In the Australian Football League (AFL), previously the Victorian Football League (VFL), the pre-season competition, known during its history by a variety of sponsored names and most recently as the NAB Cup, was an annual Australian rules football tournament held amongst clubs prior to the premiership season between 1988 and 2013. The pre-season competition culminated annually in a grand final and pre-season premier.

The pre-season competition was established from the Australian Football Championships Night Series in 1988. The Night Series had been a competition featuring VFL, SANFL, WAFL and minor states representative teams which had been staged partly in the pre-season and partly during the premiership season, generally finishing in July; but, it had reduced in size and importance until 1987, when only VFL teams were involved and the competition was finished by the end of April. In 1988, the competition was moved entirely into the pre-season, and became the VFL Pre-season Cup. The pre-season competition is generally considered to be of equivalent importance as both the AFC Night Series and the VFL Night Series (1956–1971), and records relating to the three competitions are often combined under the general name "night premierships".

Between 1988 and 1999, the competition was run as a simple knock-out tournament in which the winning teams moved through to the next round and losing teams were eliminated. Before there were sixteen teams in the AFL, the previous season's top-ranked teams (either the premier or both grand finalists) were advanced directly to the second round; after Fremantle entered the league as the 16th team in 1995, all teams began in the first round. In 1992, the competition introduced the Michael Tuck Medal for the best player in the grand final.

After criticism that the knock-out format limited the preparation of the losing teams, a round-robin format was introduced in 2000. The sixteen teams were split into groups of four, each playing three pool matches with the winner of each group advancing to the knockout semi-final stage. The public reaction to the change was mixed, as the atmosphere at some of the pool games was noticeably flat compared with previous years. The competition reverted to the straight knock-out format in 2003, and retained that format until 2010.

In 2011, the pre-season competition expanded to eighteen teams with the addition of the Gold Coast Suns (which joined the day premiership in 2011) and the Greater Western Sydney Giants (which joined the day premiership in 2012). As this precluded a straight four-round knock-out competition, the first round of the pre-season competition was staged with six pools of three teams, with each group playing a round-robin of half-length lightning matches on the same day at the same venue. The format from that point was:

After 2013, the competitive aspect of the preseason was abandoned altogether, and replaced with a series of standalone practice matches over several weeks prior to the home-and-away season, featuring no ranking or overall winner. By the 2021 pre-season, these matches were reduced to a single weekend, principally due to changing border restrictions in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The series has still had its own sponsored name throughout much of this time, although matches are also simply termed "official practice matches."

Source:

Most games during the pre-season competition, including the final, were night matches. Normal games were typically played slightly short of full-length (quarters lasting 17½ or 18 minutes plus time-on instead of the normal 20), and with an extended interchange bench of six or eight players to offer less physically demanding conditions for the pre-season games. Lightning matches, when they were played from 2011 until 2013, were played over two-halves of 20 minutes plus time-on. Extra time was played to resolve drawn knock-out games.