Football of various types was played in New South Wales from the 1820s but the first Association football club in the colony formed in 1880.
Thereafter immigrants, locals, miners, workers and youth combined to shape football into what has always been the sport’s dominant state in Australia. The code has progressed over time from paddocks to stadia but the quest for players and patrons, money and media has been as difficult as protracted. There have been such problems as world depressions, world wars and the rivalry of other codes. There was also a dominant culture so often unmoved by a game it sometimes deemed to be foreign. The tide seemed to have turned in the 1920s and then again in the 1950s. Australia’s qualification for the World Cup in 1974, and a national competition thereafter, promised a third breakthrough. Yet it took another thirty years to cement a viable national league, join the Asian Football Confederation and return to the World Cup (2006), the first of five consecutive qualifications. All states and territories played their roles in the game’s journey but New South Wales has always remained at the centre, from the first club through to today.
