1939 VFL season

Premiership season

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

Round 5

Round 6

Round 7

Round 8

Round 9

Round 10

Round 11

Round 12

Round 13

Round 14

Round 15

Round 16

Round 17

Round 18

Ladder

Finals

Semi finals

Preliminary Final

Grand final

Awards

• The 1939 VFL Premiership team was Melbourne.
• The VFL's leading goalkicker was Ron Todd of Collingwood with 98 goals.
• The Argus newspaper's "Player of the Year", was shared between Jack Dyer of Richmond and Dick Reynolds of Essendon.
• The winner of the 1939 Brownlow Medal was Marcus Whelan of Collingwood with 23 votes.
• South Melbourne took the "wooden spoon" in 1939.
• The seconds premiership was won by. Melbourne 22.12 defeated 17.13 in the Grand Final, played as a stand-alone game on Thursday 28 September at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, before a crowd of 4,100.

  Notable events

• Two key rule changes were made nationally in 1939.
• *The holding the ball rule was altered to eliminate the provision for a player to drop the ball when tackled, meaning that a player was forced to either kick or handpass the ball when tackled to avoid conceding a free kick.
• *The boundary throw-in was reintroduced whenever the ball went out of bounds, except when put out deliberately, instead of a free kick being awarded against the last player to touch the ball, as had been the case since 1925.
• A record 91 scores of more than one hundred points were kicked during the year; this was a record until 1969.
• Hawthorn's win over Carlton in Round 5 was its first as a member of the VFL. Carlton had won the first 25 meetings.
• All round 18 matches were postponed for a week because all grounds were under water from constant rain.
• North Melbourne's win over Geelong in Round 18 was the club's first since their initial meeting in Round 1 of the 1925 VFL season, North Melbourne's first match as a member of the VFL, breaking a streak of 23 consecutive wins by Geelong.

  Footnotes