Overview

Twenty-two players arrived at Parramatta Common on Saturday, 14 August 1880. The King’s School was hosting a Sydney XI yet to adopt a name. The visitors had played Association football before and finished victors by five goals to nil. On the following Thursday Sydney’s members met and decided to name themselves the NSW Wanderers. They were the first Association football club to be established in Australia.

‘Foot-ball’ had been played in Sydney from the 1820s. With few rules and many a side, play was often viewed as rowdy if not rough. Foot-ball surfaced in and around Hobart, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane as well as Sydney. Local variations were the norm but a push for standard rules that began in the 1850s led to rugby and Victorian rules evolving during the 1860s.

The Wanderers’ Arthur Henry Patrick Savage had called for Association football as early as 1877 but he was not the first. Others had made the same suggestion a decade earlier. And it is more than likely that games were played in various places throughout the colonies without ever being recorded. The first game the press did report was at Woogaroo outside of Ipswich in 1875. Another was played at Germanton in southern NSW in 1878. Hobart hosted both a scratch and formal game in 1879. What separated the Sydney XI was that they survived for more than a match or two. After playing King’s they formally constituted their club and from this flowed organisers and competitors to establish a new code.

The game’s pioneers were initially led by educated young men who had recently arrived in the colonies, most notably John Walter Fletcher. Schooled at Cheltenham Grammar and Pembroke College, Oxford he was the founding secretary of the Wanderers. However within three years the game in Sydney had changed. Players and officials linked to the English Public schools had given way entirely to English and Scottish workers. Workers in Britain had been taking up Association football with gusto and upon arriving in Sydney as immigrants, often imported for their specialist labour as ironmongers, mechanics and manufacturers, they had settled in such centres for heavy industry as Pyrmont, Balmain and Granville. Living where they worked, they had then established teams and clubs that quickly became the bedrock of the game in the harbour city.

The same applied to the coalfields that ringed the County of Cumberland. In the north around Newcastle, in the south overlooking Wollongong, in the west about Lithgow, clubs sprouted with the arrival of young immigrant miners. If they didn’t hew coal then they extracted shale at Joadja in the southern tablelands. Locally-born players had been there at the start in 1880 but not until economic depression in the 1890s turned off the migrant tap did Association football’s image begin to drift away from that of a game dominated by ‘new chums’.

The waxing and waning of immigration has proved a pivotal influence on the game. In addition to the 1880s, waves of new arrivals boosted football in the years leading up to World War I and thereafter for most of the 1920s. Depression again took its toll but some new arrivals did arrive to help the game in the late 1930s. War yet again intervened but in the years after World War II, leading up to the mid-1960s, football experienced its greatest boom. Yet there was a difference, and not just in greater numbers. Immigrants before World War II had been overwhelmingly British. Immigrants after the war were overwhelmingly European. It was a shift with marked effect, and not just for the game but for Australian society at large.

The 1920s had been a watershed. Players and patrons had grown and with them grounds and gate receipts. Moving the dial for more spectators, vision and ambition had promoted the first international tours and with them had come publicity and profit that invited the first thoughts of professionalism. It was centred in Sydney, the South Coast and the Newcastle and South Maitland coalfields. However the game also sprouted in regional and rural NSW. Returned soldiers, miners, railway workers and immigrants scattered the game widely, aided by central administrators keen to help or control whenever they could.

By the 1920s Rugby Union had been replaced by Rugby League as the dominant code in NSW. However during the 1920s football’s growth at both the grass roots and senior level caught the wary eye of League officials. Among schools, juniors and workers, football was burgeoning in terms of number and reach. All the different codes needed grounds and facilities that were often in short supply among metropolitan councils, be it for elite or social kickers. The churches were particularly important for football. They drew their strength from Protestants with Scottish and English heritage, Catholics with Irish links leaning towards Rugby League.

