Monday 4 December 2006

The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football

The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football
By David Goldblatt



THIS BOOK IS A monster: a 978-page, gloriously fat, thorough-going account of the history of association football, the world game. Beginning with the deep prehistory of football, David Goldblatt takes us on his 320,000-word journey through the developmental stages of the game as its tentacles spread relentlessly around the globe.

Football, in this account, is a product of industrialisation, global commerce and professionalism. It is the game of modernity. As regions and nations around the globe enter periods of modernisation, football seems most often to be the game that comes knocking, usually without competition from other sports.

For Goldblatt, the game's many imperial successes result from a potent brew. Its origins lie in the "rationalising thrust of Victorian society" that intensifies the desire of the English and Scottish middle classes to create a codified form of football out of a rowdy and disruptive pre-modern form of folk culture.

The game spreads outward via patterns of "industrial globalisation" that take the game to parts of the world that adopt football with ease and make it their own. Once transported, football is able to generate such immediate and near universal interest because of its simple adaptability and its inclusive emphasis on grace and fluidity over exclusive brawn and brutality.

The final key to the game's success is that no other "game embraces both the chaos and uncertainty and the spontaneity and reactivity of play like football". Goldblatt adds grimly, "at no moment in our history has humanity faced a world so threatened by the former and been so in need of the latter". Football, the beautiful and joyous game of risk, injustice and tragedy, is the game of and for our epoch.

These many histories of football are presented by Goldblatt with the aid of a sociological mirror. The waning of English and Scottish influence in Latin American football reflects the decline of the "de facto" British economic empire. The history of Spanish football is utterly embedded in Spanish politics; or is it the other way around? When France wins the World Cup in 1998 it's also a victory for French multiculturalism; its miserable run in the early 2000s parallels the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the racist right. It is never quite clear whether Goldblatt sees political, social and economic change as harbinger or product of events in the football world. He probably sees the relationships as dialectical, given his subtle but not infrequent Marxist reference points.

He shows that for all the economic hype around the game it's still a relatively small player in the global economy. Economic decisions in football are never really earth-shattering. Where football leads and directs history is at the levels of collective emotion and spirit, though Goldblatt might baulk at these terms.

Goldblatt's narrative is one that in hindsight seems so inevitable. He tracks the conquests as one might observe falling dominoes. Rather tantalising, then, is the suggestion that football's hegemony in Britain was determined by its better handling of the pressures of encroaching professionalism than rugby (which split into amateur and professional codes, thereby losing its unity and influence). Had rugby taken the same path as football the domino tracks of global sport today would make a very different pattern. Of course, some of the dominoes failed to fall, especially in the English-speaking world - though history has not had its final word on this.

The reasons association football fails to take hold fully in Ireland, the United States, Australia and New Zealand revolve around such matters as: the formation of colonial national identity as a rejection of the imperial centre and its cultural practices; association football's unavailability in codified form when the need or desire for regulated sporting competition is emerging in the colonies; and sheer serendipity.

For example, the All Blacks' 1905 successes against British rugby teams were vital in bolstering that code's already rising fortunes in New Zealand. By comparison, the New Zealand and Australian association football teams had to wait until the mid-1920s before they had the honour of being pummelled by a visiting English team. For all the much-vaunted Aussie and Kiwi fighting spirit we nonetheless turn our backs on our failures as readily as anyone else. It's a matter of record that association football has struggled to gain a strong foothold in Australia until very recently. Yet I write this review after having recently been a part of a crowd of 50,000 at Telstra Dome watching a domestic Australian match and having spent a year boggling at the unprecedented feats of the Socceroos.

For anyone trying to understand this phenomenon, The Ball is Round is an ideal place to start, even though it is wafer thin on Australian football history. As a global history it is ultimately a collection of stories about locality. Through his grand temporal and geographic sweep, Goldblatt builds story upon story, mapping patterns of growth, decay and regrowth that pulse to the beat of the history of modernity, adding local variations to the rhythm as he finds them. It's a framework that invites and accommodates further local comparisons.

