There is a particular quality to the light at the Gabba on a Friday evening in the Queensland winter — the subtropical dusk arriving slowly, the stadium filling from the outer suburbs inward, the smell of cut grass and something fried drifting from the concourse. The oval is configured for Australian rules football now, its dimensions stretched east to west to accommodate the longer axis the code demands, and if you stand at the top of the western stand and look toward the city, the Brisbane skyline rises with a clarity that only a subtropical capital in winter can offer. None of this was predetermined. The story of how Australian rules football made its home at the Gabba — how a code that began in Victoria’s goldfields towns came to occupy the most storied ground in Queensland sport — is a story of civic ambition, administrative ingenuity, and the particular stubbornness of a game that refused to remain provincial.

That story is also, inseparably, the story of the Brisbane Lions: a club that does not exist in any simple sense, assembled as it was from the wreckage of two failing Victorian institutions, relocated to a city historically indifferent to the code, and forged over three decades into one of the most decorated clubs in Australian football history. The Gabba is their home, and the relationship between club and ground runs deep enough that it has shaped both.

THE GROUND BEFORE THE GAME.

The Gabba’s association with Australian rules football did not begin with the Brisbane Bears or the Brisbane Lions. The first VFL/AFL game at the Gabba was held on June 28, 1981, with Hawthorn hosting Essendon in front of 20,351 spectators. That match was a travelling fixture — an exhibition of the code in a city that barely knew it — rather than the beginning of a permanent tenant relationship. The ground at that time was encircled by a greyhound track and shared its calendar with a dozen competing uses. Australian rules football was a curiosity in Brisbane, not a constituency.

Six years later, the Brisbane Bears were admitted into the VFL but initially played their home games at Carrara Stadium on the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast experiment was a commercial miscalculation. Initially based on the Gold Coast, the Bears struggled to attract a loyal fanbase. The ground at Carrara was remote from Brisbane’s population centre, and the crowds that came were rarely large enough to suggest a sporting culture taking root. The Brisbane Bears experimented with playing four matches at the Gabba in Brisbane in 1991, before moving all home matches to the venue ahead of the 1993 season.

The transition to the Gabba required real investment and governmental will. After many years of negotiation, in 1991 the AFL and the Bears convinced the Queensland Government to redevelop the Brisbane Cricket Ground, facilitating a permanent move to the venue for the 1993 season. The last greyhound meeting was held at the Gabba on 5 February 1993, with work commencing shortly after to remove the greyhound track around the ground to accommodate the relocation of the Brisbane Bears from Carrara, renovating the Sir Gordon Chalk Building to house the Bears Social Club and change rooms, refurbishing the Clem Jones Stand, the construction of a new Western grandstand, and extending the playing surface to cater for Australian rules football. The work was largely completed by 11 April when the Bears hosted their first AFL game at the renovated venue against Melbourne in front of 12,821 spectators.

The move changed everything. This move helped the club a lot, as more people joined as members and attended games. The Bears made the finals in 1995 for the first time, and in 1996 reached a preliminary final. The Gabba had given the code a proper home — a genuine metropolitan venue with civic weight behind it, connected to the railway, embedded in a suburb that residents of inner Brisbane could reach without considerable effort.

THE MERGER AND THE LIONS' BIRTH.

The Lions came into existence in 1996 when the AFL expansion club the Brisbane Bears, established in 1987, absorbed the AFL operations of one of the league’s foundation clubs, Fitzroy, established in Melbourne, Victoria in 1883. The merger was not a straightforward act of institutional ambition. It was, in important respects, a rescue operation for two clubs that faced different varieties of institutional crisis.

By the start of the 1996 season, Fitzroy was almost at the end of their financial tether. With no home ground, back-to-back wooden spoons, and their future under a cloud, Fitzroy began to consider options for survival. Fitzroy’s directors had agreed in principle to merge with the eventual 1996 premiers, North Melbourne, as the “North-Fitzroy Kangaroos.” However, that proposal was rejected 15–1 by the club presidents, reportedly out of concern that an all-Victorian merge would be too powerful. Instead, Fitzroy was placed into administration, and its administrator accepted an offer to merge its AFL operations with Brisbane.

