Melbourne Storm

League history

Final ladder position each season on record (1998–2025) — 1st at the top. Hover a point for the exact position and field size that season.

Club history

Melbourne Storm was founded in 1997 during the Super League war, when Super League boss John Ribot pushed to plant a franchise in Victoria to compete with the ARL. When the warring competitions merged for 1998, the Storm entered the newly unified NRL as the first fully professional rugby league club based in Melbourne. A Melbourne teenager, Cameron Duncan, won a public competition to name the club "Storm," and its purple, gold and navy colours were chosen partly on marketing advice. The club played at Olympic Park Stadium from 1998 until moving to the purpose-built AAMI Park in 2010.

After a 1999 premiership and lean years, Craig Bellamy took over as coach in 2003 and built the club into the competition's benchmark side, anchored by the "Big Three" of Cameron Smith, Billy Slater and Cooper Cronk. This success was thrown into crisis in April 2010, when the NRL revealed Melbourne had run a secret dual-contract system since 2006, funnelling roughly $1.7 million in payments to players outside the salary cap. The club was stripped of its 2007 and 2009 premierships and 2006-2008 minor premierships, docked all competition points for 2010, and fined a record $1.689 million. Remarkably, the playing group — found blameless — rebuilt to win further premierships in 2012, 2017 and 2020. The stripped titles remain a point of ongoing dispute between the club and the NRL: the NRL record book excludes them, but the club continues to count six premierships rather than four.

Grand Final appearances (1999-2025)

Sources

• Melbourne Storm salary cap breach — Wikipedia
• NRL.com — Melbourne Storm breach NRL Salary Cap