You might have missed it: The slow strangulation of A League football
The RBB out in full force. Photo courtesy: Red and Black Bloc/Facebook.
“I saw something I’ve never seen in my life before,” a presenter says on the REDANDBLACK TV podcast during their weekly wrap-up show. “I saw one riot squad officer being held back by three other officers. You know when you want to bash someone? He was being held back by his own officers trying to calm him.”
He’s talking about the moment the Raptor Squad – the branch of the NSW Police Force dedicated to combatting organised crime and outlaw motorcycle gangs – violently arrested members of the Red and Black Bloc, an active supporter group for Western Sydney Wanderers, at the derby between Sydney FC and the Wanderers, seemingly without provocation.
This last month, footage of police manhandling teenagers and hardcore football fans at A League matches and stadium security guards squaring off with supporters have littered social media. Meanwhile, almost half the clubs in the competition have released statements relating to ejections and aggressive confrontations at home ground games.
Local football fanatics have told No Filter that they no longer feel safe attending matches and they no longer want to bring their kids. But it’s not due to anti-social behaviour and hooliganism in the terraces; it’s due to the disturbing actions of police.
It’s an ominous sign. The A League, the top flight of professional men’s football in Australia, is in dire straits. Plagued by administrative mismanagement, heavy-handed policing, hostile media reporting, sterile match day atmospheres and half-empty stadiums, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the league has reached crisis point. Unable to balance their books and propped up by funding from the owners of rival clubs, one team, Newcastle Jets, is even on the verge of disappearing altogether.
Robbie Slater, ex Socceroo and sports commentator, has written that Australian football – soccer, that is, the round ball game – is in the “worst state” he’s ever seen. This isn’t hyperbole; some genuinely fear the entire league may collapse.
The question has become: where to now?
* * *
The Den, the active supporter group for Brisbane Roar FC, jostle for space like horses chewing at the bit awaiting the crisp sound of the starter gun. A few stragglers still tumble out the Lord Alfred Hotel in Brisbane’s centre. Their pre-game ritual – a few schooners at the pub – is over; now it’s time for business.
They march and mosh down Caxton Street towards Suncorp Stadium swept up in a maelstrom of testosterone, their feet rarely anchored to the ground. They chant and clap the whole way.
The Brisbane Boys, [boom-boom-boom-boom goes the drum]
Up in The Den, [boom-boom-boom-boom]
We’ll bring the noise, [boom-boom-boom-boom]
Until we’re dead [boom-boom-boom-boom]
Oh oh oh oh…
The throng of supporters take over the footpath, moving in rehearsed unison. There’s not a single square inch of free space on the sidewalk but they’re far from what you would call a threat. For all intents and purposes this march before the game against Melbourne Victory – 3 March 2024 – is like every other the Den has done this A League season. But there’s one difference: they have a police escort, and the ring of cops around them are especially agitated today.
Whenever the fresh-faced teens begin jumping into each, moshing to established chants, the cops order them to keep moving. They tell the football fans to walk sensibly while shoving them in the back and herding them like cattle. Before the march had even begun, plain clothes police officers had visited the Lord Alfred, checking on the age of the Roar supporters there and recording ID details. There was a palpable air of tension in the air, something you could taste like salty sweat.
When a boy stumbles and loses his footing, officers from the Queensland Police Service (QPS) finally snap. They charge into the throng, shoving kids aside and grab who they believe is the culprit: a 17 year old boy of African descent. They push the kid up against his fence and handcuff him while he screams that he’s in pain. His brother videos the incident before himself being snatched on the alleged basis of being a public nuisance.
QPS officers frogmarch the 17 year old to an isolated area outside Suncorp Stadium where they write up a ticket. They accuse him of anti-social behaviour and issue him with a move-on order. When the confused teenager asks the cops what he should do with the ticket, one allegedly replies, “you can wipe your ass with it for all I care”.
Inside the stadium, the Den assume their usual position behind the goal, bringing a barrage of noise and drum beats. A line of police stand opposite, arms folded and immobile like statutes, as if locked into a Mexican stand-off staring contest. The cops haul away a 16 year-old kid who lights a flare. Around the 25th minute of the game, the Den decide enough is enough and walk out en masse in protest – it’s not their first rodeo with heavy-handed policing. As supporters exit the stadium, one is enraged that the police have gone too far. He gives them some lip.
He’s immediately tackled to the ground. Video evidence shows three QPS officers and a stadium security staff member piling onto him.
