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The Melbourne Football Club, nicknamed the Demons, is an Australian rules football club, playing in the Australian Football League (AFL). It is named after and based in the city of Melbourne, Victoria, and plays its home games at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG).
Melbourne is the world's oldest professional club of any football code. The club's origins can be traced to an 1858 letter in which Tom Wills, captain of the Victoria cricket team, calls for the formation of a "foot-ball club" with the need of a "code of laws". An informal Melbourne team played that winter and was officially formed in May 1859 when Wills and three other members codified "The Rules of the Melbourne Football Club"—the basis of Australian rules football. The club was a dominant force in the earliest Australian rules football competition, the Challenge Cup, and was also a foundation member of the Victorian Football Association (VFA) in 1877 and the Victorian Football League (VFL) in 1897, which later became the national Australian Football League. Melbourne has won 12 VFL/AFL premierships, the latest in 1964.
The club celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2008 by naming "150 Heroes" as well as creating a birthday logo which appears on its official guernsey.
The football club has been a sporting section of the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC) since 2009, having previously been associated with the MCC between 1889 and 1980.