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The A-League is in full swing, crowds are booming and the bandwagon has taken off. So it is no surprise the mainstream media is engaging in a bit of online click-baiting, with some predictably xenophobic results.
Last weekend’s Sydney derby was everything an A-League fan could hope for – a packed house, two colourful sets of supporters and a Shinji Ono special volleyed home for good measure.
It was the sort of game A-League fans have been enjoying for years, and lo and behold, a couple of Sydney-based News Corp journalists decided to hop on board for the ride.
“Soccer-hating journo goes to Western Sydney Wanderers/Sydney FC A-League match. Sees the light,” read the chest-thumping headline on a piece published on the somewhat spuriously-named news.com.au website.
“Soccer, (t)he most boring sport in the world,” followed the first line of more than 300 comments – a sentiment so predictable you couldn’t possibly get to the TAB fast enough to lay a bet on it.
Plenty of A-League fans responded positively to the article written by Walkley Award-winning sports journalist Anthony Sharwood, but to scratch the surface of his new-found enthusiasm is to reveal some uncomfortable truths.
Sharwood went along to the derby with former ABC Online journalist Chris Paine – a self-confessed Aston Villa fan – but despite his background as a highly-regarded writer for both Inside Sport and Alpha, Sharwood admits he was attending his first ever A-League game.
Yet as far back as August 2009, Sharwood wrote on the now defunct Punch website: “(k)nockers will tell you the A-League is about the same standard as the Slovakian third division. So what? It’s our league, and it deserves our full attention”.
The sort of attention which sees an award-winning sports journalist attend precisely zero A-League games in the past four years? Sounds fishy to me.
However, any A-League fan with an analytical mind and five seconds to spare can connect the dots.
Want to know why News Corp is suddenly running positive pieces on the A-League? Because journalism ain’t paying so well and the net must now be cast far and wide to lure as many readers as possible.
It used to be that outlets like News Corp acted as gate-keepers, publishing about topics it had a vested interest in and keeping stories about rival interests out of the newspaper.
But the internet age has rendered the mainstream media obsolete, leading to a frenzy of click-baiting aimed at attracting parochial respondents from polar-opposite ends of the spectrum.
Sharwood’s article fulfilled the brief perfectly, insomuch as it attracted A-League fans pleased to see some positive coverage from a traditionally anti-football outlet, as well as the usual assortment of boofheads unwilling to let the opportunity slip to inform the world how much they hate the game.
Indeed, one of the most depressing aspects of every news.com.au article about the A-League is the mind-boggling amount of xenophobia and casual racism which transpires in the comments section below.
The responses are so predictable someone should create a cut-and-paste template; “soccer is boring, the players are divers, the fans are all hooligans, the sport is un-Australian,” etcetera.
Yet, the bleating negativity is as futile as senior journalists like Sharwood, Richard Hinds and Phil Rothfield belatedly clambering aboard the A-League bandwagon – as all have recently done.
The ship has sailed, and A-League fans learnt long ago they’re capable of pouring their money into the competition with or without the support of mainstream media.
The crowd of 40,000 who turned up at the Sydney Football Stadium last weekend weren’t there because of coverage in The Daily Telegraph, they were there in spite of it.
Journalists writing puff pieces for an industry with an outlook bleaker than the Dodo’s may not top the list of A-League concerns, but football fans would do well to exercise some caution here.
After all, today’s populism is tomorrow’s footnote, and the annals aren’t exactly replete with Johnny-come-latelies who’ve changed history.