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The FFA Cup round of 32 has been an unequivocal success, yet, in a storyline that is all too familiar in Australian football, Football Federation Australia has managed to put a dampener on the celebrations.
Revelations have emerged in the past few days that Victorian NPL side Melbourne Knights have filed a complaint against the governing body to the Human Rights Commission under the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.
The Knights are claiming they were refused the opportunity to utilise sponsorship deals with three partners due to the FFA’s controversial National Club Identity Policy.
The club wanted to feature Melbourne Croatia Soccer Club as major sponsors on the front of a specially made shirt for the Knights’ FFA Cup clash against Brisbane side Olympic FC on July 29.
Two other sponsors, Australian Croatian Association Melbourne and Australian Croatian Association Geelong, were set to appear on the sleeves.
The Knights claim FFA originally accepted the major sponsor under the NCIP, but then performed a remarkable backflip just five days before the cup clash.
In a statement released last Wednesday, Melbourne Knights said FFA released a memo to the chief executives of each state governing body on July 24, stating they would only approve playing strips that clubs had worn during the qualification stages for the national competition.
It is the first example of FFA implementing the NCIP, albeit with additional laws. The policy sparked a major outcry among fans when it was first released on June 24, incidentally on the eve of the draw for the round of 32.
At the time, many took a ‘wait and see’ approach to the policy, which restricts clubs from using language other than English and implementing symbols that hold any “ethnic, national, political, racial or religious connotations either in isolation or combination.”
As the policy only applies to new clubs, or clubs wanting to revise their name or logo, it was initially downplayed, despite the clear provocation involved against ethnic minorities.
The fine print, for those who dug deeper than FFA’s press release, stated that clubs were also not allowed to advertise or promote similarly ethnic symbols. Yet it also said that such prohibition “does not apply to the legitimate promotion of a club sponsor.”
Melbourne Knights claim they argued successfully with FFA to prove their three sponsors were legitimate under the NCIP, and it is quite clear Melbourne Soccer Club falls under that legitimate category.
But knowing they were out of their depth to deny Melbourne the shirt sponsors, FFA officials duly changed the parameters to suit their agenda.
By issuing the memo to state governing bodies that playing strips had to represent previous strips, FFA was blatantly changing the rules.
The Knights replied to FFA when resubmitting their strip, saying the move demonstrated a “failure of your vision of an assimilated football community, which fundamentally denies the reality of the game in this country.”
And they are bang on the money. This is another attack from FFA in a bid to gain more power and control over football in Australia.
The NDIP, coupled with the changes to Active Support, send signals that FFA is intent on alienating large sections of the game’s community.
This time though, FFA have gone too far in their hardly-concealed efforts to de-ethnicise football in Australia. Whether Melbourne Knights were looking to provoke FFA by printing the ‘Melbourne Croatia’ part of the sponsor in big letters, harking back to the days when that was the club’s name, is irrelevant.
Why is FFA so intent on ridding the game of ethnicity? It is another insult to ‘old soccer’, which has been left behind since the inception of the A-League in 2005.
The FFA Cup was supposed to be a celebration of our game’s history and a chance for old NSL clubs to grab the spotlight after being pushed into the dark. Worse still, a club has been denied valuable resources as a result of the sponsorship collapse, even though FFA has encouraged such initiatives.
This is about power. These clubs aren’t merging with the A-League anytime soon, the FFA has made that quite clear. So why the need to control them? What do they fear?
If Ivor’s Ćevapčići decided to throw sponsorship money at the Knights, would it also be rejected? Or if Oma’s Kitchen wanted to feature on the Newcastle Jet’s FFA Cup jersey, however fanciful that may sound, would they also be knocked back for containing German language?
Following Melbourne’s 3-1 loss to Olympic FC in the round of 32 clash, Knights vice-president Pave Jusup and Melbourne Croatia Soccer Club president Ange Cimera both lodged the official complaints to the Human Rights Commission in regard to the NCIP.
FFA confirmed it had received the two complaints, and now has reportedly less than a month to reply.
It will be interesting to see how FFA argues its case, given the fact that Brisbane Strikers were allowed to play in a newly-released kit on the same day Melbourne faced off against Olympic.
The Knights’ proposed sleeve sponsors for the special FFA Cup kit have also been featured on the club’s jersey in the past. How they were then deemed inappropriate for the FFA Cup is astonishing, and hard to justify.
FFA has stuffed up, and should now be big enough to issue an apology. It’s an embarrassing situation, and one that could and should have been avoided.
This incessant obsession with eradicating any ethnic connotations in the game is unnecessary, and ignores the work clubs such as the Melbourne Knights did in initially growing the game within a hostile environment. They deserve better.
The Knights are now ready challenge the FFA’s NCIP in the Federal Court, if the issue cannot be resolved through the Human Rights Commission.
At least an independent body will finally be able to scrutinise FFA’s policy, and FFA will be forced to explain the logic and legitimacy of the NCIP for the first time.
The key principle was to “promote Australia’s most inclusive, accessible and multicultural sport.”
“We want clubs that stand for uniting people through the joy of football,” the governing body said in its press release.
It seems FFA is being exclusive, and is more intent on Anglicising the game to mirror that of its English counterparts.
The ramifications of this fallout are, as yet, uncertain. But it will be interesting to see how FFA responds and how far Melbourne Knights are willing to pursue this matter.
Hopefully some explanations are tabled and the debacle avoids a messy conclusion in the courts.
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