Occasional violence part of double-edge sword of active fans but A-League right to crack down hard on Victory

The morning after the night before, one of this country’s most prominent sports columnists – to save the embarrassment, I won’t name them – began their column on the Melbourne derby incident with the line “it could only happen in Australian soccer”.

Suffice to say that columnist is not a fan of soccer, but evidently, they are also not a scholar of it, because a propensity for periodic outbursts of disorder is one of the few things that Australian soccer shares with the rest of the footballing world. On most other metrics, it is quite unique.

On the emotional level, this country clearly doesn’t rate the sport as highly as nearly everyone else on the planet, and on a structural level, it doesn’t really look like many other countries either.

Promotion and relegation are the sine quo non of football’s organisational structure, hardly anyone else operates a transnational league and we only play 26 fixtures, almost a third fewer than the 38 that is common in Europe. There’s the A-League, Major League Soccer in North America and, err, that’s it.

This might seem irrelevant to the discourse around Melbourne Victory’s ban, handed down yesterday by the Australian Professional Leagues and backed up by Football Australia, but it’s not.

For the record, Melbourne Victory were fined $550,000, their active fans were banned for the rest of the year from home and away games and a points deduction hangs over the clubs for any serious misbehaviour in the next three seasons.

The relationship between the league and fans, as played out to death in the last month, is at the heart of what is wrong with the A-League. The APL wants the league to be authentic to football and to Australia, but those things don’t really mix.

“Authentic” Aussie sports leagues like the NRL and AFL have neutral Grand Final venues in big central stadiums because they always did it like that and therefore it works, but such a thing is anathema when you need a partisan atmosphere to make the product sellable.

(Photo by Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)

When you have football you have the dickheads that come with it, and without those dickheads, you are the Big Bash League on a rectangular field, background entertainment masquerading as sport. In fact, even the Big Bash knows that they need to host their Grand Final with at least one team at home otherwise nobody would show up.

Unlike rugby league and Aussie rules, football does not exist in a vacuum and there is a huge sample size from around the globe to show that fan culture is football, whether the APL likes it or not.

APL sanctions are big stick behaviour, but really, it isn’t the stick they want to wield and, if anything, the best thing that could happen for their product is for more teams to have as many active fans as Melbourne Victory do.

The A-League actually love all the fan behaviour, even when it crosses the line. They shared images of active fans breaking the law repeatedly during Socceroos games.

They created their own content that exclusively focused on the active supporters to hype the first round back after the World Cup. They want the fans to be like that, but not like that.

It speaks to the two spirits of sokkah that need to live side-by-side, and since 2004, rarely have. Our football organisation is non-traditional and our fans are too.

You can’t profess undying love to a team that has only existed since 2004 in the same way that you can for the one that your father, your father’s father and your father’s father’s father supported.  

What you can do, however, is attempt to recreate the conditions that you see in places where that is true and ape them to the best of your ability. YouTube ultras are a thing.

The tradition, such as it is, among engaged football fans worldwide is to take it absolutely up to the edge and then wheel back. The whole thing is largely performative, until it isn’t, and is based around what sociologists called the threshold model of collective behaviour.

In short, the theory is thus: most people have some capacity to do things that are illegal if enough other people are willing to do it too.

That is enhanced by those people being young, male and drunk, which they often are at football matches, and enhanced further in a way that no other sport comes close to because the best way to predict future disorder is previous disorder and football has gone hand in hand with violence since its inception.

Our football culture is young and largely inauthentic compared to established football nations and thus the threshold for the sort of scenes that we got a taste of in the Melbourne derby is very high for participants.

Their innate Australianness outweighs their footballness, for want of a better phrase, and in Australia, even our biggest derbies are unsegregated.

Here’s a perfect example: I was at Victory’s game against Macarthur just a week before the incident, and as I got off the train at Leumeah, I saw the travelling Vuck active group hurling abuse at a Bulls fan, giving it the big one and offering him out.

Though the Bulls fan took the bait, nobody was actually interested in fighting. It was football fan cosplay and a little bit farcical.

I spent more than a decade watching that incident take place in England, Scotland, Germany and the Netherlands and can assure you that the farce is better than the alternative.

That incident is a fight 100% of the time in proper football cultures, because the threshold is set differently and the societal expectations kick in. You don’t want to be all jacket and no dancing.

