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Following the announcement that football will be screened on both free-to-air and pay television from next season onward, there has been a great deal of discussion about football ‘coming home’ to SBS.
With the standard and visibility of the A-League at an all-time high, the new, multi-platform broadcast deal comes as a welcome announcement.
Football needs to build on its current commercial success and leverage itself into Australian living rooms. Free-to-air visibility is crucial to this strategy.
In a short video screened on The World Game website, Craig Foster waxes lyrical about how SBS “understands the essence of the game,” and how football is an “old friend” to the station. Similarly, Les Murray calls the relationship “a happy marriage”.
One cannot and should not trivialise SBS’s commitment to the game. The station deserves credit for promoting the game through good times and bad. It is a shame that to a large extent, SBS have been peripheral in the A-League’s inaugural years.
However, such were the commercial realities facing Football Federation Australia back in 2004. Allowing Fox Sports a monopoly on the A-League was fundamental to its establishment and continued existence. Put simply, without Fox Sports, there would be no A-League.
Fox Sports took a punt on the domestic game, and deserve to enjoy the fruits of their investment. As chief executive Patrick Delany commented, the broadcaster has invested over $160 million over the past eight years. They also have a right to claim that Fox Sports is the ‘home’ of football in Australia.
It is worth asking, then, how smooth this polyamorous relationship between the FFA, SBS and Fox Sports will be.
Already, both broadcasters have issued differing statements regarding the deal. While SBS have talked up the sentimental value of the announcement, Fox Sports have focused on the commercial benefits of their involvement in Australian football.
It is most interesting to see the reaction of SBS. Not for the first time, the multicultural broadcaster has trumpeted its so-called symbiotic relationship with the game. Further to the point, it is also not the first time that the public has conflated SBS with football.
In 1980, Australian Soccer Federation president Arthur George labelled SBS’s relationship with football “a marriage of convenience and necessity”.
To George, the hurdles that migrants faced to gain acceptance in Australian society mirrored and were intertwined with football’s fight for acceptance. SBS “fulfilled those needs and relieved those frustrations’ of a marginalised football community”.
In 2003, however, SBS came under criticism from its own constituents for prioritising ‘sex and soccer’ over its original mandate to provide information and entertainment services to its migrant base.
Later, Frank Farina commented, “the game deserves better than SBS,” arguing that the so-called ‘ethnic station’ ghettoised football. Indeed, there is a view that mainstream acceptance would only arrive from a partnership with a commercial broadcaster.
Throughout the history of the National Soccer League, there were numerous attempts to strike deals with Channels Ten and Seven, the latter which turned out disastrously. Neither took the game seriously, in stark contrast to the self-described missionaries at SBS.
In this context, Les Murray’s description of “a happy marriage” overlooks years of football administrators flirting with other commercial networks. Football has hardly been a faithful partner. SBS is, unfortunately, an unwaveringly loyal but often neglected spouse.
On another note, it is interesting to see the shift in the language that football people are starting to use. While clubs and administrators were loathe to espouse their history in the game just a few years ago, now it seems that history is everything.
The Western Sydney Wanderers, funded and directed from FFA headquarters, have talked about representing the multicultural community of western Sydney and ‘bringing football home’. They like to imagine themselves as Australia’s ‘newest, oldest club’.
Similarly, David Gallop has made uniting the football community a priority for his administration. “Connecting the current game to the history of the game is very important,” Gallop commented.
This new rhetoric is a positive, if sometimes corny, development in Australian football. Engaging with the game’s history and ethnic support bases should be encouraged.
However, with so many factions scrambling to establish themselves as the true custodians of the game, the question remains, where is football’s ‘home’?
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