The Essendon Football Club, nicknamed the Bombers or colloquially the Dons, is a professional Australian rules football club that plays in the Australian Football League (AFL), the game's premier competition. The club was formed by the McCracken family in their Ascot Vale home "Alisa" adopting the name of the local borough. While the exact date is unknown, it is generally accepted to have been in 1872. The club's first recorded game took place on 7 June 1873 against a Carlton seconds team. From 1878 until 1896, the club played in the Victorian Football Association (VFA), then joined seven other clubs in October 1896 to form the breakaway Victorian Football League (known as the Australian Football League since 1990). Headquartered at the Essendon Recreation Ground, known as Windy Hill, from 1922 to 2013, the club moved to The Hangar in Tullamarine in late 2013 on land owned by the Melbourne Airport corporation. The club shares its home games between Docklands Stadium and the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Zach Merrett is the current club captain.

Essendon is one of Australia's best-known and most successful football clubs. It has won 16 VFL/AFL premierships, which, along with Carlton and Collingwood, is the most of any club in the competition. The club won four consecutive VFA premierships between 1891 and 1894, a feat unmatched in that competition's history. Essendon also hold the distinction of being the only club to win a premiership in their inaugural season (1897). It has struggled to achieve significant on-field success in the 21st century, however, having won its most recent premiership in 2000 and most recent final in 2004.

The team plays in two of the AFL's two longest-running annual marquee fixtures: the Anzac Day clash with Collingwood since 1995 and Dreamtime at the 'G with Richmond since 2005.

Three Essendon players — John Coleman, Bill Hutchison, and Dick Reynolds — and one coach, Kevin Sheedy, are classified as "Legends" in the Australian Football Hall of Fame.

Essendon also fields reserve men's and women's teams in the Victoria Football League and VFL Women's, respectively. Since 2022 (S7), it has fielded a senior women's team in the national AFL Women's competition.

The club was founded by members of the Royal Agricultural Society, the Melbourne Hunt Club and the Victorian Woolbrokers. The Essendon Football Club is thought to have been formed in 1872 at a meeting in the home of a well-known brewery family, the McCrackens, whose Ascot Vale property hosted a team of local junior players.

Robert McCracken (1813–1885), the owner of several city hotels, was the founder and first president of the Essendon Football Club, and his son, Alex McCracken, its first secretary. Alex later became president of the newly formed VFL. Alex's cousin Collier McCracken, who had already played with Melbourne, was the team's first captain.

The club played its first recorded match against the Carlton Second Twenty (the reserves) on 7 June 1873, with Essendon winning by one goal. Essendon played 13 matches in its first season, winning seven, with four draws and losing two. The club was one of the inaugural junior members of the Victorian Football Association (VFA) in 1877, and it began competing as a senior club from the 1878 season. During its early years in the Association, Essendon played its home matches at Flemington Hill, but it moved to the East Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1881.^{[citation needed]}