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This is an issue that to some is claimed as being a ‘non-issue’. But that’s nonsense. It is pretty well at the heart of the code wars. It’s about the use of the word ‘football’.
For a good few years now, we’ve seen competing ‘footy show’ presentations on Channel 9. One footy show is the Sydney based NRL Rugby League (Football) show, and the other is the Melbourne based AFL (Football) show.
Would this make sense to new arrivals to Australia?
Only a couple of major cities, and there’s two totally different ‘Footy show’ programs.
At the heart of it, both codes are codes of ‘Football’. And, in Australia, we are well aware of this particular family tree. We also have rugby (football) union, soccer (Association Football), there is low level playing of but fair exposure to American and Gaelic football, and we even have a hybrid Gaelic-Australian football series.
The most interesting move in recent times was the old Soccer Australia, a failed national body that was forced out of the way by the federal government.
Soccer Australia was disbanded, the National Soccer League shut down – and like a phoenix from the ashes – the rebirth gave us the FFA and A-League.
All okay, except suddenly the FFA states their desire to be known hence forward as ‘football’, rather than ‘soccer’.
Around Australia, it is only some media outlets mostly emanating from Sydney (co-incidentally the home of soccer in Australia) that have acquiesced.
The rest of the country? Soccer is still soccer. And ‘football’ is not used at the higher level where it may, and does, lead to ambiguity.
This is in keeping with other English speaking nations such as Canada, the USA, Ireland and New Zealand – – all of whom have the common situation that soccer is not the dominant or sole ‘football code’, and in most of these cases there’s actually a ‘local variant’.
In Australia, we’ve had 25 years of a National Soccer League and longer of our national team known as the ‘Socceroos’.
Why change?
The final position, really should be that no one has sole custody of the generic term ‘football’.
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