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Our passion for English football is not helping the A-League

5th January, 2017
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Do we need a new football stadium in Brisbane? (AAP Image/Dave Hunt)
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5th January, 2017
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There’s nothing wrong with supporting a team in a foreign league, but it’s not the same as regularly attending games in your own country.

I said as much on Twitter during the week when I tweeted: “The ‘love English football, hate the A-League brigade’ suffer from a strange kind of cultural cringe”.

I was motivated to say it on the back of Andrew Wu’s follow-up tweet about his dislike of the A-League, when the Sydney Morning Herald reporter told his critics he’s a Queens Park Rangers fan.

I see a lot of this in Australia, particularly in the media, where journos swear their undying allegiance to Liverpool/Arsenal/Tottenham and so on but couldn’t tell you when the next A-League game kicks off.

So when Wu professed his love for QPR, I wasn’t surprised.

After all, what easier way to prove your credentials than by supporting a club which is physically impossible to go and watch?

In fact, I’d venture to say a significant portion of those in Australia who call themselves football fans have never actually been to a game.

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There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it certainly makes it harder for A-League clubs to market themselves to an audience which actually has little investment in the game.

Of course, many journos attend English football league fixtures as part of overseas trips covering Australian sporting teams, while others have spent considerable time in England over the years.

And with the rise of the Premier League coinciding with the expansion of English coverage on our TV screens across the ABC, SBS and Fox Sports, it’s no mystery why a lot of us profess allegiances to English clubs.

The problem, in my opinion, is that a growing number of Australians are using their so-called love of English football as an excuse not to attend fixtures in their own backyard.

And that’s especially true of a ‘youth’ demographic A-League clubs are no doubt desperate to entice through the turnstiles.

At any rate, a few followers pulled me up about my tweet, and their objections warrant some clarification.

One group was determined to remind me that, in actual fact, plenty of pub-going fans are hugely invested in the English game.

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What did they have in common? They’re all English expats.

Others wanted to know – and I get this all the time – which former National Soccer League club I supported, as well as my current choice of National Premier League club.

But I never suggested fans should follow the A-League at the exclusion of other Australian competitions.

My point was always, and remains, that too many Aussies use their purported passion for English football as an excuse to avoid the A-League.

Of course, it’s not just English football we watch on our TV screens. Plenty of Aussies are diehard fans of clubs in places like Italy and Croatia and Greece – often because they have family ties there.

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However, many such fans are often also involved in local clubs – just like, it must be said, a huge proportion of English-born fans who proudly call Australia home.

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I was never trying to question why English-born fans might follow English teams; I simply used English football to illustrate a type of behaviour that does nothing to benefit the A-League.

But if Simon Hill can eruditely highlight “the Pom thing” as another example of the hostility Australians often harbour towards football, perhaps I can approach the issue as someone for whom the shoe is on the other foot.

I was born in Australia, as were my parents and their parents before them.

And I reckon my dad would fall off his chair to see anyone suggest that I don’t like English football, given that I was utterly obsessed with it as a kid.

But that was before the A-League kicked off.

And if the scene you’re involved in is only as good as you make it, then I still reckon too many Aussies use English football as an excuse to ignore the football played in their own backyard.

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