- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
John Aloisi announces he's joining new A-Leauge franchise Melbourne Heart FC - Slattery Media
With Melbourne Heart’s entrance into the A League we are set for our first genuine derby this A-League season. But what is the fire that fuels this new derby, what elements of the same city are being pitched against each other? The reality is nothing.
If this was truly to be a genuinely workable derby, then two Melbourne teams should have been introduced at the start of the A-League initiative in 2005. Melbourne Victory have a rather dynamic fan base of several cores that includes virtually all the different sub-sections of the Victorian football fraternity as well as the cross-code generalist sports fans.
As a reflection of this, 40 to 50 per cent of Victory’s fan base are also AFL members, so the club has some resonance with the larger sporting fraternity. This means that the rest – which going by Victory’s previous membership figures must account for about 10,000 of its members – are the traditionalist or purist football fans.
Within that, in terms of active fandom, we see two distinct home ends (North and South) which facilitate different perspectives of football’s culture – South American/continental and Northern European. These people may have joined a club pitching itself as a “purist” football club without a silly moniker, but they aren’t about to “jump ship” across town because of their loyalty to their friendship network.
It was suggested to me there could be a class divide of sorts, with Victory supposedly going for the top end class with Heart oriented more towards the so called lower classes, but personally I do not think this will really eventuate because Australia is not a particularly classist society. Where there was some class divide in the AFL a hundred years ago, this has disappeared and ironically Collingwood is now the most corporatised club of all. Both A-League teams play out of the same stadiums in effect and area of the city.
While Heart seem to be trying to lay claim to the fact that they are more of a football club because they play a higher volume of their seasons games at the new Swan Street stadium, Victory can point to the fact they are actually based there. Plus, perhaps most importantly, it is ironically the traditionally minded (and perhaps predominantly working class) football fans of the Victory that will actually provide the proper football atmosphere at the new stadium and make it feel like a football home ground and a fortress.
Interestingly, at the first derby on 2 October, it is the Victory fans who will outnumber the so called “home” fans. AAMI Park is no more of a home to Heart than Selhurst Park was a home for Wimbledon or Loftus Road was a home for Fulham.
Simon Colosimo – who has been playing in Sydney for the past couple of seasons – came out in an interesting article regarding Heart supposedly being the first “real football club”. This is a bit of a joke because firstly Heart are as plastic as every other franchise in the league. Secondly, Heart were not formed out of any organic groundswell within Victorian society.
Rather they have been formed because there was a surplus of interested investors (Munn and co) and because the marketers at FFA headquarters decided there needed to be a second franchise to service the Melbourne market. Heart is very much a “top-down” initiative.
Heart in essence represent no distinct core demographic of the football fraternity, and they certainly have no element to their fan base that is not represented in the Melbourne Victory’s fan base in some way.
This also includes the few old NSL/VPL fans who are open to the A-League. Heart fans through their pre-game pullover (against the Mariners) are simply in a deluded fantasy land if they think they can genuinely lay claim to links to the grassroots clubs any more than Victory can.
The only organic football entity that could lay this claim was the prospective South Melbourne bid. The only team in the A-League that can lay claim to being a true football club is Colosimo’s old club Perth Glory. The Roar could to a degree but they made a point to dissolving their old links.
Lastly, there is the interesting idea that they are supposed to be team built around their brand of supposedly more “cultured” football, which is a bit dubious because they effectively have to choose from the same talent pool as everyone else. Regardless of who is coaching there is only so much variance that can be gleaned from the pool of A-League players. Somewhat hilariously it is Victory, who despite their “culturally backward” Scottish born coach, who play some of the most entertaining football in the league. The Premiership and Championship results in truth could have gone either way last season.
Heart is merely a team that is “not Victory” pitched for the peripheral football fans who didn’t quite find Victory to be their cup of tea. This does not a genuine football club make.
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.