“You’re choking me,” he yells. Then: “I can’t breathe. I’m fucking serious. I can’t breathe.”
It’s reminiscent of the final words of George Floyd, the African-American man murdered by American police in 2020, which sparked the most recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests across the globe.
John Lang, Vice President of the Roar Supporters Federation (RSF), believes the actions of police at the Melbourne Victory game were an overreaction. In an attempt to help, and as a liaison with the club, the RSF has collated eyewitness reports - roughly 10 in total - of what happened at Suncorp.
John says he’s “never felt unsafe” at a Roar game. It’s a statement all the more emphatic because he has attended games since the club’s inception in 2005.
For the record: the club’s management hasn’t always had a relationship with the Den where they send each other Christmas cards. In 2019, at a game against Perth Glory, a club staff member requested the Den cease chanting “fuck the FFA” [the Football Federation of Australia, the sport’s governing body]. The staff member immediately copped a tirade of flowery abuse from fans who weren’t exactly chuffed that the club was trying to censor and silence them. In the aftermath, the stoush “almost shut down the Den”, John recalls.
A League clubs like to promote their family-friendly credentials. They’re understandably keen to root out the trouble-makers, but many fans feel that clubs have turned on their own active supporter groups in the past and stood with the real aggressors – police and stadium security.
John suggests that recent events represent a watershed moment.
“Since [COO] Zac Anderson and [Chairman and CEO] Kaz Patafta have taken over, there’s been a turning point in the way they’ve treated everybody. They’re younger than your average CEO. They’re both ex footballers. They understand the game and the reason why you have active support.”
In the aftermath of the Roar-Victory game, Brisbane Roar released a statement where they stood by their fans. A few days later, the club announced a Supporter Marshall Initiative whereby trained and experienced Supporter Marshalls will act as liaisons between fans, the club and security personnel and police.
“We have heard your concerns and frustrations loud and clear, and I want to assure you that we are taking decisive actions in response,” CEO Kaz Patafta wrote. “Brisbane Roar Football Club stands unwaveringly with our fans. You are the heart and soul of our club, and your safety and enjoyment are our highest priorities.”
At the end of the day, however, there is only so much the club can do in the face of a toxic work culture within the QPS, and there are some issues the club can’t solve on its own.
For instance: John suggests that the arrests around Suncorp Stadium may indicate racial profiling. There are very few members of the Den who are of African descent yet two happened to be arrested. It’s not as if they were simply unlucky, as if they were on the edges of the group when police pounced.
The video evidence is “pretty damning really”, John states.
* * *
To put it lightly: that first weekend of March was a tumultuous one, even for A League standards. What happened at CommBank Stadium during the Sydney derby – Saturday 2 March – was even more shocking than events at Suncorp Stadium.
On the weekly REDANDBLACK TV podcast, the show’s presenters have provided vivid firsthand accounts of what unfolded. Decorated with f*** and c*** bombs in the curt, indignant, nasal-infused accent of old school Western Sydney wogs, their stories are dense with audible anger. These are fathers, guardians, football coaches.
During the first ten minutes of the game, select members of the Red and Black Bloc – the nation’s most colourful active supporter group – exited their seats to drop a 220 metre ‘tifo’ (banner) so long that it stretched around half the stadium. “Greater than life/more glorious than death/for the red and black/our passion will never rest”, the tifo read.
Equivalent in length to fifteen Sydney buses, it’s very likely the longest tifo ever created in Australian football history. Creating such a banner is no easy feat, nor is it cheap. Wanderers fans spent countless late-night hours on their knees painting the tifo in a secret warehouse deep in suburbia in a frenzy of adrenalin-fuelled euphoria and superstition that only a football fan can understand. Maybe, come game day, their tifo and their noise would help star striker Brandon Borrello or midfield anchor Jorrit Hendrix gain that extra yard of space when the goal gapes in front of them. Maybe their sweat and energy would rub off on their players. Maybe, just maybe, they would gain a moral victory over the team that represents the city’s ritzy eastern suburbs, Sydney FC.
It took fans four to five days to complete the banner.
(“I barely saw my kids for five days,” Malta exclaims on the REDANDBLACK TV podcast.)
You just don’t see NRL or AFL fans in this country going to such lengths.
When those members of the RBB attempted to return to the active support bays on game day, however, stadium security, backed up by an estimated 50 riot squad police, denied them entry. Stadium security wanted to check their tickets all over again. When a couple of supporters expressed frustration – stadium management had preapproved their movement around the stadium and the tifo drop, after all – the atmosphere flipped in a flash. The cops pounced. Cue: pandemonium.