Women in Britain had begun playing football in exhibition games from the 1880s. To date, no Australian records have been unearthed that go that far back but changing attitudes in society, flowing out of the wide-ranging women’s movement and accelerated by World War I, saw women playing football before crowds in Brisbane in 1921.  At the same time women began playing Rugby League in Sydney and this was after an all-female Australian Rules team had emerged in Perth in 1915. In NSW the press reported on women agitating to play football at Granville in 1903 and nearly fifty women voted to form a Sydney Ladies Soccer Association in 1921.  Practice games were organised and immediately after women’s teams formed on the South Coast.  Formal competitions were not reported but women were playing in Newcastle, the South Maitland coalfields, Lithgow and parts of Sydney from the late 1920s through to the late 1930s.

The war abruptly halted normalcy in the 1940s but its massive impact was not confined to the years of fighting. In its aftermath came changes to Australian society not seen since the gold rushes, and for football that ushered in not just years of boom but also some of its most difficult moments. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing into the 1960s, Australia’s intake of immigrants was unprecedented and with that came the fact that continental Europeans outnumbered Britons by two to one. Among the many from war-torn Europe were the Dutch, Jewish, Polish, Italian, Maltese, Greek, Czech, Hungarian, German, Croatian, Serbian, Ukrainian and Baltic. And with their arrival came the creation of football clubs centred on nationality and ethnicity. At a simple level the clubs allowed young, single, immigrant men to gather together to indulge their favourite passion. At an emotional level the clubs provided a whiff of home and the comfort of things familiar. At a communal level the clubs served as a means for maintaining cultural identity and loyalties that fostered networks of support. Anchors for those trying to cope in a new country, the clubs could function as bulwarks against a strange, mostly ambivalent, and at times hostile Australian public.

And with post-war immigration the game did boom. Players and spectators grew exponentially, especially in Sydney where so many immigrants settled. Money in the game rose through gate receipts, with Prague, Austral [Dutch], Hakoah and Europa [previously Ferencvaros, later Budapest], as forerunners for the likes of Pan Hellenic, A.P.I.A., Marconi, Yugal and Croatia, generating bumper crowds as they graduated through the ranks to senior competitions. Standards rose with the immigrants. They had different and skilful styles of play compared to British directness, graft and physicality. Europeans were deeply passionate for the game and were prepared to spend in ways at odds with not just their limited personal resources but the strong amateurism so entrenched among many British Australians. Not that the latter were lily-white. As mentioned, professionalism had been sought for the game since the 1920s but the ethnic clubs were so intent on prominence that their bases were happy to sacrifice for success. Players and coaches were well paid.

European immigrants in the game were ambitious. They worked within football’s existing structures for a decade but grew discontented under the direction of local and British-born officials. Clashes on the field, which also included violence between rival ethnic groups, were matched by frustrations off the field as ’old’ and ‘new’ Australians found it hard to understand each other. It finally led to the breakaway NSW Federation of Soccer Clubs forming in 1957. The ousting of the old NSW Soccer Football Association was acrimonious but inevitable by the next season. It led to similar coups in all other mainland states and the Australian Soccer Federation that formed in late 1961. The ASF took just eighteen months to gain control at the national level but nothing had been easy. Clubs in Sydney under the NSW Federation, and then clubs interstate, had signed players from overseas without paying transfer fees. It had led to a ban imposed by FIFA and only after compensation was paid was the ban lifted and the ASF recognised by officials in Geneva.

The code before the war had had its highs, including international tours that had begun to go beyond the staple diet of English-speaking opponents. However with the infusion of continental Europeans there had been a changing of the guard. Familiar faces were swept aside and in their place came those with fresh ideas and different priorities. Born outside the British realm, their outlook was not bound by the links of Empire. Cosmopolitan and catholic, they set about expanding the previous limits of local football and for the first real time, aided by the dawning of commercial jet travel that reduced time and cost commitments, Australian football embraced fully the world game. In what was its single biggest early act, the ASF sought to qualify for the World Cup in 1966.

