was not until 2 September that arrangements for the grand final were finally announced.

The home-and-away season was shortened to 17 matches per club, instead of the originally intended 22, and the season was suspended entirely for almost three months between 22 March and 11 June as Australia dealt with its first wave of the virus. This adjusted fixture had the effect of delaying the end of the regular season until mid-September, and pushing the grand final back to a provisional date of 17 October. The game was ultimately scheduled for 24 October, surpassing the 1923 VFL Grand Final (which was played on 20 October 1923) as the latest in the year to play the grand final.

The playing of the match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, as contracted until at least 2057, was complicated by a second wave of the virus in Melbourne that commenced in July, which resulted in tighter border restrictions, local lockdowns, and social distancing rules. All Victorian clubs left the state for the majority of the season, basing themselves primarily in Queensland, and on 24 August it was announced that the MCG could not host the grand final. The Gabba, home stadium of the Brisbane Lions in the central Brisbane suburb of Woolloongabba, Queensland, was ultimately announced to host the match; Adelaide Oval was kept available as a backup venue in the event of a virus outbreak in Brisbane. As part of negotiations, the deal to play the grand final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground was extended by one year to 2058, and two extra home-and-away matches were granted to the ground in 2022 and 2023. It was the first time that a VFL/AFL grand final in its 123-year history was played outside of Victoria, and the first time since 1991 that the match was played away from the Melbourne Cricket Ground. A 3 m² section of Melbourne Cricket Ground turf was transplanted into the Gabba surface to ensure the traditional venue was still part of the event.

The venue's normal capacity of 42,000 was reduced to 30,000 to comply with health department restrictions still in force at the time, and many tickets were available for general public sale for the first time in more than 20 years—this was in contrast to all grand final tickets having been sold through different corporate and membership allocations in recent years. The reduced capacity was all but filled, with 29,707 attending the match; the restrictions meant it was the lowest crowd to attend a grand final since 1917, during World War I.

In the lead-up to the announcement, it was widely reported that the league was strongly considering moving the match to a twilight or evening timeslot to avoid a clash with major Melbourne Spring Racing Carnival races (the Caulfield Cup on 17 October or the Cox Plate on 24 October). Ultimately, the match was scheduled for a start time of 6:30pm AEST to avoid the Cox Plate, the first time the match had not been played in the traditional afternoon timeslot.

The Grand Final Eve public holiday, observed in Victoria, was shifted to 23 October in line with the adjusted date.