The key to Australia's recent football history lies in Goldblatt's notion that the game enters a new era as the globalised economy heats up. Post-industrial football, with its global television deals, mega-rich players, corporate branding, architecturally sculptured all-seater stadiums and cashed-up "theatregoing" audiences, has fundamentally rewritten the guidelines for success.

The old modern industrial football was always a joint enterprise between the working-class masses who supported the game and the businessmen who obtained power, influence and cachet (but rarely capital) by owning and running football clubs. The loyalties of the majority of the Australian working class, having been captured by Australian rules or rugby league, were largely lost to association football in this country.

However, post-industrial football doesn't need the working-class masses, it needs customers. It doesn't need grassroots, it needs cable connections (apologies to Ken Wark) and the apparatuses of the post-industrial corporation. One beauty of The Ball is Round is that it gives the reader models for understanding the reasons association football can suddenly seem to bloom in Australia without ever broaching the topic directly.

Goldblatt also enables us to understand what football fans in Australia might be losing even as our game slides into the mainstream because he feels deeply the ebbs and flows of the global game.

But this is a book with many attractions. In the end it is simply magnificent; an exhaustive and exhausting, well-written and beautifully packaged story of the most popular game in the world, written by a man whose knowledge and research is encyclopedic if not maniacally obsessive. It is an absolute must for fan and aficionado alike.

Reviewed by Ian Syson

This review first appeared in the Age

Thursday 13 July 2006

Foul! The secret World of FIFA:


Foul! The secret World of FIFA:
Bribes, Vote Riggings and Ticket Scandals By Andrew Jennings
For a football supporter, reading this book is (I imagine) like finding out that your parents are crooks. You realise that your lifestyle and values are at some level morally compromised.

If only half of what Andrew Jennings documents in Foul! is true then the much-lauded ‘football family' is rotten to the core. Among the bureaucracies of FIFA and its confederations, Kick-backs, bribery, vote rigging, and ticket laundering are commonplace.
Jennings presents a stream of examples: the case of the illicit stand-in member at the FIFA congress (her being a young woman instead of an older man went unnoticed); the tidy US$500 per diem expenses claimed by annointed FIFA representatives; CONCACAF's overlord Jack Warner funnelling World Cup tickets exclusively through his private travel company at £1,700 profit per package. The list is extensive.
All over the FIFA world easy corruption is practised by glib hypocrites.
Not much different from any other transnational corporation then! Indeed, as Jennings points out, FIFA and the IOC have a lot in common. McDonald's, Nike and most other rapacious global enterprises seem to be models for FIFA imperialism – or should that be the other way around? FIFA has a longer history than many of them.
Jennings is an award-winning investigative journalist, having exposed serious corruption in big business, Scotland Yard and the Olympic movement. His investigations need to be taken seriously.
Jennings knows the dangers of making such powerful enemies. And his method is to keep himself loud and visible. Despite the odd, veiled physical threat, he fronts up at press conferences (when he's not banned from them) and ask the blunt questions: ‘Where's the money gone, Mr Blatter?' His journalism keeps alive themes that others might have allowed to die prematurely. He endures insult and innuendo about his motives. But he will not be distracted from his quarry, FIFA CEO Sepp Blatter and his senior henchmen.
Jennings' strategy forces FIFA into trying other, less direct, means to silence him. They try unsuccessfully to coax him onto the gravy train – through bribery or soft-soaping. When that fails they resort to lawyers and the threat of legal action – all of which Jennings blithely and joyfully sidesteps.
Unfortunately, Jennings' investigative method finds itself replicated in the book's structure. Too often, he thrusts himself forward as the hero of the story, all the while alluding to his own cleverness, bravery and solid principles. Sometimes Jennings is more worried about the minutiae of the investigation than the bigger story. This paper chase has too much paper and not enough chase.
Ultimately, Foul! doesn't tell us much about the game of football, merely the corrupt state of its governance. Maybe that's Jennings' purpose; but the resultant story is monotonous and limited.
While Jennings dedicates his book to the fans of the game, he doesn't see them as major players in his story, even though they are the ones being ripped off. Their inclusion might have given the book the balance, colour and life it hasn't achieved.
Foul! Is about what happens when money in sport gets so big that the sport itself becomes the background. The past four weeks has shown us what can happen when a body like FIFA is so corrupt: the sport it governs is seen in the same light. Refereeing errors are turned by some commentators into proof of wide-scale corruption. The ascent of skillful and tactically superior teams like Italy and Brazil is translated into a pre-ordained maintenance of the status quo.
For some, tomorrow night's victor will be forever tainted by the smear of political manipulation.
Despite my reservations, this is a book that deserves to be read by all football fans – so we can understand how badly our beautiful, flawed game is run and be inspired to work out ways of taking it back from the criminals who run it.
Reviewed by Ian Syson
This review first appeared in the Age