Women had been reported as playing during the 1950s but both passive and active opposition from men was commonplace. Establishing therefore their own organisation, women formed the Metropolitan Ladies’ Soccer Association in Sydney in the 1960s. New Zealand was played in unofficial internationals from the late 1960s and the Australian Women’s Soccer Association was formed in Sydney immediately after the first national championship was held in that city in 1974. Nation-wide, the great majority of players were located in NSW and the most prominent players played in Sydney for St George Budapest. Indeed, St George supplied the core of a representative side invited to play in Hong Kong in 1975. Women’s participation in the game was growing exponentially. The country’s largest football association, the NSW Protestant Churches Soccer FA, exclusively male since forming in 1920, finally organised its first ‘Ladies’ competition in 1978. The first official internationals were played against New Zealand in 1979 and the national team, named the Matildas, qualified for the Women’s World Cup of 1995.  It was the first of eight successive World Cup appearances, the last in 2023 when as hosts the ‘Matildas’ played brilliantly to reach the semi-finals.

In men’s football, qualification for the World Cup in 1974 and the start of a national league in 1977 seemed to signal a coming of age. However making headway against the hegemony of Australian Rules and the two rugby codes was not easy. The cessation of large-scale immigration by the mid-1960s had also reduced the buoyance of nearly twenty years. The growth in participation levels compensated and the many junior and amateur associations, be they in Sydney, Newcastle, the South Coast and in various country centres, ensured the code overwhelmed rival forms of football in terms of those who took the field. Yet for all the hard work within social football, and this included all other states as well, the game failed to translate its popularity into paying spectators and concomitant media and commercial attention. Infighting among administrators didn’t help, the game often bogging down when grappling with the pros and cons of ethnicity, the image of ‘wogball’ and the search for acceptance as a game for ‘Australians’.

The high of 1974 was followed by particular successes, especially accomplished youth teams, but the holy grail of senior men’s World Cup qualification eluded the code for the next thirty years. More still, unable to shake off its own (ethnic) politics and interstate rivalries, administration at the national level spiralled down to such an extent that it warranted government intervention. Football needed to change its organisational structure. It still had a system that favoured the states and dominant clubs at a time when the game was aspiring to and had become more national and international. Matters got so bad that even the Prime Minister got involved, with John Howard reaching out to billionaire Frank Lowy to take up the reins of the game.

Lowy was a Czech-Hungarian immigrant who had arrived in Sydney via Israel in 1952. A member of the Jewish community, he became a long-standing president of Hakoah and oversaw the Bondi club’s winning of numerous state and national championships. Yet he had also shut down the football club when years of poor crowd attendances proved too costly for the social club to subsidize. Thereafter Lowy was courted to return to the fold, especially when his commercial Westfield empire continued to surge and expand. When he did return in 2003 many hoped for a miracle and Lowy, drawing in lieutenants to help, did not disappoint. Within three years of him assuming the chair, Football Federation Australia established a viable national league, gained admission to the Asia Football Confederation and qualified for the World Cup. It was the start of five successive qualifications.

Since the Commonwealth FA (Australia) began in 1911, the headquarters for the national body has remained in Sydney. It was a measure of the city’s size and importance, boosted by adjoining Newcastle and Wollongong. More specifically for the game, it was an acknowledgment that NSW has always been the largest and most influential state for football. Population was the key but spectators and crowds at senior games were less the point than the volume of juniors and amateurs. Traditions ran strong in some areas and loyalty to the game was generational. The locally-born combined with immigrants to advance the game, especially when the post-war baby boom linked with large scale arrivals of Europeans and Britons spread over two decades. School football proved important but even more so was the continual lowering of the age for children playing the game on Saturdays or Sundays. Boys and girls, even down to under 6s and 5s, were signed up by mums and dads enamoured with a code of football not based on contact.

Histories of the game do tend to concentrate on winners, representatives and the big occasion. Yet the game has always rested on a broad base of participants whose primary purpose was to have fun, to enjoy a recreation that complemented family, and which tempered the stresses of the working week. And while playing football has always been a youthful indulgence, parents and elders have always peeled the oranges and washed the kit. Then there was the coaching, officiating and managing around the kitchen table. The game has always striven to improve standards and to stage spectacles in stadia but, at least for most folk who have been involved, it has been about turning up at their local public park on a winter weekend. That has been the real key to the game’s progress. That’s what has really underpinned football’s story for more than 140 years.

Written by Philip Mosely, 15/03/2024