Organised soccer is at least 140
years old in Australia. At the time of writing, 500,000 Australians were
registered soccer players, more than any other team sport. The ABS estimates another million or so playing at less formal levels. At its elite
level, soccer is capable of generating massive television viewing statistics. A
Socceroo game at the World Cup, for example, is one of the high-water marks in
Australian sports viewing (even in the middle of the night), surpassing the AFL
and NRL Grand Finals and the Melbourne Cup. While soccer tends to be the second
football code wherever it is played, it nonetheless has the kind of demographic
Australian coverage that the other football codes would envy. Soccer’s numerical
strengths (and some of it cultural weaknesses) are indicated by its status as
the ‘go to’ game for Australia-wide advertising narratives that represent
children at energetic play.
Yet this game, even with such an
apparent comparative advantage, has fared badly in Australia. Since 1880,
organised soccer has sought a place in Australian society only to be rebuffed
and rejected as a foreign game, a threat, sometimes even a menace to Australian
masculinity and life in general. The game has endured sustained media myopia offset by frequent outbursts of
intense and spiteful attention. Johnny Warren encapsulated this anti-soccer
mentality in the title of his memoir, Sheilas,
Wogs and Poofters.
These were
the kinds of people who played soccer in Australia (though Warren might have
added Poms and Children). The game was seen as effeminate, foreign and for homosexual men.
While Warren’s title doesn’t quite represent either the totality or the
subtlety of opposition, it does capture the vituperation and the spirit of a
different age. He
relates the story of a parade for the Australian national team (the
Socceroos) in Sydney in 1969.
I have a daunting image, still
prominent in my memory. It was the occasion of a tickertape parade for the
Australian national team in 1969. I had taken my allocated place in one of the
sports cars which had been organised for the event. The cavalcade was snaking
its way through the streets and turned a corner. This one particular corner,
like so many of its kind in Sydney, was adorned by a pub. Wooing the punters to
drink from its kegs were pictures on its outer wall of rugby, cricket and horse
racing. True-blue Aussie sports. Spilling out of the pub’s doors were
tank-topped, steel-cap-booted, tattooed workers quenching their thirst after
the dust of the day’s work. ‘Fuckin’ poofters,’ some hooted at us. ‘Dago
bastards,’ followed others. The odd projectile was hurled our way. Needless to
say, I had, in my life, felt much safer than I did during that parade.
(ppxxi-xxii)
The recent relative successes of
soccer in Australia might tend to suggest that the bigoted attitude that
confronted Warren is a thing of the past. The way that the A League and
well-attended internationals have elbowed themselves some room in the
mainstream of Australian sport media indicates a new-found respect for the game
has been established in Australia. However, the battle may not be over. Even
when the vulgar and coarse resentment is peeled away a core of repulsion,
sometimes principled, more often irrational remains.
The former comes from a writer like
Martin Flanagan who believes that any weakening of Australian rules football
because of soccer’s rise will damage our local culture, already embattled by
the manifold forces of globalisation. Flanagan respects soccer and other codes
of football but he makes his priorities clear. He believes that Australian
rules
has a unique place, not only in
Australian sport, but in Australian culture which, in my experience, is obvious
to outsiders. I can admire the Australian rugby union team and enjoy watching
them play, but at the end of the day it is a British game they’re playing.
Australian football is a marvellous sporting invention that found its way into
the hearts of people and infiltrated other aspects of their lives so that it
became something by which you knew families and suburbs and towns and, more
recently with the national competition, different parts of Australia.
While this argument is one that
deserves notice, largely because it is true for much of Australia, it is flawed
when we look at Sydney and broad regions of the northern states. The problem is
that Australian rules is an irrelevance for many Australians, even many of
those who are interested in sport. They do not play it; they do not watch it;
they fail to understand it. Nor have they experienced the purported social
benefits of the game to which Flanagan refers. Significantly, in one of the
heartlands of Australian mythology, what might be called the Waltzing Matilda
country of outback Queensland, Australian rules is (or was until recently) an utterly foreign game.
Flanagan does not allow for the fact
that the so-called ‘British games’ (the Rugby codes and soccer) have also given
and continue to give meaning and structure to the lives of many Australians.
And unless he is willing to say that these experiences are inferior to or less
authentic than the social meaning obtained through Australian rules, or that
these Australians aren’t true
Australians, then Flanagan is guilty of making a national generalisation out of
a regional truth. In many regions and towns soccer has a continuous history of
more that 100 years where the game has been, for generations of Australians and
waves of migrants, an important pillar of their communities.
Representing a very different perspective is a
writer like Michael Duffy, whose article, ‘Jig is up - give World Cup the boot’
published shortly after the 2006 World Cup, is a checklist of predictable
prejudice that masks his own failure to understand the game: boring; not enough
scoring; should be allowed to use hands; too much play acting. He talks about
an experience of watching the World Cup that, given his attitudes and the
second-person persona adopted, is probably second hand or made up.
You rose from your bed in the early
hours to spend an hour and a half watching the ball move from one player to
another several hundred times without passing through the white posts at either
end of the field more than once or twice. It was like golf without the
excitement.
