King's Birthday match (AFL)

The King's Birthday match, known as the Queen's Birthday match when the reigning monarch is a woman, is an annual Australian rules football match between the Melbourne Football Club and Collingwood Football Club in the Australian Football League (AFL), held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) on the King's Birthday public holiday in Victoria (the second Monday in June).

Since 2015, the match has been preceded by the Big Freeze, a charitable event raising funds into research for motor neuron disease (MND) through FightMND. The event sees celebrities slide into a pool of ice water as a curtain-raiser to the match.

History Football has been played on the Queen's or King's Birthday public holiday since before the first season of the Victorian Football League in 1897.1897 Match Results (Queen Victoria was born on 24 May) In most years, the VFL scheduled three matches to take place on the public holiday. Since 1936, the public holiday has been set as the second Monday in June.

Melbourne and Collingwood first faced off in a Queen's Birthday fixture in Round 3, 1898, with Melbourne winning by 10 points. The teams have a long-standing rivalry that was solidified in the 1950s and 1960s when the two sides were the dominant forces in the VFL. Having defeated Collingwood in the 1955 and 1956 grand finals, Melbourne was prevented from equalling Collingwood's record four premierships in a row when Collingwood was victorious in the 1958 grand final. That same year, a crowd of 99,256 saw a top-of-the-table match between the two teams on the Queen's Birthday public holiday; as of 2024, that remains a record for the highest ever home-and-away crowd.Memorable Moments Melbourne later defeated Collingwood in the 1960 and 1964 grand finals. Almost half of Melbourne's 13 VFL/AFL premierships came against Collingwood, and the teams have met in seven grand finals, the most of any pairing.

Since 2001, the AFL has scheduled Melbourne against Collingwood at the Melbourne Cricket Ground as the only match played on the public holiday each year, and this is considered the start of the modern Queen's Birthday match as a stand-alone event. Prior to this, Melbourne and Collingwood had faced each other on the King's/Queen's Birthday public holiday on ten occasions: 1898, 1950, 1958, 1961, 1964, 1977, 1983, 1993, 1996 and 1999; among those, the 1996 match was the only time it was the sole match scheduled for the day. The round in which the game is played is sometimes referred to as the "King's/Queen's Birthday Round", although Queensland and Western Australia do not celebrate the monarch's official birthday public holiday on the same date as Victoria.

The fixture is traditionally staged at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which is the home ground for both teams. From 2001 until 2018, the match was always a designated Melbourne home game, resulting in Melbourne receiving a greater portion of the gate and its highest match profit of each season, typically in the order of $800,000 to $900,000. Collingwood, which had a substantially higher membership and more blockbuster fixtures than Melbourne, agreed to and encouraged the deal over that period. Since 2019, when a period of success had seen Melbourne close the financial gap between the clubs, the clubs have agreed to alternate the home team designation between the two clubs each year, with Collingwood's first home game played in 2019.

The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the game's continuity for two years: the match was not played at all in 2020, and it was relocated to the Sydney Cricket Ground at short notice due to a lockdown in Victoria in 2021.

Match results This table lists all Queen's/King's Birthday matches since it became an annual fixture between Melbourne and Collingwood in 2001.

! ! Year ! Home team ! ! Away team ! ! Ground ! Crowd ! Result/Winner

King's Birthday match (AFL)

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