1990 AFL season

Foster's Cup

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

Round 19

Round 20

Round 21

Round 22

Ladder

Finals Series

Elimination Final

Qualifying Final

Semi Finals

Preliminary Final

Grand final

Match attendance

Awards

• The Brownlow Medal was awarded to Tony Liberatore of.
• The Coleman Medal was awarded to John Longmire of.
• The Norm Smith Medal was awarded to Tony Shaw of
• The Leigh Matthews Trophy was awarded to Darren Millane of
• The Wooden Spoon was "awarded" to the
• The Under 19's grand final won by North Melbourne
• The Reserves grand final won by Carlton
• The Seniors grand final won by Collingwood
• won the reserves premiership. Carlton 14.14 defeated 11.15 in the grand final, held as a curtain-raiser to the seniors grand final on 6 October at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

  Notable events

• The Victorian Football League was renamed and re-badged as the Australian Football League in 1990.
• VFL Park was re-designated as Waverley Park.
• Prior to the season, and – both in serious financial difficulty – announced that they would be merging to form a single club known as the Fitzroy Bulldogs, which was to have taken its place in the AFL from 1990. Less than three weeks after the announcement, a successful grass-roots campaign by Footscray supporters restored their club to a position of financial viability, and the merger was called off.
• By the AFL rules at the time, the drawn qualifying final between and was replayed on the following weekend. This meant that minor premier was given a second consecutive bye week, giving them three weeks between games; Essendon ultimately reached the grand final through the preliminary final, but they were soundly beaten in both the second semi-final and grand final, to which many laid partial blame upon the extended layoff. Additionally, the delay caused scheduling chaos for venues and hotels as a large number of league and corporate events related to the finals, and particularly to grand final week, had to be rescheduled: the extent of this was unprecedented, as the number and scale of such events had increased significantly since the last drawn finals match in 1977. The AFL went on to introduce the provision to play extra time in tied finals matches in future years to prevent a repeat of these problems. In 2016, a resolution in extra time was implemented for the grand final as well.
• The Port Adelaide Football Club from the South Australian National Football League made a bid to join the new AFL competition; the application was rejected, in response, a composite South Australian National Football League team, christened the "Adelaide Crows" was admitted to the AFL competition in the 1991 season.
• The Brisbane-Melbourne game in round 5 was the 10,000th VFL/AFL match.