Fitzroy & Bears of Old

The Fitzroy Football Club was one of the VFL's original eight clubs when the competition broke away in 1897, and one of the most successful of the early era — eight premierships, the last of them in 1944. The Maroons produced legends and gave the game the roaring lion it still carries today.

But success on the field couldn't hold back decades of financial trouble. Small, inner-city and without a home ground of its own, Fitzroy spent its final years in survival mode. By mid-1996 the club was in administration. A proposed merger with North Melbourne — the "North Fitzroy Kangaroos" — was voted down by the other AFL clubs, and the administrator instead struck a deal that sent Fitzroy's football operations north.

The Brisbane Bears entered the competition in 1987 as the VFL pushed into new markets, originally based down the highway at Carrara on the Gold Coast before making the Gabba their true home. For most of their first decade the Bears were battlers — light on wins, light on crowds, but slowly stockpiling the young talent that would matter: a kid named Michael Voss, Alastair Lynch, Justin Leppitsch and others who'd become premiership Lions.

By the mid-90s the Bears were finally climbing the ladder. They had the young list and the northern base; Fitzroy had the history, the emblem and the finals pedigree. Out of two clubs on the edge, one strong club could be built.

On 1 November 1996, Brisbane Bears members voted to take over Fitzroy's AFL operations and rename the club — first as the Brisbane Bears-Fitzroy Football Club, and to the world simply the Brisbane Lions. It was a bittersweet birth: for Fitzroy's faithful, the end of an inner-Melbourne institution; for the north, the arrival of a club with real history in its bones.

The new club adopted a song, an emblem and a jumper all drawn from Fitzroy's — the fierce lion, and the colours maroon, blue and gold. In their very first season, 1997, the Lions marched straight into the finals, finishing eighth before bowing out in week one. The foundations of something far bigger were already in place.