Extra, extra…have you read all about it? There are dangerous soccer men after your boys. They play a “foreign” game and will “convert” them to it. These scary foreign men with weird sounding accents are coming for our Aussie Rules loving boys. Help!
That was 1952. When 'soccer' was a pawn in a much bigger game. The propaganda transcended sport, the game was just a vehicle for xenophobic fear mongering. We all know about that trope of football being “un-Australian”, and well the foreignness hasn’t really washed off.
Now decades on, with varied migration patterns into Australia the game still feels foreign. And the supporter base that’s probably reflects that diversity is Western Sydney Wanderers’ active support, the RBB.
With headline after headline being written about their boisterous fans making noise, which was first, something interesting and new. Everybody loves something new and shiny. But their fans were too a little a bit of something. We didn’t know what it was. They just rubbed us the wrong way.
Maybe it was the media fawning over them. Perhaps it was they were the new big team in the league, they were climbing the mountain. But no it wasn’t that.
The RBB are what the mainstream thinks football fans are. Loud, in your face and ethnic looking.
We cannot take away the fact Western Sydney is home to much of what we consider Australia’s melting pot.
But that’s the problem.
Let's we forget the words of AFL legend and Greater Western Sydney coach Kevin Sheedy said about the Wanderers’ supporters.
“We don't have the recruiting officer called the immigration department recruiting fans for the West Sydney Wanderers. We don't have that on our side,” Sheedy told Fairfax Media.
The Wanderers fan base has a high proportion of people that you wouldn’t usually see in catalogue brochures of what Australians look like.
And despite providing a different dynamic to the sporting scene in Australia, they were subject to brand spanking new regulations before the new season.
The Wanderers faithful were advised to not walk in big groups, no controversial banners, to stop standing up and clapping over their heads and not to swear.
These regulations policed the movement of people. When was the last time there was any type of regulation of people walking together? How about something as simple as clapping over your head?
The regulations didn’t go through and there have been ongoing discussions and community meetings, but there doesn’t seem to be any progress.
The CEO of the Wanderers admitted to not even being in communication with the NSW Police Force at all.
But is the NSW Police Force focusing their efforts in the right place? The potential excessive force in previous games hasn’t been scrutinized. Cr Steven Issa called out the police’s use of pepper spray that resulted in a 14-year-old being hospitalised.
Wanderers CEO John Tsatsimas criticised the lack of understanding of football’s sporting culture in Tuesday’s hearing.
“The football culture is not understood, nor is the active support, in particular, understood by those who make those calls,” Tsatsimas said.
But just like we cannot separate the ethnic diversity of Wanderers fans and their relationship to the actions taken by NSW police, we must not dismiss the aspects of class.
Western Sydney is one of the lowest socio-economic areas in Australia, throw in the perceptions of football fans you have a pretty strong drink.
You simply don't see police officers on horseback marshalling and padding down people who are on their way to a sporting event in the more glamorous areas of Australia.
The Wanderers and their unprecedentedly passionate support might be new to Australia but the attitudes of police are not.