Saturday 10 June 2006

Reviewing the Gravy Train?


By the Balls: memoir of a football tragic, Les Murray
The Away Game: the secret lives of Australia's soccer superstars, Matthew Hall
Guus Hiddink: Going Dutch, Maarten Meijer
The World Game Downunder, edited by Roy Hay and Bill Murray
German Football: History, culture, society, edited by Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young
Calcio: A history of Italian football, John Foot
Even as John Aloisi was driving home the winning penalty on that mad night in November, they were already at it. While we mere punters were celebrating joyously, drunkenly, wantonly, the publishing accountants clicked into gear like cat burglars taking advantage of a massive street party. They were busy: adjusting schedules, ordering reprints, contacting authors to update their now out-of-date books, asking the odd popular writer without a jot of interest in the game if they could perhaps write a sokkah book for them. A gravy train had arrived and they were getting on board.

Maybe I'm a little too cynical. But it's hard not to notice that publishers with little prior commitment to the world game have acknowledged its marketability in Australia and are pushing out World Cup books by the truckload. It's a good thing; it's a bad thing. A number of the books reviewed here bear the traces (if not the open editorial wounds) of this new publishing imperative.

For example, I wish Les Murray's By the Balls had not been subtitled, memoirs of a football tragic . It's too marketing-department and tacky, conjuring the image of a small-minded man pretending to love something in order to gain advantage. In truth, Murray is a stalwart of the game in Australia who almost single-handedly cemented SBS's reputation as the Soccer Bloody Soccer channel. His relation to football is romantic, perhaps heroic, but never tragic.

This is the first full-length book telling of Murray's transition from Hungarian boy Laszlo Urge to Australian football identity. It describes the Urge family's escape from Stalinist Hungary in 1956 and their arrival in Wollongong a year later. Young Laszlo was struck immediately by the lowly status of the game he loved. How could it be that football was not popular in Australia? Why did the identity and strength given to him by ‘his' team, the magnificent Magyars of the early 1950s seem to mean so little in his new country where the eggball codes reigned.

Thankfully, Murray found football in Australia via his family's involvement in Hungarian community teams, first Wollongong-based Pannonia and then Sydney team, Budapest (later St George).

Football gave a sense of belonging to Murray (and to legions of European migrants) and his story is one of a debt gladly repaid through his activism for the sport in Australia.

By the Balls ends on a sobering note. As football becomes ever more a business in which financial success drives what happens on the field, the beauty and ethics of the game are in peril. For Murray, what ‘quarantines the game and its virtues is national team football'. When the accident of birth determines selection and national pride is the reward, the excesses of football capitalism can be averted. Consequently, the World Cup is the ‘pinnacle of the world game'. As he confesses, this may be a tad ‘romantic'. The next four weeks will tell.

Matthew Hall's The Away Game contains the stories of a number of footballers who left Australia to advance their careers. It was an important book in its first edition (2000) partly because it was published at a time (post Iran) when everything seemed lost for the international ambitions of our star players. It had all the poignancy of a story of wasted youth.

