The Sydney Swans Football Club is an Australian rules football club which plays in the Australian Football League (AFL).

SYDNEY SWANS AFL WEB SEARCH

The club is based in Sydney, New South Wales. The club, founded in 1874, was known as the South Melbourne Football Club until it relocated to Sydney in 1982 to become the Sydney Swans. Sydney was the first club in the competition to be based outside of Victoria. The Swans play most home games at the Sydney Cricket Ground, while local derbies and larger games against teams such as Collingwood are played at ANZ Stadium.

Since 1995, the Sydney Swans are the only club not to have missed the finals in consecutive seasons, and have made the finals more years than any other club in the same time, only missing the finals in 2000, 2002 and 2009.

While known as South Melbourne, the club won three premierships in 1909, 1918 and also in 1933, which was to be the last time for 72 years that the Swans would win a premiership. In 2005, however, the Swans finally broke the league's longest premiership drought of any club, by winning the Grand Final against the West Coast Eagles in a tight, low-scoring game by a margin of just four points. The following season the two teams met in the Grand Final once again, but this time Sydney finished as runners-up by a single point. In 2012, the Swans won their fifth premiership by defeating Hawthorn by 10 points in front of 99,683 people at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

The Swans moved to Sydney (and the SCG) in 1982 as part of the VFL's attempts to broaden its appeal, a move which ultimately culminated in its extension into a national competition, the AFL.

The move to Sydney is the subject of the Weddings Parties Anything song «The Swans Return».

On 31 July 1985, for what was thought to be $6.3 million, Geoffrey Edelsten «bought» the Swans. In reality it was $2.9 million in cash with funding and other payments spread over five years. Edelsten resigned as chairman in less than twelve months,