The club became the Brisbane Bears-Fitzroy Football Club (trading as Brisbane Lions), remained at the Gabba, and were coached by Bears coach John Northey. However, the club’s identity, logo, song, and guernsey were based on those of Fitzroy. The club’s colours of maroon, blue, and gold were drawn from both Fitzroy and the Bears. It was an unusual entity — a club with Victorian heritage wearing Victorian colours, playing at a Queensland ground, in a city that had only recently begun paying attention to the game. The Brisbane Lions were officially launched on 1 November 1996, joining the national competition in 1997.

The Brisbane Lions in 1997 remain the only team in VFL/AFL history to have made the finals in their first season. That debut, improbable given the disruption of the merger, announced that the new entity had something real behind it. The Gabba gave them a platform — a ground with genuine atmosphere when filled, in a climate that made winter football genuinely appealing.

FROM LAST PLACE TO DYNASTY.

The trajectory from 1998 to 2003 remains one of the most extraordinary institutional transformations in Australian football history. The Lions finished last at the end of the 1998 season. Twelve months later, after the appointment of coach Leigh Matthews, they had risen to fourth. Under Matthews, the Lions assembled one of the great modern dynasties, winning three consecutive premierships from 2001 to 2003.

They appeared in four consecutive grand finals from 2001 to 2004, winning three premierships (2001, 2002, 2003). Those three premierships — won against Essendon in 2001, Collingwood in 2002, and Collingwood again in 2003 — were achieved in Melbourne, at the MCG, which was then (as now) contractually guaranteed as the host of the AFL Grand Final. The Lions won their flags away from home, a feat that deepened rather than diminished the Gabba’s significance: it was the fortress where they prepared, where their home support had been built, where the culture that sustained them through September campaigns was forged across regular-season Fridays and Saturdays.

The final score of 20.14 (134) to 12.12 (84) in 2003 saw the club become only the fourth in VFL/AFL history to win three consecutive premierships and the first since the creation of the AFL. The Brisbane Lions became the first grand finalist in VFL/AFL history to have three Brownlow Medallists in its line-up, the three being 1996 winner Michael Voss, 2001 winner Jason Akermanis, and 2002 winner Simon Black. The talent concentrated at the Gabba during those years was exceptional by any standard.

The 2001–2003 Lions are widely regarded as one of the greatest teams in AFL history, not only for their on-field success but also for their physical toughness and mental resilience. The Gabba record across those years was formidable — the ground’s configuration, the subtropical climate, and a partisan support base all contributed to a home advantage that opponents found difficult to replicate. The 1999 season included a Round 20 Gabba match where the Lions led Fremantle by 113 points at half-time after having kicked 21 goals. Their half-time score of 21.5 (131) still remains the highest half-time score in VFL/AFL history.

THE GABBA REMADE FOR AFL.

The physical transformation of the Gabba to accommodate Australian rules football was not a cosmetic adjustment. Between 1993 and 2005, the Gabba was redeveloped in six stages at a cost of A$128 million. The dimensions of the playing field are now 170.6 metres east-west by 149.9 metres north-south, to accommodate the playing of Australian rules football at elite level. This reconfiguration was permanent and consequential. The oval’s geometry is now defined, in physical terms, by the requirements of the code it hosts for half its calendar.

The redevelopment created a dual-use ground that is rare in Australian sport: a venue where Test cricket and AFL finals both feel native, where neither code is treated as a secondary tenant. At present, the Gabba serves as the home ground for the Queensland Bulls in domestic cricket, the Brisbane Heat of the Big Bash League and Women’s Big Bash League, and the Brisbane Lions of the Australian Football League. The AFL configuration produces a capacity that is meaningfully smaller than Melbourne’s major grounds. The current capacity for AFL matches at the venue is approximately 37,000. That constraint has shaped the Lions’ relationship with their support base — sellouts became the norm as the club’s profile grew, and the intimacy of a filled but relatively compact ground generated an atmosphere that visiting clubs noted with genuine respect.

