It was the 35th annual grand final of the Victorian Football League, staged to determine the premiers for the 1933 VFL season.

The match, attended by 75,754 spectators, was won by South Melbourne by a margin of 42 points, marking that club's third premiership victory.

[2] Bob Pratt kicked three goals for South Melbourne which saw him overtake Gordon Coventry as the 1933 season's leading goalkicker.

South Melbourne's premiership side was often referred to as the "foreign legion" due to the high number of players in the team who had been recruited from interstate.

[3] The majority of their recruits around that time came from Western Australia which earned South Melbourne the nickname "Swans".