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What is Football? Every fan from every code has an opinion, but in actual fact, every code is “football”.
AFL is the professional competition for Australian Rules Football.
NRL is the competition for Rugby League Football.
Rugby Union Football has its Super Rugby.
Association Football has the A-League.
Each is played on a field with defined boundaries, over set time periods. Each has two teams with a set number of players, who defend opposite ends of the field, and try to progress a single ball to the far end of the field, to score points.
In each of the sports, you can score points by kicking the ball through goal posts. At the end of the set time, the team scoring the most points is the winner, or there is a tie. Each game has a set of rules that are presided over during the match by various officials.
It is obvious, therefore, that each code is a type of football, and to suggest one is more “football” than the others is ridiculous. The similarities between all four are as big as their differences, and all can be predominantly traced back to the same origins.
Talking about football never used to be a problem. Wherever you lived, if you spoke about “footy”, people knew what you were talking about. Each code was happy with its place in the local sporting pantheon. Each code that is, except for soccer.
Soccer was just soccer, and rarely football to any except a few hardcore fans.
Then came the phoenix like transformation of Soccer Australia into the Football Federation Australia and the creation of the A-League. Soccer was no longer to be called soccer. It was to be called football.
For all the countless arguments about why it should or should not be called football, the fact is it has just as much right to be called football as any other code.
The real issue is not “should it be called football”, but the implications of that change. After all, who really cares what name is used to describe any thing? Calling something by one name is only a matter of habit.
But words do have power, power to change ideas and perceptions. Some words, in certain contexts, have more power than others.
A long time soccer player and fan would be very aware that soccer has always been considered the lesser of the four football codes. It has never had mainstream respect as an equal to any of the other three football variants.
Every fan of the sport would have heard the derogatory remark “it’s only soccer” on numerous occasions. However, change the name to football, and instantly it becomes difficult for others to be so dismissive.
This simple, and seemingly insignificant, change in name raises the sport to the same level of credibility as the other sports. “It’s only football” becomes much harder to think and say when “football” also refers to the sport you feel most passionately about.
The flip side to this of course is that some fans of the other codes feel threatened by the name change. Associating their favourite brand of football, by name, with a type of football that they view as lesser than their own, threatens the very credibility of their own code by that association. Such a narrow view is the definition of bigotry, and has no place in the debate over the merits of any sport over another.
There is enough space in Australia for all four codes to co-exist. It is in fact only the extremely small minority represented by the professional competitions chasing the public and corporate dollar that this is even an issue for.
Soccer should be regarded as the equal of any other sport, and phrases like “it’s only soccer” should disappear when others talk about a sport a lot of people prefer.
When the majority of fans of other sports and the general public treat a preferred sport with the respect that it deserves, the fans will happily return to calling the sport soccer.
In the meantime, for that reason, and that reason alone, the fans will call this sport football.
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