The decision-making process followed by the council was that delegates would meet, generally every one to three years, to discuss and vote on proposed changes.

With a growing desire to have a uniform set of rules across the country to facilitate intercolonial play and development of the sport, invitations were sent to all of the major football clubs or leagues.

In November 1892, the conference recommended the formation of a formal administrative body known as the Australasian Football Council which could make binding decisions.

[7] The desire to re-establish a binding national governing body persisted, and after an agreement was reached at a conference of state delegates in November 1905,[8] the Australasian Football Council was formally established during 1906, with its inaugural meeting taking place at the Port Phillip Hotel in Melbourne on 7 November 1906.

Notably, the VFA remained unaffiliated, refusing to affiliate with the league which had seceded from it ten years earlier.

[12] It was initially decided that clubs affiliated with the state controlling bodies would be charged a levy equal to 5% of their income to finance the council's activities, which included the expense of holding meetings, and for propaganda campaigns and developing school football in Queensland, New South Wales and New Zealand, all of which were rugby football territories;[13] the size of levies and funds varied throughout the council's history.

Considered a great success, interstate carnivals were held approximately triennially (except during periods of war) until the 1970s, and were the main on-field events for which the council was directly responsible.

It was thought that amalgamating with rugby league, rather than trying to supplant it, could be a more effective way to create a nationally popular sport which incorporated the best features of Australian rules football.

[27] Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, the council's ability to manage the game was hindered by conservative procedural provisions, so some changes were made to streamline its operation: Through the late 1930s and the 1940s, the ANFC faced the first serious challenge to its ability to maintain uniform rules and a nationwide permit and transfer system for players, owing to the actions of two unaffiliated bodies: the Australian Amateur Football Council (AAFC) – which was a body similar in structure to the ANFC but in charge of amateur football – and the VFA.

The VFA made a bold step in 1938 by making major rule changes which legalised throwing the ball and re-introduced the boundary throw-in, and by aggressively recruiting VFL players without clearances, causing a football schism in Victoria and Tasmania.

This made the ANFC's national administrative role increasingly difficult to carry out, particularly as the schism was centred in the sport's heartland state of Victoria.

[41] The VFA refused to comply, and after continuing to field VFL players without clearances, it was provisionally suspended from the ANFC in 1969,[42] and formally expelled in March 1970.

The Night Series was a new competition, played concurrently with the premiership seasons, among twelve clubs from the VFL, SANFL and WANFL invited based on their finishing positions from the previous year.

[53] In 1988, the nine-man Council board which needed to pass rule changes by supermajority vote was streamlined by establishing a semi-independent five-man commission to make rule changes; such a shift was typical of many football bodies during the 1980s, which had replaced delegate-based boards of management with independent commissions to both streamline and remove self-interest from decision-making.

[53] Much of this masterplan was later followed by the AFL with the notable exceptions being the recommended reduction of Victorian teams and removal of the independent national governing body.

[53] In its final years, the NAFC was instrumental in the establishment and coordination of the International Rules Series between Australia and Ireland in Canberra between 1984 and 1990.

[59] The NAFC which was funding junior development to form a pathway to the state leagues was openly critical of the AFL's restructuring of junior leagues focus on a pathway to the elite competition, the NAFC believed that there should be career options for senior players who didn't aspire to play at professional AFL level.

The Silvio Foschini restraint of trade case in 1983, the introduction of the VFL Draft in 1986, increasing professionalism and the consolidation of the AFL as the highest level competition in all states of Australia gradually made much of the NFL's historical interstate player transfer system obsolete.

[61] By the end of the 1980s, the VFL was so comfortably established as the pre-eminent national competition and was so wholly self-reliant that the NFL had become powerless to impose any meaningful control over it.