As Hall acknowledges in the new edition, a lot has changed in the past six years but he fails to explain just what, how and why things have changed. One definite change is in the contents of the book. New material has been added, some has been excised, and the chapters have been re-ordered to draw attention to current Socceroos.

Unfortunately, this major structural change has been not been accompanied by thoughtful editing – ‘get this out in a hurry' seems to be its editorial method. We are repeatedly told information that we have already read. Updating has occurred without much thought as to how it might relate to the rest of the book. I got to the point where I just wanted the book to end. It was like being told the same story over and over.

While the book needs re-organising it is still worth dipping into. The (first edition's opening) chapter on Joe Marston, the Aussie who went to Preston in the 1950s, is a classic Australian sports story.

The Away Game is an important book in that it reveals the repeated patterns of shoddy treatment meted out to young Australian players – the three brave players who independently admitted they were sometimes reduced to tears of loneliness in their rooms at night are testimony to this. If only the publishers had cared more about its integrity.

Maarten Meijer's Guus Hiddink: Going Dutch is a biography of the man who will take some of the players in Hall's book to the World Cup.

Marketed as an ‘intimate biography of the super coach', it is nowhere near as intimate as we'd like, reproducing the stereotypes of Hiddink that circulate through other media without revealing much that is new or enlightening. The large font ensures a 260 page book when 150 pages might have done.

Moreover, it seems that the bulk of the book was written shortly after Hiddink's Korea career came to an end. The Australian material feels very much tacked on – another case of MPS (the Must Publish Soccer syndrome).

If Roy Hay and Bill Murray wrote about AFL the way they write about association football in Australia they'd be local heroes. Hay has a long and distinguished track record as a scholar and working journalist while Murray is a highly respected international scholar, having published the classic history, The World's Game.



With The World Game Downunder, Hay, Murray and their contributors have produced a fascinating but necessarily disjointed history. A precursor to a big history the two editors are writing, the collection gives us insight into the way football in Australia, unable to move beyond second-rung status, has progressed in waves of interest and appeal only to fall into troughs of neglect and abuse.

All those with more than a vague interest in the history of football in Australia will want to get their hands on it.

If The World Game Downunder represents academic publishing at its best then German Football, edited by Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young sits towards the other end of the scale. An interesting book crippled by its turgid and sometimes impenetrable prose, it is constructed around essays that seem to tick all the ‘appropriate' scholarly boxes: immigrants in football; women in football; hooliganism; fandom and so on, without coming together to make a coherent argument.

The defence that this is an academic book speaking to academics doesn't wash either. Sports history, as an academic discipline, doesn't need to model itself on critical theory, sociology or discourse analysis to do its job. It should be able to develop its own forms of communication that engage sports aficionados. Indeed, Hay and Murray show the way.

Nonetheless, German Football contains some significant and important essays from which I learned a great deal.

Until the First World War, football was a minority sport in Germany, a nation that treated sport with contempt. (The game's English origins didn't help either.) In fact football never fully established itself in the national imagination until Germany's 1954 World Cup final victory over Hungary, a vital moment in the regeneration of postwar German identity (as well as being a major tragedy in Laszlo Urge's young life).

That victory helped to strengthen arguments for a national club competition. I was surprised to learn that the German national competition, the bundesliga began as recently as 1963 (only 14 years before Australia's NSL).

The subsequent West German triumph, in 1974, gave the nation a different kind of legitimation in a context of massive social upheaval, radical politics and domestic terrorism.

But I wanted more than this. I wanted a story of German Football and not footnotes at its edges.

Calcio: a history of Italian football , by John Foot is a magnificent compendium/encyclopaedia of a book. It demonstrates just how important football has been in the unification of Italy and how significant its World Cup triumphs have been for the development of Italian national sensibility.