Police threw supporters onto the ground, grabbed them in headlocks and shoved others out of the way, regardless of their age and gender, Will Thompson tells me. He’s chair of the Football Supporters Association Australia (FSAA), a volunteer-drive advocacy organisation, and he was with the RBB that day.
It wasn’t just RBB members who got caught up in the scuffle. Police shoved women, hoping to use the toilets, out of the way and set upon ‘scarfers’ – non-active fans who don’t stand up all game or lead the chants like the RBB. It seemed like they were grabbing anyone and everyone wearing the red and black colours of Western Sydney Wanderers.
“I saw people being thrown to the ground with multiple officers involved. I even captured on film one police officer preparing pepper spray,” Will recalls. “It was the most unsafe I’ve felt at a football match.”
(Police aggression is clear from the video evidence.)
En masse, the RBB walked out in protest. It wasn’t just a show of solidarity with those already arrested, those on the REDANDBLACK TV podcast have explained; many feared for their safety or for their jobs, if they were to be hit with a criminal record.
“I’ve walked into the royal rumble,” one presenter, “Banana”, recalls on the podcast. “Cunts on the floor, guys being randomly grabbed, 6 guys [police officers] on top of 1 little kid, a teenager…” His voice trails off as everyone fights to speak at once.
The presenters maintain that “the riot squad lost control of their actions”.
“I saw something I’ve never seen in my life before,” Boz says. “I saw one riot squad officer being held back by three other officers. You know when you want to bash someone? He was being held back by his own officers trying to calm him.”
A NSW Police Force spokesperson, meanwhile, told No Filter that “14 people were ejected, six of which were issued banning notices” as a result of a “high visibility policing operation” at CommBank Stadium.
“Two people were issued infringement notices; one for offensive behaviour and a second for igniting a flare just before full time.”
“About 8pm, police were called to assist security after a fight broke out on the concourse area. Officers dispersed the group with no injuries being reported.”
“Police and venue staff have conducted a full review of CCTV and other available footage,” the spokesperson continued. “Police will not tolerate anti-social behaviour or violence and expect supporters to comply with instructions from security and venue staff when accessing certain areas at the stadium, including active supporter bays.”
The RBB on match day. Photo courtesy: Red and Black Bloc/Facebook.
As a caveat: it’s difficult to know exactly what happened at CommBank Stadium. I was not there, and while I follow local football obsessively, I haven’t attended an A League game in years. I’ve tried piecing together a rough mosaic of events but it’s not exactly a masterpiece from an ancient Roman villa. There are lengthy strings of allegations and countless unverified testimonies on social media that tumble just out of arm’s reach. Some criss-cross with mapped passageways in this labyrinth of accusations and some lead to dead-ends.
But there are too many accounts of hostile seccies and cops at recent A League games, too many offhand remarks recorded of them showing off about brutalising fans and berating parents, for them all to be invented.
Those balls of thread, those navigational tools in times of crisis, all lead back to a common siege mentality, a long-held belief that, compared to fans of other sporting codes, A League enthusiasts are disproportionately subject to surveillance and brutality from stadium security and police. What preliminary data exists in the public domain seems to back their belief. One media report from 2022 showed that the number of ejections at the (then-recent) Sydney derby between Sydney FC and Western Sydney Wanderers – six in total – was substantially less than the quantity of ejections and violent incidents at comparative AFL, NRL and cricket games. In short: Australian football has a PR problem and it’s not warranted.
“When fans are ejected and arrested at cricket matches, it goes down in the media as Aussie larrikinism,” Will from the FSAA asserts. “When it’s at the football, it’s hooliganism.”
While there are claims about the clashes at CommBank and Suncorp Stadium I can’t yet substantiate, there are some things I can write confidently. Investigations by Wanderers fans and independent journalists have revealed that police falsified documents that night. When police detained one minor – and denied the presence of a legal guardian during questioning – an officer altered the boy’s age to 18 on his stadium ban notice.
The more evidence that emerges the more difficult it is to see the “royal rumble” at CommBank Stadium as anything other than a power trip for the NSW Police Force.
The brutality of police at football games has even attracted the attention of queer rights group Pride in Protest who, earlier this month, posted a statement of solidarity with A League fans. It’s not exactly a crossover you’d expect. While governing bodies have employed countless marketing ploys to make professional sports inclusive of queerness, only one player, Josh Cavallo, has ever come out as openly as gay while playing in the A League.