The record crowd for an Australian rules football match at the Gabba is 37,473, between the Brisbane Lions and Richmond in the 2019 second qualifying final. That figure is essentially the venue’s limit for the code — an attendance ceiling that the club has regularly approached and periodically bumped against in the years since their second dynasty began forming.

The namespace gabba.brisbane marks this ground’s dual identity in the onchain civic record — a permanent address that reflects a venue which has been shaped, in equal measure, by cricket and by the code it spent decades learning to accommodate.

A GROUND FOR THE NATION'S BIGGEST GAME.

In 2020, something happened at the Gabba that no one in Australian football had anticipated: it hosted the AFL Grand Final. The 2020 AFL Grand Final was an Australian rules football match contested between Richmond and Geelong at the Gabba in Brisbane, Queensland, on Saturday 24 October 2020. It was the 125th annual Grand Final of the Australian Football League. It was the first AFL grand final to be staged outside the state of Victoria, and the first to be held at night.

The pandemic had forced the relocation. Virus outbreaks and interstate travel restrictions precluded games in many states for much of the season, with all clubs spending parts of the season temporarily relocated to quarantine hubs, particularly in South East Queensland where almost half of all matches were played — including the Grand Final, the first time it had been played outside Victoria. The season itself had been shortened and restructured in response to the pandemic, with no crowds initially permitted before limited attendance of 29,707 was allowed at the decider under Queensland’s biosecurity protocols.

The hosting of that grand final was not simply a logistical solution to an unprecedented crisis. It was a statement about what Queensland had built in its half-century of engagement with the game. The Gabba had been rebuilt, it had sustained a club through its formative decades, and it had demonstrated — under conditions that could not have been planned for — that it was capable of staging the sport’s defining event. The AFL’s own statement at the time acknowledged that Queensland had supported the competition at a critical moment, and the grand final was, in part, a recognition of that support.

The Head of AFL Queensland, Trisha Squires, noted that the legacy of hosting the 2020 Toyota AFL Grand Final at the Gabba continued to thrive, with a record number of Queenslanders playing, supporting, and watching the game in 2021. The grand final catalysed a sustained growth in participation and membership that the Lions had been cultivating for years. It confirmed, in a way that no ordinary home-and-away season could, that the Gabba had earned its place in the national imagination of the sport.

THE SECOND DYNASTY AND THE GABBA'S FINAL SEASONS.

The Lions endured a long period of reconstruction after the dynasty years. Injuries, list management difficulties, and the challenge of sustaining a non-Victorian club in an era of salary cap parity took their toll. Between 2005 and 2018, the club made the finals only twice. The Gabba remained loyal to them through this period — membership figures held, the ground continued to fill on the better nights — but the hunger for the September standard they had set was visible in the support base’s sustained patience.

They appeared in four consecutive grand finals from 2001 to 2004, winning three premierships (2001, 2002, 2003) before again appearing in three consecutive grand finals during the 2020s, finishing as runners-up in 2023, and winning their fourth and fifth premierships in 2024 and 2025 respectively.

The 2024 AFL Grand Final was contested between the Sydney Swans and the Brisbane Lions at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Saturday, 28 September 2024. Brisbane won by a margin of 60 points, marking the club’s fourth AFL premiership and their first since 2003. Then, the following year, the 2025 AFL Grand Final was contested between the Geelong Football Club and the Brisbane Lions at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Saturday, 27 September 2025. It was the 130th annual grand final of the Australian Football League. The Brisbane Lions won by a margin of 47 points, marking the club’s second consecutive premiership and fifth overall.

The Lions are the most successful AFL club of the 21st century with the best frequency to win a premiership across the entire AFL competition — five premierships in 29 completed seasons. That record was constructed from the Gabba as its base. It is the ground where the culture was formed, where the connection between club and city was established through thousands of ordinary rounds of home-and-away football, and where the two grand final journeys of 2024 and 2025 began each season.