Foot is demonstrably in love with Italian football ( calcio ). He adores it; he is obsessed by it; now and then he hates it – but never for long. The game is both object and vehicle of his passions. The book is superbly written and richly layered. The longest by far of all those under review here, it was the easiest and most delightful to read. Over 220,000 words went by almost without a hitch. It suffers from a little repetition but (unlike The Away Game ) its echoes are both understandable and forgivable.

Calcio is organised around the vital themes of the Italian game: history, referees, players, managers, Italian style, the media, the World Cup and others. In covering these so thoroughly Foot kicks up recurring problems in calcio and Italian society.

By this account, Italians live their lives in a constant state of antagonism: the referee is out to get them; FIFA is out to get them; the English gave them the game but play it badly and are out to ruin it; everyone hates them and they hate each other.

Moreover, Italians seem to accept corruption as an unavoidable part of their lives and their sport. It's OK to bribe referees; it's OK to pre-determine results to the satisfaction of both teams; it's OK to dive and cheat in order to advance the interests of the team. Foot gives the example of an English player, new to Italian football, who refused to fall down after a heavy challenge in the penalty area being criticised broadly for failing to dive and get a penalty for his team. Teams that try too hard when they have little to play for are accused of playing outside the spirit of the game!

There'd be something offensive (if not racist) about all of this if Foot were not deeply immersed in Italian culture and thereby also able to find and express the joy and spirit at calcio 's heart.

This immersion produces the book's one narrative flaw – and it's a big one. The English critic David Goldblatt argues that Foot is too compromised to say what he really thinks about Italy and calcio. So Goldblatt says it for him: ‘Italy and Italian football are a disgrace', a corrupt and corrupting world unable to mend its fractured history or escape its legacy of fascism.

I suspect Foot agrees. It's hard to finish this book without feeling profoundly depressed about the possibility of Italy and calcio emerging from its corruption in the near future. I don't want to agree with Foot – because national stereotypes are usually wrongheaded – but his story is presented with such weight and passion that it's hard not to.

If there's a significant thread to be drawn from this collection of books it is this: football, the World Cup and nationalism are inextricably entwined. World Cup victories are always significant events in a nation's history – the exception might be Brazil, which seems to take such things in its stride. The failures of teams like Hungary and Holland to win the Cup when they seemed the team most likely have also left their mark on ideas of their respective national characters.

A common idea seems that national sentiment and confidence can only form fully on the back of a nation's World Cup exploits – a notion that raises questions about Australian nationalisms, all of which have formed in the absence of major success in the world game. If we have (as a nation) defined ourselves on the sporting field it has been in an anti- or post-colonial mode, against England and other Commonwealth countries. We have never been in a position to succeed in a genuinely popular and global sport.

But we have glimpsed a possible future with the recent successes of the Socceroos. And we have been given intimations of a previously unseen kind of multicultural nationalism at recent World Cup qualifiers. It is intriguing to think on the kind of effect Australian success at the World Cup (if it ever comes) will have on ideas of who we think we are and our place in the world.

Reviewed by Ian Syson

This review first appeared in the Age

Saturday 29 April 2006

The Goal is Going Global

Goal!, a movie released without much fanfare into our cinemas very recently, could play an important part in a renewed imperial campaign being fought on our shores. The global might and vast resources of FIFA (the world football governing body) are being deployed against some powerful and resilient defences – mainly set up by the AFL but with the support of the two rugby codes, all of which are involved in their own programs of geographic expansion.

One of the primary ideological defences of these codes has been the cultural denigration of football (or soccer as it is called in all countries where it is not the dominant sport). The late Johnny Warren called it the ‘Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters' mentality: the idea that the game is not one for real men – real anglo-celtic men, that is.

FIFA has the economic muscle to wage and win a long war but to get the war over more quickly it needs to win ideological battles first. This is where Goal! comes in.



Supported and sanctioned by FIFA, Goal! is the story of the rise and rise of a football-loving Mexican boy, Santiago Munez into the English Premier League. It puts the kind of passion we saw in November when Australia qualified for the World Cup into a fictional but no less affective form.