If Flanagan adopts a left-nationalist position in
worrying about soccer’s globalising effects, Duffy comes from the free-market right
and argues the very opposite. Inspired by the American academic economist Allen
Sanderson, Duffy suggests that Australians are very much like Americans and we
should see their resistance to soccer as exemplary. He cites Sanderson who
believes that those Americans who support soccer “are uncomfortable with
competitions that produce winners and losers, and soccer appeals to their
egalitarian, risk-averse streak. The same crowd usually also can be counted on
to oppose globalisation.”
Duffy also sees soccer is also a force of political
correctness: “Lots of parents force their children to play football for reasons
of social engineering: they want to make their boys more like girls and their
girls more like boys.” For Duffy men’s sport is about upper body strength. As a
sport that disallows the use of hands, soccer therefore runs against the spirit
of unfettered competition that characterises the true sporting contest. Anyone who has seen Michael Duffy will note
a quaint irony in his being critical of anyone’s upper body proportions. Indeed,
Duffy continues the great right wing tradition of puny old men urging on strong
young men to do their dirty martial work for them.
Despite their having completely antagonistic
perspectives on virtually all other cultural-political matters, Flanagan and
Duffy end up on the same side in this argument. This speaks greatly of the
general antagonism to soccer in Australia, particularly from middle-aged men (with
Irish surnames) with positions of cultural influence.
But Duffy
and Flanagan did not invent their perspectives. They inherited them. Their
pronouncements on soccer have a genealogy that extends back to before soccer
was even codified in 1863. And there are very good reasons for the resentment
of soccer. The game’s reputation has legitimately suffered through fan violence
and farcical organisational corruption around the world. Throughout history it
has been variously held responsible for the collapses of moral order and
collective political will. It has been a game of the economic colonizer,
imposing itself on or being taken up by indigenes who have thereby lost contact
with their native customs. In ancient times its forebear (folk football, which
is arguably an important precursor of all football codes) was even outlawed by
monarchs afraid of the game’s impact on their fighting forces.
But none of
these relates directly to the main source of contemporary vilification, which
might be called ‘soccerphobia’. Soccerphobia is the fear of one particular code
of football, Association football and its supposed potential to damage
national, regional and local cultures. The loudest bastions of soccerphobia
are, curiously, found in Anglophone countries with a long and direct colonial
connection to the British Isles – the birthplace of Association football.
Australia, the United States of America, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and South
Africa all house strong and entrenched cultures of soccerphobia. In three and
one-half of these countries, soccer is seen either as a threat to local and
established games or as a game that cannot assimilate because of its
foreignness or unsuitability.
Ireland,
Canada, the USA and southern and western Australia have developed regional
variations of football (or other sports) that are assumed to be indigenous
expressions of nationality – assumptions that are often flawed. For example
baseball’s claims to indigenous status ignore the obvious fact that it stems
directly from rounders, a game imported from Europe. Often, claims of
indigeneity rest more on politically expedient assertions of national
independence than they do on historical fact.
In New
Zealand, white South Africa and the Australian states of Queensland and New
South Wales the local/imported divide is not as relevant – or at least it has
little basis to be. The dominant football codes (Rugby Union or Rugby League)
in each of these states or countries have clear British origins. Here, the
disparagement of soccer tends to focus on questions of courage, masculinity and
even sexuality. Historically, Association football has been seen as a game for degenerates
and weaklings across the soccerphobic world.
In recent
times, the idea of sport-as-industry has been clarified. While organized elite
sport for the past 120 years or more, has had the element of profit-and-loss at
its heart, for much of that history the ruling mythology of sport provided a
smokescreen, placing the economic realm into the category of a ‘necessary evil’.
Contemporary sports discourse happily brings questions of economics to bear.
This newer general consciousness of sport as business is often one which perceives
any attempt to grow a sporting market necessarily involves a diminution of
another and competition between sports becomes a legitimate subject matter for
sports discussion. Soccer’s attempts to gain ‘market share’ in those regions
where historically it has been less dominant are one more basis for
soccerphobia, a position which can dip into the toolbox of cultural
soccerphobia as required.
To leave it
at this would be to allow soccer to cry victim without accepting a measure of
responsibility. Soccer sometimes has only itself to blame. While the game has risen and fallen
subject to external pressures, it has, in perhaps equal measure, been
self-sabotaged by its internecine feuds and unfathomable incompetences.
One could also point to historical
factors. Soccer has regularly collapsed under the massive weight of war and
Depression and often resurged on migrant tides. And while history has not been
kind to the game in Australia, it might be said: “In sport you make your own
history!” In a sense soccer has not been kind to its own history. It has not often
made a good fist of becoming a narrative point of Australian history. Nor has
it done a very good job of remembering the times when it actually did.
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This section is devoted to documenting soccerphobia from around the world but particularly in Australia and USA. Click on links at right to go the the relevant section.
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This section is devoted to documenting soccerphobia from around the world but particularly in Australia and USA. Click on links at right to go the the relevant section.
Soccerphobes role of honour
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