1902 VFL premiership season
Collingwood, premiers
Teams	8
Premiers	Collingwood 1st premiership
Minor premiers	Collingwood 1st minor premiership
Leading Goalkicker Medallist	Charlie Baker (St Kilda)
Matches played	72
Highest	35,202
← 1901 1903 →

The 1902 VFL season was the sixth season of the Victorian Football League (VFL), the highest level senior Australian rules football competition in Victoria. The season featured eight clubs, ran from 3 May until 20 September, and comprised a 17-game home-and-away season followed by a finals series featuring the top four clubs.

The premiership was won by the Collingwood Football Club for the first time, after it defeated Essendon by 33 points in the 1902 VFL Grand Final.

Background

In 1902, the VFL competition consisted of eight teams of 18 on-the-field players each, with no "reserves", although any of the 18 players who had left the playing field for any reason could later resume their place on the field at any time during the match.

Each team played each other twice in a home-and-away season of 14 rounds. Then, based on ladder positions after those 14 rounds, three further 'sectional rounds' were played, with the teams ranked 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th playing in one section and the teams ranked 2nd, 4th, 6th and 8th playing in the other.

Once the 17 round home-and-away season had finished, the 1902 VFL Premiers were determined by the specific format and conventions of the amended Argus system.

Home-and-away season

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

Round 5

Round 6

Round 7

Round 8

Round 9

Round 10

Round 11

Round 12

Round 13

Round 14

Ladder

Rules for classification: 1. premiership points; 2. percentage; 3. points for
Source: AFL Tables

Sectional rounds

Round 15 (Sectional round 1)

Round 16 (Sectional round 2)

Round 17 (Sectional round 3)

Final ladder

Rules for classification: 1. premiership points; 2. percentage; 3. points for
Average score: 45.6
Source: AFL Tables

Finals series

Semi-finals

Preliminary final

Grand final

Win/loss table

The following table can be sorted from biggest winning margin to biggest losing margin for each round. If two or more matches in a round are decided by the same margin, these margins are sorted by percentage (i.e. the lowest-scoring winning team is ranked highest and the lowest-scoring losing team is ranked lowest). Opponents are listed above the margins and home matches are in bold.

By having the best overall record for the season following the second week of finals, Collingwood won the right to challenge the preliminary final winner for the premiership.^[1]

Source: AFL Tables

Season notes

• The VFL instituted the amended Argus system to determine the season's premiers.
• St Kilda finished last without a win, their sixth consecutive wooden spoon, and seven games behind second-last Geelong, both VFL/AFL records.
• In each of Rounds 8 and 10, while Essendon champion Albert Thurgood was serving a three-match suspension for striking, one of his team-mates took the field each week under the nom de guerre "Goodthur"; the name was used (in quote marks) in all news reports of the matches. Football historians Michael Maplestone and Stephen Rogers, through a process of elimination, determined that Goodthur was most likely Fred Mann, and official statistics reflect this. ^[2]
• Collingwood's Charlie Pannam becomes the first VFL player to play 100 VFL games (at the end of the 1902 season, he had played in 104 of the 106 VFL games that Collingwood had played since the VFL's first round of games in 1897).

Awards

• The 1902 VFL Premiership team was Collingwood.
• The VFL's leading goalkicker in the home-and-away season was Charlie Baker of St Kilda with 30 goals; St Kilda kicked only 64 goals for the year, of which Baker kicked 46.9%, and Baker's proportion of his team's goals is a VFL/AFL record. Including finals, Ted Rowell of Collingwood scored the most goals with 33.