For all its Hollywood schmaltz and contrivance, Goal! is riveting – a compelling and magical story of a boy who refuses to give up his dream despite hurdle after hurdle in his way. The ending has all the audience on the edge of their seats – much like the ending of a tense football match. When Santiago scores the goal that puts Newcastle United into Europe, the on-screen (and off-screen) outpouring of emotion is, again, familiar to any football supporter.

Beneath the slick storyline is a kind of realism not usually captured in sports movies. The bleak and spectacular Northumberland coast, the driving rain and bitter cold of a winter in north east England, the beautiful rhythms and sounds of Geordie dialect and the mad banter of football supporters – not to mention the black pudding – produce a texture that owes as much to the documentary realism of Ken Loach as it does to the fantasy of Hollywood. Unlike a lot of sports movies, the crowd scenes are convincing and the way the actors have been spliced into footage of actual games is seamless and convincing. The cameo performances of stars of the game (Raul, Zidane, Beckham) are appropriately understated and charming.

The four young boys who accompanied me walked out of the cinema uplifted and with stars in their eyes.



But Goal! is more than a very entertaining movie. It is also a piece of FIFA propaganda that is meant to sway youngsters and their parents to the world game.

Significantly, for Australian audiences, Goal! does some subtle ideological work. Santiago's exuberant skills and selfish play are modified for the (supposedly) more physically demanding English game. The Latino temperament makes way for English graft and physical aggression. At one point the Newcastle coach says to Santiago, “Maybe you don't have the pace and stamina for the English game.” Santiago proves in the end that he is able to ‘anglicise' himself.

Make no mistake, this movie is about the pointy end of sport capitalism and at stake are the hearts and minds and wallets of football supporters of all codes in this country and around the world.

While the conquest of Australia is important to the world game, there are two far more important markets that have been in FIFA's sights over the past two decades: China and the USA. China seems smoothly to be taking to the world game whereas the USA is proving to be a much more difficult citadel to capture.

Soccerphobia is one of the USA's most important defence mechanisms for its domestic sport. In How Soccer Explains the World , American journalist Franklin Foer argues that many of the louder voices in American public culture hate football with a vengeance. It's a hatred that crosses political lines and the game is seen as one for wimps, girls, Latinos and middle-class ‘soccer moms' afraid to let their boys play ‘manly' games. There's a strong correlation here with the old-fashioned Australian attitudes towards the game.

But the USA goes even further in its fear and loathing. Despite the fact that association football is organised worldwide on far more competitive and capitalistic bases than is the draft-ridden and salary-capped NFL, the game is sometimes derided in the USA as politically correct, liberal or even socialistic. To Foer, the confused rhetoric of right-wing shock jocks suggests that the American fear of soccer is ultimately a fear of globalisation. And this is where Goal! makes its most searching observations of contemporary USA.



In the opening scene, Santiago and his family are planning to enter the US illegally, under the cover of night. Santiago is woken and told by his father to hurry and get his things together. One of these things is his most precious possession, a football. As the family are hurrying through a gap in the border fence, pursued by border guards, Santiago drops the ball. When he stops to consider returning to get it his father Hernan stops him, urging him to hurry “leave that stupid ball” behind.

Symbolically, football has been shut out at an American border that has nonetheless allowed the politically loathed but economically necessary illegal Mexican immigrants to pass through.

The action then jumps ahead ten years with the Munez family settled in Los Angeles. Santiago and Hernan are working as gardeners for rich clients.

Despite having lost his precious ball, Santiago's passion for the game has been retained and strengthened and he stars in minor local competitions. His games are played on dustbowls where no grass has taken root or on fields marked out on a still-evident grid iron. The message is that the game is an alien one. Like Santiago, football cannot get a Green Card.