The Gabba currently holds 37,000 spectators for AFL games, with the Lions officially selling out nine of their 12 games in 2024. The smallness of the ground, once a mark of the code’s peripheral status in Queensland, had become a different kind of problem — a constraint on a club whose demand for tickets had outgrown its stadium.

A FAREWELL ALREADY IN MOTION.

The Gabba’s tenure as the home of the Brisbane Lions will not be permanent. Brisbane is set to have a new home ground from the 2033 season following the Queensland government’s announcement that the Gabba will be demolished and a 63,000-seat stadium built at inner-city Victoria Park. Premier David Crisafulli confirmed that the new stadium would be the centrepiece of the 2032 Olympics and then be home to the Lions and cricket after the Games. The Gabba will continue to host AFL home games until then, before being demolished for residential development.

The Brisbane Olympic Stadium is a planned multi-purpose stadium to be built in Victoria Park, Brisbane, which will serve as the main stadium for the 2032 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. The 63,000-seat stadium is expected to host the opening and closing ceremonies, as well as the athletics events during the Games. Following the conclusion of the Olympics and Paralympics, it will replace the Gabba as Brisbane’s main Australian rules football and cricket stadium, becoming the new home grounds of the Brisbane Lions of the Australian Football League, the Queensland Bulls in domestic cricket, and the Brisbane Heat of the Big Bash League and Women’s Big Bash League.

The path to this outcome was not straightforward. Plans were floated, costs escalated, and a prior government reversed the original intent before a new administration revived the Victoria Park approach. The full arc of that decision-making belongs to other pieces in this series. What matters here is the consequence for the Lions and for the Gabba: the ground that took decades to shape into a genuine home for the code will, in the years following 2032, be taken down and its site given over to the city in a different form.

The Lions’ own chief executive, as reported by AFL.com.au in March 2025, acknowledged the emotional dimension of the transition while affirming the practical necessity: “The Gabba has been a great home for the past 30 years, but the city has outgrown it, the Lions have outgrown it, we’ll top 70,000 members this year and the venue is reaching its end of life.”

That statement carries the weight of institutional candour. The Gabba served. Now it has been outgrown. The city that once could not fill a Gold Coast oval for an AFL match now cannot fit its football club’s membership into a 37,000-seat venue.

WHAT THE GABBA MADE.

There is a temptation, when reflecting on the relationship between the Brisbane Lions and the Gabba, to frame it as a story of the code conquering a foreign territory — Victorian football planting its flag in rugby league’s heartland. That framing understates the reciprocal nature of what actually occurred. The Gabba shaped the Lions as much as the Lions shaped the Gabba. The intimacy of a compact, enclosed stadium gave the club’s culture a particular intensity. The Brisbane winter, warm and clear in a way that Melbourne’s September can never be, made the ground hospitable in a different register. The city of Brisbane, growing through the 1990s and 2000s into a genuine metropolis, found in the Lions something it had not expected: a team of its own.

The code made concessions too. The Gabba’s oval had its greyhound track removed, its playing surface extended, its stands rebuilt and expanded across six separate construction stages, all in the service of a game that would always share the ground with cricket. The 170-metre east-west axis of the playing field represents, in literal concrete and turf, the accommodation that Queensland made for Australian rules football.

What emerged from those accommodations is now indelible. The Gabba is where the Lions play. It is the ground that gave the code a metropolitan home when it had none; that staged the grand final when Melbourne could not; that witnessed both of the Lions’ dynastic periods and the long, patient years in between. When the stadium’s current structure is eventually demolished after the 2032 Games, what it contributed will persist in the memory of the sport and, increasingly, in the civic record — in the permanent institutional layer that places like gabba.brisbane represent: a fixed address in Queensland’s onchain identity infrastructure, as durable as the history it names.

The Gabba’s remaining seasons as the Lions’ home are not a diminishment. They are a completion. The ground will be used fully until its final season, and then the city will build something larger where the Lions can grow again. That is not a departure from what the Gabba stood for. It is its logical conclusion — proof that what was built at Woolloongabba in the 1990s, for a code that nobody was sure belonged there, was worth building.