The metropolitan membership of the Association remained unchanged from the fifteen clubs which contested the premiership in 1886. The three Ballarat-based clubs also remained senior clubs; however, unlike in previous years, they were included in the premiership lists by all of the major sportswriters.
1887 VFA premiership
The premiership was won by the Carlton Football Club, which played eighteen matches for the season, winning fifteen and drawing two. The runner-up was, which won sixteen and drew three matches from twenty-one played. was ranked third. Although no official system for deciding the premiership existed, it was conventional for the club which suffered the fewest defeats during the season to be named premier. On July 2, a weakened, which was missing eight of its best twenty due to unavailability, suffered one of its two losses for the season when Ballarat Imperial beat them 3.4 to 0.2 at the Eastern Oval in Ballarat. Geelong lodged a protest with the Association that the match should not be counted toward the premiership on the following grounds:
Firstly, the match had been arranged informally as part of a countrytrip after a planned tour of Adelaide was cancelled.
Secondly, it was not included in the Association fixture at the beginning of the season.
Thirdly, the club had not expected the match to be counted, and in any event, there were other procedural irregularities, including the appointment of the umpire.
However, the Association had in place a stringent rule in place that any match played on a Saturday between two Association clubs would count towards the premiership, and Geelong's protest was rejected by a large majority of delegates. Had Geelong been successful in having the match excluded from the premiership, ceteris paribus, it and Carlton would each have finished with only one defeat for the season, and a playoff match would likely have been arranged to decide the premiership.
Club senior records
The below table details the records of the eighteen clubs in senior matches during the 1887 season. In addition to Saturday matches, matches played on Queen's Birthday were counted towards the premiership, but matches played on the celebration the Golden Jubilee were not counted. The clubs are listed in the order in which they were ranked in the Sportsman newspaper. The VFA had no formal process by which the clubs were ranked, so the below order should be considered indicative only, particularly since the fixturing of matches was not standardised; however, the top three placings were later acknowledged in publications including the Football Record and are considered official.
Notable events
president Frank Grey Smith replaced James Garton as president of the Association. Garton had presided since 1882.