But local activists are paying attention because there is widespread growing concern over the heavy-handedness of emboldened state police forces. This vigilance reverberates outside the cloister of local football.
Police overreach in protest supervision has plagued activist spaces in recent years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Australian authorities attempted to silence political protest and expand ASIO’s capabilities under the guise of public health. For activists, the sight of phalanxes of police officers and horses outnumbering protestors at street demonstrations became expected; the clip-clop of the Mounted Unit and the barking of dogs became white noise. In April 2021, Amnesty International even released a report detailing the disproportionate and excessive use of force by NSW police to enact COVID-19 regulations and shut down protests.
There’s popular sentiment among activists that police are making more frequent pre-rally visits to the homes of key organisers following nationwide lockdowns and many feel state surveillance has escalated even further as pro-Palestinian activism has ramped up in recent months.
I spy the same anxiety surrounding Big Brother when I scroll through the RBB’s Instagram page which features pixelated faces galore.
When NSW police officers are still wearing thin blue lines patches associated with right-wing extremism, as The Guardian revealed this week, it’s little surprise they’re cautious. Being a rowdy Westie puts a target on your back.
* * *
A League fans believe that police and stadium security across the country suffer from a collective misunderstanding surrounding the nature of active fan support.
As John, Vice President of the RSF, explains, “Active support is active. It’s not sitting on your hands and clapping every now and again; it’s full-on.”
Will from the FSAA tells me over email, meanwhile, “Football culture is about the colour, the noise, the passion. Most police officers are used to working NRL games where the most heated fans get is a rendition of insert team name here *clap *clap *clap.”
This is no conspiracy theory. Frighteningly minor transgressions have attracted the attention of stadium security staff at A League matches in recent weeks. Early this month, at Campbelltown Sports Stadium, security guards forced members of the Bullpen – the active supporter group for Macarthur FC – to take down a banner reading “passion is not a crime”. The following weekend Matt Vanderberg, a diehard Newcastle Jets fan, reported that security guards told him and other Jets supporters to sit down and remain in their seats when a goal is scored. Surely an inhuman feat.
Is it any surprise that attendance figures for A League matches have been declining for years?
Amid this month of madness for the A League, the FSAA held an open forum with fans and representatives from Professional Footballers Australia, the trade union for professional players. Out of that meeting emerged a clear demand: the football community want the APL, the governing body for Australia’s professional football leagues, to back the sport’s fans.
“What we’re proposing is a national football forum held by the APL, to invite all the stakeholders together to sit down and discuss these issues,” Will from the FSAA says. “We need consistency among stadiums and states, and for authority figures to understand football culture.”
The RBB, meanwhile, has pledged to boycott all Wanderers games until authorities overturn the six stadium bans issued during the Sydney derby. It’s a vote of no confidence from fans.
* * *
In November 2001, the Socceroos arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay, to play the second leg of a do-or-die contest with Uruguay. The Socceroos were in a good position; just the day before they’d won the first leg 1-0, courtesy of a Kevin Muscat penalty, in front of 84,656 exuberant fans at the MCG. On the line was a place in the FIFA World Cup.
Immediately, however, players and staff spied the peak of the mountain ahead. Through bleary eyes – it’s not a short flight – it must have felt like the Andes lay before them.
At every point at Carrasco International Airport, obstacles appeared. First, the players and support staff were held up on the plane. Then there was a two hour wait at the baggage claim and intensive bag searches. As the team moved towards the airport’s exit, a Uruguayan welcoming committee made their feelings known. A mob of football fans circled the players, drumming and shrieking in their faces. Some even spat and threw punches. A police escort whisked the players to a hotel where, under the watch of armed guards, they reportedly remained couped up, venturing outside the compound only for training sessions.
It must have seemed like the entire country was against them. Local buses didn’t turn up to take the players to training. In the evenings, riotous fans banged, whistled, jeered and screamed outside the hotel to disrupt their sleep.
“We let the fans get to us a little bit”, Socceroo John Aloisi told Copa90 years later.
The Socceroos lost the game 3-0.
Uruguay went to the 2002 World Cup.
* * *
“They can’t be compared to their overseas counterparts,” Dr Jorge Knijnik says of active fan groups in Australia. “Football culture in Australia differs significantly from European or South American leagues; the intensity is much lower both on and off the field.”
