The Port Melbourne Football Club was formed in
1874 as the
Sandridge Football Club. It changed its name to Port Melbourne in
1884, in line with the renaming of
the municipality. Port Melbourne joined the senior ranks of the
Victorian Football Association (VFA) in
1886, with its inaugural team formed in large part from members of the powerful nearby
South Melbourne Football Club which had dominated metropolitan football in
1885. The club has played in every VFA/VFL season since that time. In 1897, Port Melbourne was left out of the group of eight clubs which formed the breakaway VFL competition, despite having regularly been about the sixth- or seventh- best performing team onfield. Historian Terry Keenan theorised that the likeliest reason for Port Melbourne's exclusion was the reputation for the poor behaviour that its players and spectators had developed over the previous decade; its
rivalry with and proximity to South Melbourne and the fact that Port Melbourne had supported the gate equalisation measures which the breakaway clubs were trying to escape were also speculated to have contributed to the decision. The club, and the suburb of Port Melbourne in general, were heavily associated with wharf labourers and the union movement. During a 1928 waterfront strike in Melbourne, a wharf labourer protesting the use of
scab labour was shot by police; as a result, the club banned any police from playing with them. The policy remained in place until the late 1950s. Port Melbourne went on to become one of the strongest clubs in the VFA, and today still attracts some of the biggest crowds to its games. The club had very strong links with the Port Melbourne community, arguably the strongest community relationship within the VFA; local juniors often held stronger aspirations to play for Port Melbourne than for the VFL's South Melbourne – which by the 1950s was perennially struggling and to which the Port Melbourne area was
zoned – and even players as highly decorated as
Brownlow Medallists
Peter Bedford and
Bob Skilton returned to play with Port Melbourne after their VFL careers. Over the twenty-eight seasons from 1961 until 1988 that the VFA was partitioned into two divisions, Port Melbourne played every season in the first division – a distinction shared only with the
Sandringham. Traditionally, Port Melbourne's
greatest rivals are and . As of 2025, all three teams continue to play in the VFL. Prior to the original breakaway of the VFL from the VFA in 1897, Port Melbourne's greatest rival was . and the Chargers adopted Port Melbourne's colours as part of the affiliation. Port Melbourne had previously been affiliated with the
Geelong Falcons (1996–1998), and in 1995 was part of a three-way affiliation which saw it share the
Calder Cannons and
Western Jets with
Williamstown and
Coburg. In 2024, Port Melbourne joined the
Victorian Blind Football League (VBFL), becoming the first VFL club to do so. The club's onfield nickname is the
Borough or
Boroughs. Like many clubs, its earliest nickname was geographical, and the Borough nickname came from the club's location in what was once the Borough of
Port Melbourne; the name stuck, even after the area was upgraded to the status of town in 1893, and eventually city in 1919. Unlike most other clubs, Port Melbourne never adopted a more modern nickname based on an animal or a profession, and remains known as the Borough. The name was sometimes written as Burra or Burras, and in the 1970s and 1980s the nickname was sometimes depicted with a
kookaburra. ==Club jumper==