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Parramatta Eels

The Parramatta Eels are an Australian professional rugby league football club based in the Sydney suburb of Parramatta.

The Parramatta District Rugby League Football Club was formed in 1946, with their First Grade side playing their first season in the New South Wales Rugby Football League premiership's 40th season in 1947.

The club was highly successful in the early 1980s, winning four premierships and qualifying for five Grand Finals within six successive seasons. This was a golden era for the club and has yielded their only four premerships.

The club plays in the National Rugby League, the premier rugby league football competition in Australasia. Parramatta sides are also fielded in lower grades and junior competitions run by the New South Wales Rugby League where they are typically a consistent premiership winning force.

Like most NSWRFL clubs founded before the 1980s, Parramatta was established with no official nickname or mascot. The only nickname Parramatta had ever been known by was the "Fruitpickers", a reference to the orchards spread throughout the District and surrounding suburbs in the first half of the 20th century. As the competition and the clubs themselves became more focused on marketing in the 1970s, Parramatta adopted an official club mascot.

In the mid-1960s, Peter Frilingos, a Sydney rugby league journalist, suggested that the club should be known as the "Eels". This reasoning was based on the name of the Parramatta, anglicised from the Aboriginal dialect "Barramattagal" meaning "place where the Eels dwell". After this, the team was commonly called "The Eels" and it became an official nickname in the late 1970s.

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