This seems to be Santiago's lot until he is spotted by a visiting talent scout, Glen Foy – one-time player with Newcastle United. Foy contrives to get Santiago a trial with Newcastle – as long as he can pay his own way over – bringing Santiago into conflict with his father, who believes that the idea is utter foolishness. To Hernan there are two types of people in the world: those who own the big houses and those who do their gardening or wash their cars. It represents a class divide that is impossible to cross. The American Dream does not apply to the section of the American population among which the Munez family lives.

Despite Hernan's objections, and with his grandmother Mercedes' covert financial aid, Santiago makes his way to Newcastle to begin his struggle to make it in the top flight of English football.

While this section is only the first third of Goal!, it's the part where the movie's politics are laid bare. Its makers clearly see the USA as a class-ridden and culturally protectionist society. The one delicious and central irony in all of this is that in order to achieve what was once thought of as the American Dream, Santiago needs to leave America and go to the banks of the once-decrepit Tyne at the heart of post-industrial working class Britain to achieve his goal.

As FIFA propaganda this movie has done a lot of work already in Australia and elsewhere. And it will keep on doing so.

More significant than this, it may well be signalling the beginning of the end of football's attempt to woo the USA to its cause. Goal! didn't need to be set in LA. It would have worked equally well had Foy found Santiago playing in any part of Central America. The only purpose of setting it in America seems to have been to reject that country as a place where the world game can take root and flourish. This could mean one of two things: FIFA has given up on favouring the USA; or it has seen the beginnings of the demise of the American empire. Perhaps both.

When an organisation as large and as powerful as FIFA starts making oblique observations such as these we can only sit up and take note. They give us pause to contemplate the future of the American empire and its role in global politics.



Goal! is the first in a trilogy. Perhaps the next two instalments will clarify the political and economic programs FIFA is implementing. Clearer is the impact Australia's qualification for the World Cup has had on the screenplay of the third movie. The movie's Australian producer, Matt Barrelle has changed the script to feature the Australian team and local fans.

It remains to be seen what the lasting impact of this trilogy will be on the stocks of association football in Australia. Initially it will be no surprise if it attracts large attendances in Australian cinemas because the word of mouth will be strong. And in this World Cup year word will travel easily.

Had a movie like Goal! come to our shores ten years ago, it would have had a brief success only to be forgotten within months. Periodic spikes of mass interest is the story of Australian football in the past few decades in this country. Twice, more than 80,000 have turned up to support the Socceroos at the MCG. Full houses of more than 40,000 have seen National Soccer League grand finals at Lang Park in Brisbane and Subiaco Oval in Perth. At each point, after a brief surge of interest, ‘soccer' was returned by the media to its ‘rightful' place on the edge of the sporting map.

Recently things seem to have changed – though a history of false dawns for Australian football keeps those of us who care prepared for the worst.

Three letters say it all: WCQ. One mad night in November, Australia achieved a victory for which very few dared to hope. At Telstra Stadium in Sydney, we qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 32 years. It was a moment of intense climax and celebration. It revealed the passion of the world game to a gobsmacked Australia, a good part of which was trying to come to terms with the sheer ratings fact that this was much bigger than most AFL grand finals of recent years.

Alongside this, the rejuvenated national club competition, the A League has seen outstanding crowd averages. This weekend's grand final between Sydney United and the Central Coast Mariners will fill the 43,000 seat Aussie Stadium in Sydney. At the end of March Australia will play European champions, Greece at a more than likely packed MCG before trotting off to compete in the world's biggest sporting event, the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The gaps between the spikes seem to be shortening.

The world game and its existence here are now firmly planted in the minds of a lot of Australians who might previously have seen it a foreign game – despite its 120-year history in this country. The game still has its many detractors. But even they have glimpsed the passion.

This is why I think Goal! has the capacity to help change the sporting landscape in this country permanently. If for no other reason than it's hard to walk out of this movie believing that football is a game only for sheilas, wogs and poofters. It will take more than this movie to convert the true disbelievers but it will help to soften even the hardest anti-soccer heart.

First published in the Age, April 29 2006