- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
One step forward, two steps back. It’s the story of Australian football. Another brilliant chapter was written yesterday with the unveiling of the FFA’s plan to rid the game of the scourge of ethnicity.
Let’s start with the best bit – the timing. Today marks the inaugural FFA Cup draw, which will give those lucky clubs below the A-League that have qualified their first hit of genuine relevance in god knows how long.
It should be a time of great excitement for all levels of the game – an opportunity to re-tell forgotten stories, re-visit old rivalries and celebrate the history that has been stowed away, out of sight, for far too long.
But with the release of FFA’s “National Club Identity Policy” – which came without warning yesterday, like a bolt from the blue – the focus is instead on the long-held conspiracy that the governing body is hell-bent on driving ethnicity from the game, by whatever means necessary.
Those conspiracy theorists looked like fortune tellers yesterday. From now on, any new club that is registered with FFA cannot have their name or logo refer to any “ethnic, national, political, racial or religious connotations either in isolation or combination.”
That is an incredibly broad set of criteria. Fortunately, the policy will not be applied retrospectively to existing clubs.
Of course, that didn’t stop the NSL bitters and their cronies from spitting venom all over the Twittersphere when the news broke. Nothing ever does. On this occasion, though, they had plenty of back-up, and the moral high ground.
It’s not as if there are new ethnic clubs popping up across the country, splitting the football community at the grassroots and pushing confused newcomers to rugby league and Australian rules.
Indeed, a quick glance at the fine print will reveal that should the likes of Croatian-backed Melbourne Knights or Italian club Marconi ever wish to tweak their branding at any point in the future, they might find it tough to get their designs past the head honchos at FFA.
It’s frightening to think that if this policy was in place when migrants swarmed Australia over the course of the last century, we’d probably be conditioned to toothless, meaningless club names like ‘West Melbourne Energy’, ‘Fairfield Integrity’ and ‘FC Top Blokes of Adelaide’.
As always, this is not new territory. But as always, the game is marching right over it again anyway. In 1996, the NSL launched its controversial “National Merchandising Plan”, which demanded all clubs “remove all symbols of European nationalism from club logos, playing strips, club flags, stadium names and letterheads.”
It made Soccer Australia chairman David Hill a spectacularly unpopular man, courtesy of his misguided belief that a fresh lick of paint could turn these so-called ethnic institutions into broad-based powerhouses that would finally unlock the game’s potential.
You can draw the parallels yourselves – but needless to say, the concept of ethnicity and European nationalism in Australian football is too complex to be treated in such an ignorant, ham-fisted way.
A lot depends on how strictly the National Club Identity Policy will be interpreted. Clause 4 states: “A Club must not use, advertise or promote (or permit any other person or entity to use, advertise or promote) any ethnic, racial, religious or political identifiers in connection or association with the Club.”
What is pizza, yiros and cevapi if not an obvious ethnic identifier? Can a club now no longer use delicious food as a lure for crowds? If not, NPL-level football will soon resemble Bunnings charity barbeques, where only certain condiments may be used, and only if approved by FFA in writing 48 hours beforehand.
If you think that’s being facetious or paranoid, you’re probably right. But this is, clearly, about more than food. It’s about power. Why now? Why on the eve of the FFA Cup?
The mind boggles. None of these clubs are threatening the progression of the A-League and it remains a point of contention that their insignia ever truly drove “non-ethnics” away from football.
This can only be interpreted in one way – as an assault on the former clubs of the NSL. A not-so-subtle reminder that, while the relics of the NSL might enjoy a brief flirtation in the national limelight over the coming months, they no longer hold the whip hand, and never again will.
In reality, all FFA has done is ensure that the ‘CRO-AT-ZIA’ and ‘HELLAS’ chants at FFA Cup games are only going to be louder. Rattle the cage, and the wogs will rattle right back.
Rather than driving a wedge between old and new, the FFA should be extending an olive branch, celebrating the differences and bridging the gap through the wonder and romance of football. Instead, they’ve simply stirred the pot.
Are you the ultimate team manager? Pick your own superstar team and go head to head with other football fans for glory and cash prizes on Draftstars. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.