Soccer vs AFL

Sophie Cunningham December 10

If you've been flowing the stoush between the AFL and the World Cup make sure you get hold of a copy of the latest Meanjin and read Ian Syson's essay 'Shadow of a Game: Locating Soccer in Australian Cultural Life.' Here's a taste of it. The December issue of Meanjin should be in the shops now.

"This is an argument about legitimacy. Soccer—my preferred term—is at least 125 years old in Victoria, older in New South Wales. Yet it seems that proponents of the game have constantly to justify themselves in watching, playing, preferring this supposedly ‘new Australian’ sport. Since 1880, soccer has sought welcome 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 2002 memoir Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters. Added to this, soccer has regularly collapsed under the massive weight of war and depression and often resurged on migrant tides.

While the game has risen and fallen subject to external pressures, it has, in perhaps equal measure, been sabotaged by its internecine feuds and unfathomable incompetence. Debates within the soccer community often oscillate around the notion of whether our miserable condition is our fault or ‘theirs’.

One long-standing frustration for soccer in Australia is that many of its tens of thousands of juniors end up playing (and supporting) other codes of football at the senior level—this drift may well be the game’s fundamental problem as it tries to establish itself on an equal footing in Australian sporting life. At the elite level, AFL players such as Adam Goodes and Brad Green were standout junior soccer players. Rugby League’s Andrew Johns starred with the round ball as a junior in Newcastle. Aboriginal player Preston Campbell loved playing soccer as a boy. Each of them left the game in their teens. It’s a trend that leaves many supporters wondering if we might have had more success had those players and others stayed in the game. I know the words, ‘He would have been a great soccer player!’ have often passed my lips."

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