South Wales by 1850 (an early form of Rugby), with organised competition Victoria (Australian rules) soon after. The Melbourne rules of football (later Victorian and Australian rules) were first codified in 1858 in the Colony of Victoria. The current Australian Football League features some of the earliest football clubs in the country, Melbourne Football Club and Geelong Football Club, founded in 1858 and 1859 respectively, these remain Australia's longest running football clubs. Australian Football was first played in Australia in 1859. By 1864 the code had spread widely and there were as many as a dozen clubs throughout Victoria. A rugby union team was established at the University of Sydney in 1864. In 1866, the Colony of Queensland adopted Australian rules and by the 1870s, it was the most popular code of football. Sydney also took up the Australian code, though it did not set down permanent roots. By the 1870s most of the Australian colonies began to standardise to Australian rules, primarily to facilate intercolonial matches with Victoria. South Australia and Tasmania both adopted Australian rules during this time and it has remained the most popular sport in these states. By 1874 rugby union was well established in Sydney. Soccer was also being played in Australia by the 1870s, with the game's early base in Australia found in Sydney. with the first team formally being organised in Sydney in 1880 that was named the Wanderers. In 1884, Australian rules lost its primacy in Queensland as the popularity of rugby intercolonials against New South Wales rose. In the same year on the other side of the continent in the Colony of Western Australia, Australian rules overtook rugby in popularity (and remains the colony's preferred sport to this day). During the 1890s and 1900s, Australian Football did not gain much traction in New South Wales in this period, where rugby union was the predominant code. The major exception was the Riverina area of New South Wales close to the Victorian border, and closer to Melbourne than Sydney. In 1900, a soccer league was established in Tasmania that would continue for ten years until being disrupted by the Boer War. In 1914 and 1915 an amalgamation of rugby league and Australian Football was considered and trialled. After the war, Australian rules became popular in both the Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory. In 1922, a committee in Australia investigated the benefits of