O'Rourke's suggestions another cringey, tone-deaf blunder

The match-day experience “improvements” proposed yesterday by A-League boss Greg O’Rourke have entered the Australian football consciousness like a snake dropped into a bag of mongeese.

According to a Sydney Morning Herald report, “safe smoke from flares in the stands, fan-zones modelled on the World Cup and lights and music during play” are all apparently set for trial in the opening month of the season. 

“We’ve been doing a significant amount of work with the clubs, the police and also the active fan representatives about what would be important to them to attract them back and to allow them to grow,” O’Rourke said.

The A-League head also emphasised that, while the competition clearly covet the family-centric audience the Big Bash cricket league enjoy, and are blatantly trying to emulate the Big Bash experience, they don’t want to abandon the “unique” cultural elements football treasures. “We’ll be treading carefully towards this to get the best of both worlds,” O’Rourke assured us.

So, safe smoke, music during corners and goal kicks, and a huge sugary dollop of pre-match and halftime entertainment apparently constitutes a compromise. O’Rourke has said that these ideas have been arrived at with the help of clubs and supporter groups. One wonders exactly which groups specified hearing the chorus of Seven Nation Army, or Best of You blared during every goal kick as being the vital missing piece of the match-day experience. 

City fans wave their flags and scarfs (AAP Image/Joe Castro)

O’Rourke is a former PepsiCo executive; these new suggestions have gone down with all the sickly odium of that final sip of a flat can of Pepsi, the chemical sweetness now untempered by carbonation, just a squirt of tepid black sugar liquid left to fester on the sunny windowsill of some regional car dealership. This is confection in every sense of the word, including the sort you can feel eat away at the lining of your teeth as you bite into it.

All the things to try and poach from the World Cup, and they choose “fan-zones”. I’ve a suggestion. Why not embrace the unashamed, celebrated ethnicity of the World Cup? As O’Rourke, a member of the FFA’s senior management team, talks of wanting a “return and growth of active fans”, the FFA are still dawdling up to the point of abandoning the National Club Identity Policy, the piece of governance architecture that has dissuaded away scores of fans from comfortably partaking in the A-League’s ethnically bleached “culture”.

They’d like some flags waved at A-League matches, sure, but not tiny Italian flags on shirts at FFA Cup matches, no sir, yuck.

Big Bash tickets are cheaper, and the league runs for less than three months. Cricket is a treasured national sport, and has been for a century and a half. The British invaders gave the colonies the gift of the gentleman’s game, not that rather scruffy working class pursuit, football. There is so little to analogise between the two leagues, or the two sports.

The Renegades head out to field during the Big Bash League. (AAP Image/David Crosling)

Right now, as the wholly problematic player of Sport Australia enters the scene, the main public relations fight the FFA – and by extension, to one degree or another, Australia football as a whole – have to reckon with is one of legitimacy. The very real threat that we might be turfed out by FIFA, rendered unofficial, potentially unable to defend our Asian Cup title, has hung and will hang over every thing that happens in football until the impasse is resolved.

While the Mariners trial a retired sprinter, and league expansion drags on and on, the very last thing the league needs is more gimmicks. This, as much as anything else, is what is turning off fans. And not the semi-mythical group of potential supporters the FFA seems obsessed with seducing.

No, this stuff is turning off actual fans, who go to games, who buy season tickets. In the pursuit of the unicorn, the stables have been left open and the reliable carthorses who have been ploughing steadily for years are wandering off.

Perhaps it would be best not to get too indignant, a difficult thing in the face of this, just the latest strand added to the obnoxious mass of cumulatively aggregated evidence of tone-deafness. It’s just a trial, going for a month. The safe flares aren’t even being trialled in every stadium, just in Central Coast and Wellington. The music during stoppages will probably come and go. 

Still, fans are shaking their heads, and even players are looking around, amazed and amused. Melbourne City’s Dario Vidosic was instantly memeing on Twitter about the music during corners

The craving for a family friendly experience led to the crackdown on fan groups whose behaviour did not appeal to the sheltered tourist spectator, that weren’t accustomed to the grittier parts of ‘sokkah’ culture – a game of grit – which has long been a realm unsuited to the genteel or greenhorn.

This has been a desire, for some reason, for years. Now, a sanitised version of exactly those once-unpalatable elements is what is being propped up as a cheap marketing gesture, safe smoke, rock and roll bands and a kind of plastic, ersatz culture conceived using the very worst – or least appropriate – things as inspiration.

No one should have thought that Robbie Williams’ opening ceremony performance, or the cringe-worthy peripherals thought up and propped up by whatever marketing team Vladimir Putin assembled for the fans to walk past outside the stadium, were the things from the World Cup from which to draw inspiration. The football, on the pitch, and the generations of long-held passion in the stands, are the things they should have focused on. 

An authentic football league, with authentic structures, and a governance body genuinely committed to the league, its fans, and its betterment. If only that could be worked into a marketing brief.