Comparison of Gaelic football and Australian rules football information

Australian rules football and Gaelic football are codes of football, from Australia and Ireland respectively, which have similar styles and features of play. Notably both are dominated by kicking from the hand and hand passing as well as rules requiring the ball is bounced by a player running in possession, both have a differentiated scoring system, with higher and lower points values for different scoring shots, both have no offside rule, and both allow more physical contact and players on the field than other football codes - 15 in gaelic football, 18 in Australian Rules.

Although there are also many differences, the similarities have allowed a hybrid game to be played, with a regular International rules football series between top Australian AFL players and Irish GAA players.

It was a popular assumption from the 1930s to the late 1980s that Irish football is the basis for Australian football, based primarily on the premise that Ireland is older than Australia and the two games look similar.^[1][2] The correlation between Gaelic football and Australian rules football also led to a belief that caid played some part in the origins of Australian rules football.^[3][4] Some historians have cited questionable cause as a reason for the assumption, while others suggest reverse causation as a possible scenario. Nevertheless the relationship of Irish football to Australian football and a hypothetical role in the Origins of Australian rules football remains the subject of debate. While there are some mentions of Irish playing football in Australia (English and Scottish foot-ball were far more common) before the formation of the Melbourne Football Club, there is no specific mention of either "Caid", "Irish football" or "Gaelic football" in Australian newspapers of the time.^[5] The earliest mention from an Irish sources in Australia in 1889 was that the old mob football had very little in common with modern Gaelic football which upon first appearance in 1884 was received as more a hybrid of English and Scotch football.^[6] Patrick O'Farrell,^[7] and Chris McConville^[7] along with Marcus De Búrca,^[8] have used similar logic to postulate that hurling (which was documented in Australia) was the influence, however modern hurling was not codified until 1879. Some historians claim that the similarities are largely coincidental, that there is only circumstantial evidence for a relationship between the two codes, and any resemblances are the result of something akin to parallel or convergent evolution. Most contemporary historians emphasise the influence of English public school football games.

More recent evidence primarily from Irish and English researchers including Tony Collins, Joe Lennon, Geoffrey Blainey and Aaron Dunne point to the GAA creating Gaelic Football as a hybrid of existing football codes (codifier Maurice Davin in an effort to differentiate from rugby has been found to have been making extensive notes on Association Football (soccer) from which some of the rules were based),^[9] and the Victorian Rules of 1866 and 1877 (which the modern Australian rules is based on), which were popular and widely distributed. More recently direct references to the published Victorian rules have been found in the rules of the founding gaelic football club in Ireland, the Commercial Club of Limerick from the 1870s indicating a strong possibility that Australian football found its way to Ireland even earlier than this, perhaps in a similar fashion to the way it was introduced to the colonies of New South Wales, Queensland and New Zealand.

In 1967, following approaches from Australian rules authorities, there was a series of games between an Irish representative team and an Australian team, under various sets of hybrid, compromise rules. In 1984, the first official representative matches of International rules football were played, and the Ireland international rules football team now plays the Australian team annually each October. Since the 1980s, some Gaelic players, such as Jim Stynes and Tadhg Kennelly, have been recruited by the professional Australian Football League (AFL) clubs and have had lengthy careers with them.

Aside from game-play, a social difference between the codes is that Gaelic football is strictly amateur, whereas Australian football offers professional (Australian Football League), (AFL Women’s) and semi-professional (VFL, SANFL, WAFL, etc.) levels of competition, providing a strong financial lure for Irish players to switch to Australian football.