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Coming in from the margins: ethnicity, community support and the rebranding of Australian soccer

journal contribution
posted on 2016-02-16, 14:12 authored by James Skinner, Dwight H. Zakus, Allan Edwards
Soccer in Australia exists at the margin of the professional sport landscape, although it enjoys popularity at the development levels. This historic position is the result of many social and political forces. With four football codes operating in Australia, amongst other elite and professional sport teams and leagues, soccer occupied a troubled position. The sustenance and growth of the sport emanates from a strong ethnic, immigrant basis of soccer, but this base also resulted in further marginalization of the code. Add to these difficulties organizational and governance issues, soccer was a management ‘basket‐case’ for some time. Marginalization in the Oceania federation and questionable qualifying processes for the World Cup exacerbated the problems in Australian soccer. This essay traces the various changes to soccer in Australia as it seeks to move into the mainstream of national and international sport. A reorganized national sport governing body, the Football Federation of Australia, a new national professional competition in the A‐League, new television revenues, and membership in the Asian Football Confederation point to the changes that will lead Australian soccer into the mainstream of the ‘world game’.

History

School

  • Loughborough University London

Published in

Soccer & Society

Volume

9

Issue

3

Pages

394 - 404

Citation

SKINNER, J., ZAKUS, D.H. and EDWARDS, A., 2008. Coming in from the margins: ethnicity, community support and the rebranding of Australian soccer. Soccer & Society, 9(3), pp. 394-404.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2008

Notes

This paper is in closed access.

ISSN

1466-0970

eISSN

1743-9590

Language

  • en

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