Australian Football

Sale commenced playing challenge matches against teams from nearby settlements in the 1870s. Sometimes, but not always, the team which happened to be most successful over the course of a season in these matches was accorded the semi-official designation ‘premier’. Sale achieved this distinction in 1882, 1884 and 1888.

Sale’s first foray into officially organised competitive football began in 1889 when the club joined the junior division of the Gippsland Football Association. Premiership success was attained in this competition on five occasions, and in 1900 Sale took its place among the GFA’s senior grade clubs. It won its first premiership at this level in 1901 and added a second ten years later.

Between the wars Sale won a total of five Gippsland Football League premierships and produced one of the game’s great players of the era in the shape of Norm Ware, who went on to play with enormous distinction for Footscray in the VFL and who was the only playing coach in the history of the league to win a Brownlow Medal.

The Magpies’ teams of the 1950s were some of the finest in the club’s history. After ending the 1940s with a flag the club went on to add half a dozen more in the ensuing decade, including three in a row between 1953 and 1955. The first of this premiership hat trick was claimed in the GFL and the other two in the Latrobe Valley Football League, in which Sale competed from 1954 until 1994. After the flurry of success of the 1950s the Magpies drew a blank during the 1960s before returning as a force in the 1970s, which saw them win three flags. The club’s eighth and last LVFL premiership was procured in 1986.

Between 1995 and 2001 Sale competed without achieving premiership success in the Gippsland Latrobe Valley Football League. In 2002 this competition merged with the West Gippsland Football League to form the West Gippsland Latrobe Football League. The Magpies reached the grand final in the WGLFL three times in succession between 2006 and 2008, losing twice to Maffra in 2006-7 before capturing their breakthrough premiership in 2008 with a 14.13 (97) to 12.9 (81) grand final defeat of Morwell. In 2010 the WGLFL was renamed the Gippsland Football League and two years later Sale claimed their second flag of the twenty-first century thanks to a 17.7 (109) to 7.11 (53) grand final thrashing of Maffra.  The Magpies again contested the grand final in 2013 but opponents Morwell proved too strong and won comfortably. The last few seasons have seen them finish third (2014), fifth (2015), sixth (both 2016 and 2017) and fourth (2018).