Dr Jorge Knijnik is an associate professor at Western Sydney University, a researcher in the Institute for Culture and Society and the Centre for Educational Research and author of The World Cup Chronicles: 31 Days that Rocked Brazil. So it’s safe to say he’s also an avid football fan. He’s written numerous peer-reviewed academic journal articles on the role of active supporter groups in Australian football and their importance to migrant communities.
“It’s important to note that my research within active fan groups in Australia, and in particular with the Red and Black Bloc in Western Sydney, happened a few years ago, from 2013 to 2018. While I don’t have more current data, my findings from that time never indicated any instances of football hooliganism – such as organised and ongoing extreme group violence or violent rivalries between antagonist groups – in Australia.”
It’s no exaggeration that overseas football can be a matter of life or death. Search for documentaries about European and South American ultras and you’ll find YouTube awash with footage of balaclava-laden capos, billowing flare smoke, human-dwarfing barbed wire fences within stadiums and police escorts for travelling away fans. These precautionary policing measures have come to dominate professional football in recent decades as the line between hardcore fandom and organised crime has blurred.
The heyday of mass brawls between lager-swigging tracksuit-wearing skinheads, imprinted in cultural memory by Hollywood films such as Green Street, is largely over. But investigative journalism on Italian and Argentinian ultras has shown that in-fighting and turf wars between ultras factions, who compete for control of game-day racketeering operations, has resulted in orchestrated murders. In isolated pockets of the global game, therefore, stabbings and shootings are not just confined to fans of opposition teams; love for a hometown club has become a murky veil for criminal business structures. I’m not just talking about ticket-scalping here but alleged drug trafficking, extortion and loansharking by ultras groups akin to paramilitary squads.
A completely normal scene at a top flight football game in Europe. Pictured are supporters of Nantes FC, who play in Ligue 1 in France. Photo courtesy: Unsplash.
As Dr Knijnik emphasises, Australian football is a far tamer affair devoid of the shady backdoor politics and violent practices seen elsewhere. He tells me that fans who participated in his research would mock those of rival teams, labelling them “wannabe hooligans”.
There’s an irony to all this. Sure, active fan groups are loud and boisterous, but they’re hardly thugs. I’ve played the sport for most of my life and regularly attended Sydney FC home games for over a decade. When I think of your average soccer fan, I think of pimply 16 year olds entranced by the beauty and intricate tactics of the game, diehard wog families with framed shirts on their living room walls and lanky kids lacking the upper body strength to excel in rugby. At 4 AM Sunday morning, you’re more likely to find an Australian soccer fan watching their favourite European team at the pub than on Chapel Street, Melbourne, harassing strangers with a cocktail of party drugs inside them. As a Kiwi soccer fan once told me, “it’s usually the weird alternative kids and outcasts that get into soccer”.
Both Dr Knijnik and Will from the FSAA tell me they have always brought their kids to A League games. Due to recent police behaviour, they now feel wary.
* * *
Growing up as a football tragic, I’d read the sports section of the Sydney Morning Herald – yes, the physical newspaper – religiously. Hunched over and wolfing down my breakfast before school, I’d pour through fine-print league tables and football commentary relegated to the back of the sports section; football never made front-page news.
There’s no debate that the mainstream media has sidelined Australian football and actively contributed to negative stereotypes of fans; it’s simply recognised within football circles as fact. The press has long portrayed football as foreign, as a sport pioneered and sustained by migrant communities and therefore mired in cultural division. It’s a trend immortalised in the title of the biography of Australian football icon and TV presenter Johnny Warren – Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters – a title which captured both the nation’s tongue-in-cheek humour and the strangeness of this sport for outcasts.
As migrant communities flocked to Australian shores following World War Two, many turned to ethnic-based football clubs as a way to find and solidify a sense of community. There was (and still is) Marconi for the Italians. South Melbourne Hellas for the Greeks. Hokoah for the Jews. Sydney United for the Croats. The list goes on.
This made Australian football both a symbol of multiculturalism and a target in the culture war which has blazed through the press like an uncontained bushfire ever since.
In 2012, Les Murray eloquently wrote of the sport’s continuing stigma in Australia for SBS: “Influential media columnists and commentators, with actually little else of substance to say, continue to try and soil the game as some kind of alien animal to which real Australians will never take because there are far too few goals, there are too many prima donna divers, there is no video refereeing and their fans are far too violent and, in any case, not like us.”