(Photo credit should read Chris Putnam/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

This is relevant because, a week later, the threshold was markedly different. The ‘f— you’ mentality that fuels young men in these groups was turned up to eleven by the APL’s Grand Final decision.

It was then accelerated further by a derby game. Then further still by home turf, then further by bigger numbers and a national TV audience. The threshold was on the floor.

Look at the kids in that photo, by the way. They’re kids, for one, and loving the chance to transgress publically as plenty young lads do. They probably go to watch Carlton and Collingwood innocently, too, but at Victory, they get to act differently because it’s football.

Football inherently lowers its own threshold through reputation. Imagine those lads were in Fed Square a week before, where similar behaviour was not just allowed but lauded around the world as proof that Australian football was real.

The subcultural element of all this factors in massively. Aussie fans know exactly what they are doing on that level, and thus they know the expectations of what they are doing. You sometimes have to be in the subculture – in my case, to have grown up around it in the UK – to appreciate it.

The average punter wouldn’t see a thing, because that’s what subcultures are all about. Those kids probably don’t see it either, but it only takes a tiny group that do – ‘a small minority of idiots’ is the British tabloid’s favourite phrase – to lead a much larger group over the threshold hurdle.

Here’s an example: I was at Vuck’s first game of the year, away at Sydney FC, and I jokingly sent a photo to my partner of the shoes of all the men in the queue for the toilet at the Captain Cook Hotel before the game: they were all wearing Adidas Spezials, the same as I was. There’s a dress code.

Original Style Melbourne (OSM), the leading active group at Victory, talk a lot – a lot, a lot – in the language of European ultras, perhaps more so than any other Australian group, and while groups over there love a statement on any passing political issue, even they would have thought the five that came out of OSM prior to the derby – and the two afterwards – were a little over the top.

Having a kick-off with your FA is catnip to these people, whatever continent they live on, because ‘no al calcio moderna’ – ‘no to modern football’ – is the foundational statement of the whole subculture.

That’s the point, by the way. The A-Leagues are inherently, necessarily modern football, because they were founded in 2004, as were most of their clubs.

Modern football, however, is totally unpalatable to the sort of fan that actually makes football stand out from any other sport in Australia.

Without that kind of fan to create an engaging live experience, Australian football is just second-rate football. It’s the Big Bash against the IPL. It’s meaningless.

The APL know they cannot sell football to the Australian public without the fans. But they also can’t sell it with the fans if they act like they did.

To be fair to them, the English, German, Brazilian, Argentinian or wherever else authorities would also struggle to sell that, but they can distance themselves from their fans because they have over a hundred years of history, understanding and embedded culture.

They can set themselves apart because football won’t die in their country. English club football had a red hot crack at killing itself for most of the 1980s, guess what: it came back stronger than ever.

The fans themselves, deep down, know that the No To Modern Football stuff is nonsense in Australia. The only authentic bit of Original Style Melbourne is that they are from Melbourne: nothing about their style is original.

Every bit is cleaved off someone else, from the chants to the logos to the posturing to the clothes. It might be the most authentic iteration of it in Australia, but in football fan culture terms, that’s like being the tallest dwarf.

Tom Glover picks up a flare to remove it from the pitch. (Photo by Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)

The sanction won’t stop this, by the way. It might raise the threshold for a bit but, over time, it will come down again.

As long as you have active football fans, you will have violence sometimes, and if you want to make football in Australia something that people might actually want to turn up and pay money to watch, then you need active fans.  

Aussie football fans rightly point out that the rates of arrests at A League games are no higher than NRL or AFL – and might indeed be lower – but that’s not really the point.

Incidentally, if A-League fans think their games are over-policed, I invite them to watch a fourth-division derby in the UK or Germany and tell me if they think they have too many cops here.

Violence at A-League fixtures doesn’t come in the context of half a century of televised violence associated with the sport. Other countries have decades of tolerance for football violence that Australia doesn’t. A 20-a-side brawl on a Berlin train station doesn’t even make the paper, in Sydney it would headline the news.

This is the world that the APL have to make work. They want to have their cake and eat it with the fans but fans are a double-edged sword.

You don’t get the Fed Square scenes without the Melbourne derby scenes from time to time too. Everywhere else in the world figured that out years ago.

So they do what they have to do with sanctions and bans, but let’s be honest: they’ll be back. This will happen again.