This redacted prehistory of the sport is the subject of Joe Gorman’s passionate The Death and Life of Australian Soccer. Gorman wrestles with the paradox at the heart of soccer’s turbulent history: the sport’s prominent ‘ethnic’ communities were both its biggest strength and its most debilitating weakness. It was soccer’s image as an ethnic game that pushed it to the margins of Australia’s sporting consciousness. This is no retrospective playing of the race card: until recently, for example, it was not considered controversial to refer to the sport by its decidedly racist pseudonym, ‘wogball’.

Gorman’s central claim is that soccer’s postwar experience is the best illustration of the problems and possibilities of multiculturalism in Australia. It is the true national game. At a time when all the major sporting codes are falling over themselves to prove their multicultural credentials, soccer is essentially the only sport in which this bears any relation to reality. For more than seventy years, successive waves of migrants – welcomed into a foreign country yet disconnected from its culture – built entire communities and social networks around soccer clubs in every Australian city. This often raised complex questions about the meaning of identity and citizenship in modern Australia. For Gorman, ‘Soccer’s national question is Australia’s national question’.

The Death and Life is a reclamation of the ‘confusing mess’ that is the history of soccer in Australia. It follows the long-forgotten stories of the game’s true believers, those men and women whose unbending faith in soccer’s ultimate deliverance have sustained the sport through good times and bad. The original prophet-in-chief was Andrew Dettre, an urbane Hungarian migrant and Australia’s first ‘soccer intellectual’. After arriving as a refugee in the 1950s, Dettre quickly tired of the media focus on the established sporting codes and set about producing a publication of his own. For decades he acted as soccer’s leading evangelist and used Soccer World to chronicle all of the game’s paradoxes, absurdities, and intractable feuds.

Though Australian soccer was dominated by migrants, they shared a common determination to see the game succeed in their adopted country. Dettre’s most famous disciple was László Ürge, better known to Australians as the late SBS presenter Les Murray, who migrated from Hungary in 1957. He and his close friend Johnny Warren were dubbed ‘Mr and Mrs Soccer’, and the latter’s famous phrase – ‘I told you so’ – felt like a prophecy fulfilled when Australia finally qualified for the World Cup in 2006. Indeed, the book is filled with with religious metaphors: a sporting magazine is a ‘bible’, a football ground a ‘sacred meeting place’. Soccer, Gorman contends, is a ‘game of love’, though this is more compelling as a defence of the sport’s amateur traditions than of today’s franchised entertainments.

One of Gorman’s most persistent themes is Australian soccer’s belief in the inevitability of its own success. Fans still love to refer to it as the ‘sleeping giant’ of Australian sport, endlessly on the verge of awakening. However, he continually reminds us that middle Australia’s difficult relationship with its most multicultural sport mirrors its own inability to come to terms with its post-colonial fate. Soccer is a battleground in Australia’s endless culture war. The Death and Life insists that this relationship between sport, politics, and culture be taken seriously. In this regard, it stands well above the usual production line of hagiography and memoir that dominate the sports writing genre.

Harry Kewell (Wikimedia Commons)The seriousness of Gorman’s message does not stop him from producing a rollicking narrative. His writing is wonderfully colourful and humorous, expertly teasing out personal stories to make broader points. Kimon Taliadoros’s forgotten crusade to establish a players union and the tale of Mark Viduka’s complicated nationalism are clear highlights. The tale of the individual who finds identity and belonging in the communities that formed around soccer clubs in Australia is the happy refrain to nearly every chapter. These clubs were not exclusive: many of their staunchest advocates were Anglo-Australians who retained only fond memories of time spent in ‘ethnic’ enclaves like Melbourne Croatia, Pan Hellenic, and St George Budapest.

When the A-League was launched in 2005, there was an ambient racism at the heart of its ‘old soccer, new football’ marketing slogan. The achievements of the ethnic clubs – accommodating new migrants, establishing a vibrant national competition, producing generations of Socceroos – were quickly forgotten. ‘In a multicultural society,’ Gorman laments, ‘how did ethnicity become a dirty word in Australia’s most diverse sport?’ Since Australian soccer’s great leap forward, its organising principle has been commerce, not ethnicity. It was the market that killed the old clubs, just as it dispensed with the AFL’s Fitzroy Lions and rugby league’s Newtown Jets. Thankfully, we have this book to remind us of a time when sporting clubs represented, in a very real sense, communities.