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Coinciding with the announcement that former NRL boss David Gallop is to replace outgoing FFA CEO Ben Buckley in two months are reports on of fresh ‘football violence’.
The media discourse is following an all-too familiar pattern, in what seems to be an apparent reflection of Ben Buckley’s frustrating incapacity to learn anything about fan management from his six-year experiment in football administration.
In what has become the all-too familiar reactionary approach, Buckley has instinctively fallen back on the notion of a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to solving the crowd issues, seeking to once again grasp at applying increasingly punitive regulatory regimes on offenders.
Buckley reinforced his belief in the zero tolerance approach as recently as August 24 as an article by Tom Smithies in the Daily Telegraph shows.
Buckely reached a new extreme by threatening troublemakers with de-registration as players, and even threatening clubs.
To fans and anyone else who has followed the A-League closely since its inception, this narrative will sound quite familiar – despite the fact that statistically, the A-League could be considered no more unruly than the NRL or AFL.
What resulted under Buckley was the ‘Hatamoto approach’ from season three onwards.
Fans were seen as the problem that had to be solved by a consultancy firm with no previous experience in football who implemented a regime of filming, cataloguing and profiling active fans in particular.
This was supplemented with a heavy regulatory regime that got increasingly repressive as the FFA’s approach which – contrary to claims being made in the media – failed to prevent minor crowd issues.
This has evolved to the point where Buckley is now talking about de-registering players and banning fans from supporting at a semi-professional level.
This was all done in honour of a mindset that appears to permeate the FFA and football administration circles and ensuring that the boisterous active fans and the troublemakers in their midst didn’t scare off the ‘family supporters’.
The irony is that it this approach probably did more to turn off the very demographic that the FFA were supposedly trying to protect.
The A-League’s so-called marquee matches coincidentally would also be labelled in the high-risk category and would be accompanied with a repressive police presence as per the zero-tolerance approach.
This is a policing dynamic Australian sports fans are unused to and which turned the atmosphere at marquee games from a carnival and vibrant atmosphere to an atmosphere of foreboding. This was hardly a family environment and may have been a reason for the decrease in crowd figures in the A-League.
While there are many factors contributing to the crowd decline, there is nevertheless an interesting correlation between the current FFA approach being implemented in 2008, and a decline in general A-League crowd figures that occurred from 2009 when the impact began to be felt.
Then there is the breakdown of relations with active fan groups. Melbourne Victory fans, labelled unruly by Buckley, bore the brunt of the Hatamoto approach.
Not surprisingly, the situation deteriorated to the point where even the Blue and White Brigade became concerned enough about fan safety issues that at the end of the 2010/2011 season they were highly reluctant to support actively until the situation was resolved.
The intense dissatisfaction with FFA policy was illuminated when A-League chief Lyall Gorman and the Hatamoto advisors were pilloried at a fan forum held at the time.
Back to the present then, with Buckley once again illuminating why the time has come for him to move on, Gallop will do well not to repeat his mistakes.
This involves being proactive and not reactive in terms of the media discourse that surrounds A League crowd issues.
Additionally, a proper and more thoughtful debate needs to take place in the football fraternity. Zero tolerance sloganeering may sound great in a soundbite or newspaper quote to the general public, but it does not necessarily underpin a good crowd management policy in relation to football.
There is a strong argument that the friendly but firm approach (the alternative to zero tolerance) which has been applied to great effect at major football tournaments, would be a much better strategic approach to A-League crowd issues.
This is built around managing the social-identities of the crowd through good understanding of crowd psychology – developing a self-policing climate where genuinely anti-social behaviour is taboo and repressed.
Subsequently it helps to prevent anti-social behaviour from spiralling in the first place, rather than merely filming and banning people often caught in the wrong place at the wrong time after the fact.
This also involves implementing what is known as a graded deployment approach of police and security resources where the police presence is proportionate to the actual behaviour occurring and not excessively too heavy or too light.
David Gallop became accustomed to dealing with heated issues during his time as NRL CEO, this football fan hopes he comes with an open mind and willingness to learn that Buckley and his subordinates never had.
Most of all, he needs an ability to not reactively base fan policy on often hysterical media reporting.
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