The Victorian Football League (VFL) is an Australian rules football competition in Australia operated by the Australian Football League (AFL) as a second-tier, regional, semi-professional competition. It includes teams from clubs based in eastern states of Australia: Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and Queensland, including reserves teams for the eastern state AFL clubs. It succeeded and continues the competition of the former Victorian Football Association (VFA) which began in 1877. The name of the competition was changed to the Victorian Football League in 1996. Under its VFL brand, the AFL also operates a women's football competition known as VFL Women's, which was established in 2016.

The VFA was formed in 1877 and was the second-oldest Australian rules football league, replacing the loose affiliation of clubs that existed in the early years of the game. It was the top-level club competition in Victoria until 1896, becoming the secondary-level competition from 1897 after its eight strongest clubs seceded to form the Victorian Football League (now AFL). As a secondary-level competition, the VFA enjoyed peaks of popularity, in the 1940s with a faster-paced rival code of rules and in the 1970s by playing on Sundays at a time when its competitor, the VFL, played on Saturdays.

In 1995, the VFA ceased to exist as an independent organisation and control of its football competition was taken over by its former rival, the AFL, which initially operated the competition through its subsidiary, the Victorian State Football League (VSFL). AFL clubs' reserves teams first entered the competition in 2000. In 2021, the competition expanded geographically, when the VFL absorbed the North East Australian Football League (NEAFL) to include clubs from New South Wales and Queensland. As of 2026, the competition includes 22 teams from the eastern states, eight of which have a continuous VFA heritage.

The Victorian Football Association (VFA) was founded on 17 May 1877 at the meeting of club secretaries immediately preceding the 1877 season. It was formed out of a desire to provide a formal administrative structure to the governance of the sport, and it had the power to impose binding decisions on its members on matters including the Laws of the Game, player eligibility and other disputes, as well as to facilitate intercolonial football. Decisions were made based on a vote of the Board of Management, which was composed of two delegates from each senior club, a structure which was retained until the late 1980s. It replaced a system under which the secretaries of the senior clubs met at the beginning of each year to decide on matters of mutual interest, but the system was informal and disputes often went unresolved.

The five foundation senior clubs in the Melbourne metropolitan area were Albert-park, Carlton, Hotham (later North Melbourne), Melbourne and St Kilda. Provincial clubs were also eligible for senior representation on the Association, even though most seldom played matches against the metropolitan teams; Geelong, the nearest provincial club to the metropolis, was the most prominent provincial club, joining the Association in 1877 and playing regularly against metropolitan clubs by 1880. There was no formal system of promotion and relegation between the senior and junior levels, with it largely at a club's discretion whether or not it joined the Association as a paying senior member. The affiliation fee for senior clubs was initially set at one guinea.

Through the first decade of the VFA's existence, the structure of the football season did not change significantly from the informal system which had evolved over previous years. Setting of fixtures was the responsibility of club secretaries rather than the Association itself, and in a typical season, a club could play against other VFA teams, non-VFA clubs, at odds against junior teams (usually twenty players against twenty-three), and in some seasons against intercolonial teams; although as the number of senior clubs increased, the number of matches against non-VFA clubs declined. Prior to the 1888 season, there was no formally endorsed system for awarding a VFA premiership: as had been the case since the early 1870s, the premier club was determined by public and press consensus, which by the mid-1880s was conventionally but informally understood to be the senior club which suffered the fewest losses during the season. Premierships won under this then-informal method are now considered official, and consensus was typically uncontroversial.

In 1888, the VFA first took responsibility for the onfield competition, and introduced its first formal premiership system by adopting a system of premiership points; it also awarded for the first time a premiership cap in the Association's colours to players of the premier team. The Association's influence over the on-field competition grew, and from 1894, the Association assumed responsibility for centrally setting the fixtures and standardising the number of games played by each team.

After the formal introduction of the premiership, the often-changeable collection of senior clubs in the VFA soon became settled at twelve premiership-eligible clubs: Carlton, Essendon, Fitzroy, Footscray, Geelong, Melbourne, North Melbourne, Port Melbourne, Richmond, St Kilda, South Melbourne and Williamstown; they were joined by a thirteenth club, Collingwood, in 1892. Three Ballarat-based clubs – Ballarat, Ballarat Imperial and South Ballarat – were also voting members of the VFA through this time, but were not involved in the onfield premiership.