Less than a month before the 1964 season, the defending Division 1 premier club, Moorabbin, was suspended from the Association, in the aftermath of the Victorian Football League's St Kilda Football Club announcing its intention to move its playing and administrative base to Moorabbin Oval from 1965.
Councils, particularly those which oversaw a large population and managed a good quality ground, such as Moorabbin and Coburg, had been actively seeking to be represented in the League for several years.
The first grounds-related controversy of the off-season occurred in October 1963, when the Moorabbin and Preston Football Clubs – the reigning Division 1 and Division 2 premiers respectively – were both accused of having attempted to amalgamate with League teams, or having otherwise facilitated attempts by those League teams to move into their grounds.
The motion to expel the club required a two-thirds majority to pass, and was defeated by a single vote, with the final count 27–15 in favour of expulsion.
On 24 March 1964, the St Kilda Football Club announced that it would move its playing and administrative base to Moorabbin Oval, starting from the 1965 season,[8] under an agreement that was formally signed in July 1964.
The Moorabbin council agreed to invest a further £100,000 to bring the venue to VFL standards and expand its capacity to 50,000.
[13] The announcement came as a complete surprise to the football public, as there had been no rumours that the club was interested in leaving the St Kilda Cricket Ground since its attempt to move to Elsternwick Park in 1959.
[17] The vast majority of its players went to the other south-eastern clubs which voted against its expulsion; Brighton-Caulfield was a particular beneficiary, and the twelve key senior players it recruited from Moorabbin lifted the struggling club, which had won eight wooden spoons in the previous twelve years, into the finals for the first time since 1950.
[18][19] As the season progressed, the club had to deal with £1500 of debts it had accrued as pre-season expenses, but without any steady income from takings, and the motivation of Moorabbin's committee to seek re-admission to the Association waned.
[20] With no home games at which to carry out the tradition, the club's 1963 premiership flag was unfurled at a social event at Moorabbin Oval on the evening of 4 July;[21] this was the club's VFA swan song, as two nights later the committee voted 19–2 to abandon attempts to seek readmission in 1965.