Today, little has changed. Tirades against anti-racism advocate Craig Foster, against the recent success of the Matildas, against the violent antics of people who support the old ethnic-based NSL clubs, however infrequent, litter the pages of popular mastheads.
When news recently broke that a London police officer has taken Matildas captain Sam Kerr to court due to purported racial harassment – Keer, a queer BIPOC woman, allegedly called the officer a “stupid white bastard” – many stood up for the nation’s new darling. Andrew Bolt, meanwhile, seized the opportunity to condemn Sam Kerr and the perceived leftism of the Australian football community in a bizarre Herald Sun column about “Aboriginal flags”, “bended knees” and reverse racism.
It probably helps to explain why there’s been such uproar on Australia’s “Sokkah Twitter” recently; it’s not like aggrieved fans are able to vent to journalists. When I talk to John Lang from the RSF on the phone, he tells me that, bar one journo from Channel 10, no journalists have contacted the RSF while covering police aggression at the Roar game at Suncorp on 3 March. After our phone call, he’s quick to follow up over email and eager to help.
* * *
In the introduction to his book The Death and Life of Australian Soccer, Joe Gorman recounts the downfall of Marconi Stallions FC, a once revered club from the heart of Western Sydney.
In August 2015, Marconi was relegated from the top NSW state league, a semi-professional competition below the A League.
“A lonely smattering of people sat in the main grandstand” that day, Gorman writes, in a passage worth quoting at length.
“Running adjacent to the car park… used to be a grandstand that boxed in the pitch from all sides. It has since been demolished, leaving behind a disused water tower and an artificial incline where they buried landfill in the 1970s. The famous giant Marconi soccer ball, which rises majestically above the arena, looks like a relic of a bygone era, similar to one of those dusty old silos on stilts from a long-forgotten rural town.
As the referee blew her whistle for full-time – Sutherland 2, Marconi 1 – this once-loved stadium stood forlorn… A single beam of from an empty canteen shone through the cold Saturday-night gloom…
Excluded from the A League, Australia’s premier soccer competition, the game’s pioneer clubs have been locked in the torpor of their local state leagues, living off old glories and fading dreams.”
To a neutral observer, this may appear hyperbolic language. But local football fanatics are a different breed. In a review of Gorman’s book, Roy Hay writes that a friend was in tears reading about, and recollecting, Marconi’s demise.
Today, it’s almost as if history is repeating. But there’s one key difference: how many football fans are actually still invested in the A League? My greatest fear is that, should the A League fall apart, it will go out without so much as a whimper. Perhaps there won’t be a tidal wave of tears shed?
This sentiment stems, I think, from the fear that police, security staff, stadium management teams and the APL, the administrative body behind the A League, have alienated fan bases so intensely that many supporters have already given up hope.
As private equity firms swoop – an American private equity firm paid $140 million for a 33 percent stake in the APL in 2021 – this is also a lesson about the creeping commercialisation of global football. Waning are the days where professional football clubs are community-orientated refuges for displaced migrant communities or badges of honour and money vacuums for sports-mad oligarchs and trophy-hunting ego-driven billionaires. Football in Australia is becoming a business, and a rapidly failing business at that.
With a pattern of anti-football decisions, the APL has stumbled between blunders in the blind pursuit of dollars. It’s akin to a psychotic game of self-mutilation.
Most notably, in December 2022, mere days after the Socceroos defied all expectations, making the round of 16 at the World Cup, the APL announced a deal with Destinations NSW, now rescinded, that would have seen Sydney alone host the A League and W League grand finals through to 2025. In the aftermath of that decision, active fan groups announced match day boycotts, an ALP board member stepped down and fans infamously rioted on the pitch at the Melbourne derby at AAMI Park.
The prioritisation of profit over fans has backfired, leaving the APL on its financial deathbed, bleeding out. This season mass redundancies at the organisation – almost 50 percent of staff – and the collapse of digital media arm KeepUp have made headlines.
The truth is players, managers, even owners, come and go in cyclones of feverish activity, but fans remain resolute in the crosswinds, dedicating their entire lives to hometown clubs. They know football isn’t about how many tickets a club sells on match day or how many jerseys it sells. It’s not about winning titles and trophies. The number of fans that rock up means nothing if there’s no noise and bravado in the stands.
Football is about respect and loyalty.
As active football fans hunker down in bunkers and underground shelters, turning their back on the A League and boycotting games, they must be wondering whether the storm above will ever pass. While being a football fan in this country is undoubtedly an endurance test, they have rarely faced a test of faith of this magnitude.
