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The 1987 Victorian Football Association season was the 106th season of the top division of the Australian rules football competition, and the 27th season of second division competition. The Division 1 premiership was won by the Springvale Football Club, after it defeated Port Melbourne in the Grand Final on 20 September by 38 points; it was Springvale's first Division 1 premiership, won in just its fourth season in the first division. The Division 2 premiership was won by Prahran; it was the club's second Division 2 premiership, and the last premiership ever won by the club in either division. The 1987 season was tumultuous on and off the field, with three separate clubs – Moorabbin, Geelong West and Caulfield – suspended from the Association at different times during the year. ==FORT review== In mid-1986, the Association organised the Football Organisation Review Team (FORT), which was tasked with reviewing the medium and long term structure of the Association and how it would fit within the wider Victorian football landscape. The FORT comprised: Association president and former Brunswick president Brook Andersen; former Association and Brunswick president Cr Alex Gillon; CEO and former National Football League consultant John Adams; with consultation from state Minister for Sports and Recreation and former player Neil Trezise MLA. The FORT was given ''carte blanche'' to review how best to structure the Association into the future. ;Context The Association, particularly its weakest clubs, had been in decline for about a decade, struggling with the Victorian Football League entering the Sunday football market, rising costs, loss of television coverage, reduced access to former League players, and demographic shifts in former heartland municipalities.〔 The Association had been working since 1980 to improve its overall viability, having discussed various affiliation models with the League in 1980, and undergone restructures of the divisional system in both 1982 and 1984, but about half of the Association's clubs were still struggling and long-term viability was a concern to the Association executive. The Victorian Football League was also going through dramatic changes which were altering the wider football landscape in Victoria. In October 1986, the League admitted newly established clubs based in Perth (the West Coast Eagles) and south-eastern Queensland (the Brisbane Bears). At the same time, as many as half of the League's eleven Victorian-based clubs were in severe or impending financial trouble: had moved to Sydney in 1982 due to its financial troubles, had fielded offers from Brisbane- and Canberra-based consortiums for a potential relocation in 1987, and , and were all struggling off the field – in some cases, the clubs were solvent only because of the dividend they received from the multimillion-dollar licence fees charged to the new clubs, and from the proceeds earned when the Sydney Swans club was sold to Dr Geoffrey Edelsten in 1985.〔 Thereafter followed wide speculation about further national expansion of the VFL, with expressions of interest from private consortiums, leagues and clubs in Adelaide, Canberra, Fremantle and Tasmania, and speculation that the struggling Victorian clubs would relocate, merge or fold. As such, the future composition of the League was very uncertain at the time, but it was considered realistic that within only a few years, the League could have expanded to a fully national competition, with a reduction in the number of Victorian-based clubs competing. ;FORT recommendations The FORT concluded that with the potential rapid nationalisation of the League, the Association would be well placed to take the position as the top state-based competition in Victoria, sitting underneath the League and serving as a development ground and reserves competition for its Victorian clubs – similar to how the West Australian Football League was organised underneath the West Coast Eagles. To do this effectively, the Association would be best structured as a single division of twelve strong, viable clubs, with promotion and relegation abandoned permanently. The FORT named its twelve clubs, based upon a number of off-field criteria including tradition, location, quality of facilities, and level of support from locals, councils and sponsors. The twelve clubs named were: from Division 1, Box Hill, Coburg, Frankston, Geelong West, Port Melbourne, Preston, Sandringham and Williamstown; from Division 2, Dandenong, Oakleigh and Prahran; and a new club based in Ringwood. Under the proposal, the second division would continue, but it would now be a suburban league operating under the auspices of the Victorian Metropolitan Football League, with no prospects of promotion to Division 1. The eleven clubs who were excluded from the FORT's vision were: Division 1 clubs Brunswick and Springvale; and Division 2 clubs Berwick, Camberwell, Caulfield, Moorabbin, Mordialloc, Northcote, Sunshine, Waverley and Werribee.〔 The FORT sought to implement this change by 1988, but needed a three-quarters majority from a vote of the Board of Management to achieve a formal mandate, which would have required several of the excluded clubs would vote in favour of their own exclusion. Springvale, which was undergoing the strong recruiting campaign which ultimately delivered it the 1987 premiership, and Sunshine, which had enjoyed a resurgence in recent years was in the process of securing $350,000 from the council to upgrade Skinner Reserve, were both worried that the uncertainty generated by the FORT recommendations might jeopardise those ventures, so those clubs led the public campaign against the changes; within a fortnight, they claimed to have thirteen clubs onside to oppose the changes.〔 By April 1987, Andersen recognised that he did not have enough support to get the changes through, and it was never formally put to the vote. The FORT also recommended that the Association's Board of Management, which was the primary decision-making body within the Association, be restructured. Since the Association's foundation, the Board had been formed from club delegates, the consequence being that the Association could pass changes only if a majority of clubs voted for them. The FORT recommended an independent board comprising five delegates: three elected by Division 1 clubs, one elected by Division 2 clubs, and one from the VFL Commission. This would allow the Board to make more difficult decisions in the interest of the Association as a whole, rather than rely on clubs who could vote down changes on self-interest.〔 The motion for an independent board was put to the vote on 5 May 1987, and fell one vote short of the three-quarters majority it required, with 17–7 in favour. A second vote was held in July, with the size of the proposed board expanded to six,〔 but it this time it was comfortably voted down by a 10–14 margin. The independent board of management was eventually approved in March 1988. ;Aftermath Although the FORT's structural recommendations were never formally mandated, eight clubs left or were forced out of the Association within only 2½ years of the review, with most of those clubs placing part of the blame on the fall-out from the FORT review. Andersen and the rest of the Association executive made it clear that they were still strategically in favour of the FORT's vision, which created uncertainty about whether the second division had a future: Berwick and Mordialloc both saw this uncertainty as reason to withdraw from the Association and return to suburban football; and players and sponsors saw this uncertainty as a reason to abandon weaker clubs, severely affecting clubs like Caulfield. Many clubs also expressed bitterness upon their departures that they felt that the Association executive became more willing to allow weaker clubs to decline and fail without intervening, in order to allow the Association to progress naturally towards the FORT's vision. Within only six years, the Association had contracted to the point where it almost matched the FORT's vision. The second division was abandoned at the start of 1989, and by 1991 there were only twelve teams remaining in the Association: ten were among the twelve clubs named by the FORT, with excluded clubs Springvale and Werribee surviving in place of Geelong West and Ringwood. However, the VFL's national expansion and rationalisation of its Victorian clubs did not progress as far or as quickly as FORT had speculated: by 1994, all eleven Victorian clubs were still competing in the League, and only one new interstate club, the Adelaide Crows, had joined; and even as late as 2010 there were still ten Victorian clubs and only six interstate clubs. The Association ended up becoming the top Victorian state-level competition following an administrative change in 1995, but it was not until 2000, a full thirteen years after the review, that the Association finally fulfilled the FORT's vision of merging with the League reserves. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「1987 VFA season」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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