das libero

John Birmingham

John Birmingham shot to fame in Australia as the author of He Died with a Felafel in his Hand. A couple of years ago, just before the 2006 World Cup, he thought he have a go at bagging sokkah. The piece is reproduced below because it has been taken down – perhaps in wisdom – from the web by the original publishers. Hindsight is a curious and twisting thing . . .

Is Australia ready for a new national game? No
Bulletin 20 June 2006

No history, no solid fan base, no great triumphs. The round ball game runs a pathetic fourth to Australia's three true footy codes. John Birmingham reports.

Every four years we go through this – otherwise rational people getting all a-tizz and a-twitter over some sport they wouldn’t normally give a toss about.

It’s called the Olympics and it has been known to keep millions of Australians up way past their bedtimes watching 10th-order irrelevencies like the triple jump as though it really mattered.

And every four years some Vegemiter swoops out of the blue and scoops up gold in kayaking, or show-jumping or whatever and the grand poobahs of that hobby bathe in the glow of national love for a few minutes, dreaming of the golden era that is surely just about to dawn for Australian badminton, or pole-vaulting, or . . . well, whatever.

And then, two weeks later, we’re all back watching the footy. Or the cricket, tennis or golf if it’s summer and Greg Norman hasn’t choked on the back nine yet.

It’s sad watching the light die in the eyes of so many Little Athletics administrators, but life is pain and hope is a cruel joke for the true believers of any sport outside the magic circle of the mainstream football codes and the big three of summer.

But how much more painful and galling and – let’s face it – enraging must it be for those among us who’ve pledged their troth to a genuinely popular sport, with mass appeal and legions of fanatical devotees everywhere in the world ... but here?

Oh, and America.

To be a soccer fan in Australia – and it must be called soccer here, to avoid confusing the vast majority of us who think of footballs as being oval-shaped – to follow the world game, as they insist on calling it, a little desperately, is to know all too intimately the bitterness of never-ending frustration. And how much sharper than a serpent’s tooth must be the sting of knowing that this is never going to change?

We have a tradition here at the sports desk of never giving soccer an even break.

It is not simply because its woebegone followers are so easy, and so much fun, to stir up. It is because it would be needlessly cruel to do otherwise – to lend them any hope in the face of brute reality.

For the reality is that soccer cannot hope to compete with, let alone supplant, any of the entrenched football codes in Australia, at least not for generations.

This isn’t to say, as admittedly I so often have, that soccer is a waste of time.

Henry Kissinger was not far wrong when he wrote last week that “the seductive quality of soccer resides in the almost intellectual focus with which the best teams move the ball down the field to solve the riddle of how, with each side moving at high speed, to get a ball past 11 opponents, one of whom is permitted to use his hands to intercept the ball . . . Soccer at its highest level is complexity masquerading as simplicity.”

The depth of madness which underlies the love of so many soccer fans for their game manifests itself in otherwise perplexing outbursts, such as the murder of the Colombian player whose own goal in the 1994 World Cup saw his nation eliminated from the tournament. You can’t argue with that sort of fanaticism. Even the Taliban couldn’t completely wipe it out in Afghanistan.

But it is almost entirely missing in this country.

That is not to say that soccer is a complete non-issue here. It is a very popular sport with schoolchildren – the second most popular, in fact, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which ranks it behind swimming for numbers of participants.

The 2005 ABS Yearbook listed nearly 356,000 soccer players, compared with 193,000 school-age AFL players. Soccer did benefit, however, from a much higher level of female participation. Ninety-five per cent of Aussie rules players were male, while a fifth of soccer players were girls, who incidentally were providing most of the sport’s supposedly explosive growth.

But popularity with schoolchildren and – more particularly – with their mothers, does not necessarily translate into cultural or marketing heft. Inertia plays an important role in maintaining the dominance of the established codes. Most schoolkids do not play one sport exclusively and, as they mature, they are forced to allocate the time and money they’ll devote as fans, rather than as players, to one code or another. Geography will play a part, with Melbourne kids choosing to invest more heavily in AFL than either rugby league or union. But money counts for something, too.

All of the football codes in this country have undergone a wrenching process of commercialisation in the past 20 years. They are not just pastimes now. They are multi-billion-dollar industries providing content and merchandising opportunities for a complex of interests ranging from video-game programmers to network TV stations and publishing houses, such as ACP, publisher of this magazine.

A businessman such as Kerry Stokes, who with Channel Ten has just laid out nearly $750m to purchase the broadcast rights to the AFL, is not going to stand idly by and see his investment eroded by any putative increase in the long-term popularity of a competitor such as soccer. He will deploy every weapon in his vast arsenal as the chief executive of Channel Seven to boost his returns. So, too, will the Packer family and the Murdochs who benefit from interests in televising rugby league and union.

Lest this appear to be some Naomi Klein-style rant against big media, it must be remembered that these commercial interests rest on a very solid cultural bedrock. The main football codes have established fan bases with deep footings in our national history. Armies of long-suffering St Kilda or South Sydney fans can give you chapter and verse on the tears and triumphs of their clubs down through the generations. Because of their unfortunate histories as closed ethnic enclaves, Australian soccer clubs do not enjoy this wider appeal, and will be many decades in manufacturing anything to rival it.

And it doesn’t help that Australia have got Buckley’s chance in Germany.