High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Australian Football League is the top professional Australian rules football in the world. The league consists of eighteen teams: nine based in the city of Melbourne, one from regional Victoria, and eight based around other Australian states. The reason for this unbalanced geographic distribution lies in the history of the league, which was based solely within Victoria from the time it was established in 1897, until the time the league expanded through the addition of clubs from interstate to the existing league starting in the 1980s; until this expansion, the league was known as the Victorian Football League.