The 1882 Victorian Football Association season was the sixth season of the Australian rules football competition. The premiership was won by the Geelong Football Club. It was the club's fourth VFA premiership in just five seasons, and was the first in a sequence of three consecutive premierships won from 1882 to 1884.
The senior metropolitan membership of the Association (including Geelong) during 1882 was seven, the same clubs that had competed in 1881:, East Melbourne,,, Hotham,, and South Melbourne.
At this time, three other provincial senior clubs were full Association members represented on the Board of Management for a total membership of ten: Ballarat, Benalla and Horsham.[1] Due to distance, these clubs played too few matches against the rest of the VFA to be considered relevant in the premiership.
The 1882 premiership was won by the Geelong Football Club. Geelong won ten and drew two of its thirteen senior matches for the season, a considerably better record than second-placed, which won five and drew five of its twelve senior matches.
The below table details the playing records of the seven clubs in all matches during the 1882 season, where the information is available. Two sets of results are given:
While East Melbourne was a senior club, in practice they played to a junior standard, and in its few matches against the other senior clubs were routinely beaten by large margins. Consequently, the Australasian and the Leader newspapers did not include matches against East Melbourne in teams' senior results, and this approach has been replicated in the table below.
The clubs are listed in the order in which they were ranked in the Australasian newspaper. The VFA had no formal process by which the clubs were ranked, so the below order should be considered indicative only, particularly since the fixturing of matches was not standardised; however, the top three placings were later acknowledged in publications including the Football Record and are considered official.[2]
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| Senior Results | Total Results | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TEAM | P | W | L | D | GF | GA | P | W | L | D | GF | GA | |||||
| 1 | (P) | 13 | 10 | 1 | 2 | 51 | 11 | 24 | 20 | 2 | 2 | 120 | 19 | ||||
| 2 | 12 | 5 | 2 | 5 | 35 | 24 | 23 | 14 | 3 | 6 | 85 | 38 | |||||
| 3 | 13 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 35 | 32 | 23 | 15 | 4 | 4 | 77 | 42 | |||||
| 13 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 42 | 34 | 21 | 12 | 4 | 5 | 70 | 41 | ||||||
| Hotham | 13 | 4 | 9 | 0 | 22 | 48 | 21 | 11 | 10 | 0 | 42 | 50 | |||||
| 16 | 1 | 12 | 3 | 27 | 63 | 23 | 6 | 13 | 4 | 53 | 70 | ||||||
| East Melbourne | 6 | 0 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 35 | 14 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 17 | 44 | |||||
| Key: P = Played, W = Won, L = Lost, D = Drawn, GF = Goals For, GA = Goals Against, (P) = Premiers | Source:[3] [4] | ||||||||||||||||