More than 25 players have been listed by clubs in both the AFL and the AFLW since 2010, including descendants of both Māori and European New Zealanders.

Victorians accounted for more than half of New Zealand's gold rush immigrants, including those at Otago, Aorere and Coromandel in the 1850s and 1860s,[14] and the associated settlements were later to exhibit influences of early Australian football.

The Nelson Football Club was formed this year and played a hybrid version of Victorian and Association (soccer) rules in its first two seasons.

Ultimately, the success of this led to further representative tours, and proved to be a catalyst for Rugby to become the dominant code in the main regions.

[37] In 1880, a proposal was put forward to send an Australasian team of players from Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide to New Zealand and combine and tour England.

This helped dispel assurances from Australasian Rules advocates that the Australasian game was fast overtaking Rugby in popularity in Sydney[39] the reaction that year was that in its Otago stronghold 5 of the 8 clubs affiliated with the Otago Rugby Union and saw the code's popularity across the country plummet.

After being virtually nonexistent since the 1880s, interest in Australian football was rekindled on the back of a wave of immigration from Australia in the first decade of the 20th century.

[43][36] The league had 4 clubs (City Wanderers, Sydenham, Woolston, and Imperial with a fifth, Carlton, formed a year later).

[54] All told in 1906 there were more than 60 clubs across 8 associations including the centres of Auckland, Dunedin, Wellington, Palmerston, Christchurch and Napier.

[55] The first national body, the New Zealand Football League, formed in 1907 at the Naval & Family Hotel in Auckland, including representatives from all provinces, which set about planning for the Australian tour, noting the rapidly growing popularity of the code across the country.

[56] At the meeting, the NZFL adopted a national code of laws and elected its first president Dr Tracy Inglis.

[50] Despite the country's onfield success, the Australasian Football Council decided to allocate just 20% of its game promotion fund to New Zealand, with the majority going to New South Wales (50%) and Queensland (30%).

Since the inception of the AFC Victoria (VFL) and South Australia (SAFL) had been pushing for support for the game overseas to be wound up.

Both leagues were invested in protecting their primacy and advocated for the redirection of funds proposed for other nations to New South Wales and Queensland in an effort to instead nationalise the game in Australia.

[64] South Australia's delegate R. F. C Sullivan, strongly in support of the pure Australian Football again moved to exclude New Zealand from the council in 1910[65] and while the motion was defeated[66] the chair Hickey (Victoria) passed a motion that would withdraw all funding to senior competition, a move which the New Zealand delegate called a "death warrant for the sport" in the country.

In 1911, the Council decided to reduce New Zealand's funding to £50 (compared to £225 for New South Wales and for £125 for Queensland) and only on the condition that all of it be spent on juniors (no such restrictions were placed on the Australian member states).

[68] New Zealand's delegate had strongly argued that without a viable senior competition schools would simply not take up the game, ultimately this proved true.

The war was not all doom for the code however, the formation of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps had a positive effect.

In Auckland, 8 clubs reformed at the start of the war with some promising growth prior to the major campaigns.

[78] By the time that the proposed takeover was no longer being reported as a "sure thing" the confusion caused had already been done to the confidence of the code locally, already on hold everywhere but Auckland due to the war.

[88] An opinion piece in The Argus in Melbourne's 1935 also proposed that the Australian Football Council might be remiss not to put some effort into promoting the game there.

In 1980, the game's premier league at the time, the VFL, sold its first ever television broadcasting rights to New Zealand, with highlight packages with the Grand Final going live into the country.

In 1996, the Australian Defence Force side visited New Zealand to conduct clinics and promote the game.

[98] The Arafura Games gave the side the first opportunity for the newly branded Falcons to compete at an international level.

In 1995, 1997 and 1999, New Zealand took the silver medal in Australian Football at the event in Darwin, Northern Territory, running second to Papua New Guinea.

1998 saw the debut of New Zealand-born Trent Croad into the Australian Football League, the beginnings of what is a successful career at elite level.

The years of 1991, 1998, 2000 and 2001 saw official Australian Football League exhibition matches staged in New Zealand so that the AFL could gauge local support.

In 2003, local Aussie Rules convert Nick Evans debuted for the famous All Blacks rugby union side against England.

New Zealand fields teams in several Australian competitions in other football codes including the National Rugby League and A-League.

Source: Footy Wire The record attendance for an Australian rules game in New Zealand is 22,546 which was set in 2013 between St Kilda vs Sydney at Westpac Stadium in Wellington.