Despite its worldwide popularity, soccer in Australia has long struggled to gain a proper foothold. Shunted to one side as a ‘foreign’ sport, the beautiful game has languished on the sidelines while the AFL and Rugby leagues rose to prominence. Yet, as Ian Syson discovers in the December issue of Meanjin, soccer has its own proud and almost forgotten history, from as early as the late 19th century to the migrant booms of the fifties and sixties. The full essay is now available on our editions page, and a brief extract is below.

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.