2026 Season Start Date & Men’s Premier Section Structure

The 2026 VAFA Football Season will commence on Saturday, 18th April, two weeks after Easter following strong feedback from many club Presidents suggesting that the length of the season was too long and volunteers were feeling ‘burnout.’

In order to reduce the length of the season, it was necessary to remove one of the mid-year Double Byes. Whilst we appreciate this will impact clubs who have players travelling internationally at that time of year, the reduction in season length for all Premier clubs was seen as the priority.

The William Buck Premier Men’s Grand Final will again be played on the last Friday of September (25th), taking advantage of the public holiday preceding the AFL Grand Final.

Grand Final Friday has already experienced significant growth, with the crowd up 8% and the live-stream broadcast up 38% in 2025, with more than a million social media views of our 2025 Premier Men’s Grand Final content across Instagram and TikTok alone.

The Senior Men’s Premier competition operates on a promotion/relegation structure which sees the two Grand Finalists move up a section, whilst the two lowest finishing sides are relegated down a section.

Below are the movements across the Men’s Premier competitions for 2026:

Fixturing for Premier competitions will commence in mid-November with the aim to complete as many fixtures as possible prior to the end of the year.

The Women’s and Divisional structures will be finalised in the coming weeks.