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collie dog
RIP Shelby 11-10-13
Joined: 07 Jun 2010
Location: Shelby Christmas dog
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| Post subject: Soccer's dirty little secret |  |
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By now people know that I love going with my family to Victory games. The A-League has tried to remove ethnic rivalries from the sport and make the place a more attractive venue for families with kids.
But since last Saturday night I have had to think seriously whether the soccer is a place I should take my kids. In The Age Michael Lynch writes about it. [Notice the subtle way he steals the word "football" using it only for soccer and refers to our great game as Aussie Rules. Sorry Lynch but our footy is football and you have no right to claim exclusive use of it for soccer!!!  ]
| Quote: | Football's fan culture is different to the longer established Australian codes, rugby league and union and Australian rules.
It is based on chanting and taunting and delivering insults - often quite witty - to away teams and players.
Football, like other sports, encourages families and wants to hook youngsters. But the reality is that few grounds here or overseas, are kindergartens - and parents taking really young kids need to realise that.
The wider problems arise when a small minority - and it is always a minority - want to take things further and "go to war" in what they imagine is a defence of the honour of their club.
Modelling themselves on the Ultras (Europe) and Barra Bravas (Latin America), these young men have the misplaced idea that causing a disturbance on "foreign turf" (an interstate city centre) somehow enhances their status and strikes a blow for their team.
The reality, of course, is that all they do is cause problems for their club and the game in general as they provide lurid footage and the chance for the media to use emotive language evoking a war zone to describe what is often a minor skirmish. |
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/sport/soccer/football-violence-a-trend-not-worth-following-but-active-fans-give-game-its-edge-20131231-3041v.html#ixzz2p6FPOY2A
Soccer's dirty little secret is this. Look at any game on FOX, but especially WSW games and you will see row upon row upon row of young men (their ethnicity is not relevant). I would say that at WSW home games the crowd is 95% male. For most other A-League clubs (like Victory) it is probably 85% male. All that testosterone has got to go somewhere. But I know from friends who have supported the Melbourne Knights in the past that women were told the soccer match was a no go zone for them.
Our footy on the other hand attracts men, women and children in roughly even numbers. The support of footy among women in our society is far higher than that for any other sport (bar netball).
Also I do not buy the argument that people thrown out of the footy equates to soccer violence. Most people thrown out of footy games are drunk and disorderly. Most of the soccer violence stems from highly inflamatory provocation of opposing fans, use of flares (the WSW fans let off at least half a dozen explosive flares that scared the hell out of my kids last Saturday night), and rival ethnic fights.
In short, the fact that soccer is still a masculine zone where women and children are at best tolerated leads to hooliganism that we simply do not see in Australian Football (yes, football!). Plus, there is zero ethnicity in footy.
I love soccer, but footy is my first love. But I know which place is safer for my kids and I know which game gives them more entertainment. Collingwood games!
WSW fans. Spot any women? I think not.
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Rain or hail, I wag my tail |
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King Malta 
RIP Flip
Joined: 24 Mar 2008
Location: Gettin' Wiggy
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'Steals' the word football? Whether you like it or not Collie Dog, Football was called Football a long time before Aussie Rules. You don't have to call it Football if you don't want, but it's hilarious watching people get their knickers in a knot over this, AFL does not have exclusive use of the word.
As for this whole article and this post, I have seen plenty of women and children when I go to the A-League and indeed when I watch WSW games on Television. Using the WSW travelling band of RBB fans as an example is crap to be honest, because you don't find a lot of families in any Active Area. Active Areas are for fans to stand, sing and make a lot of noise, that sort of area is normally not going to contain a lot of children due to that fact which makes the presence of families low. That being said, I see several families and quite a few women in the Yarraside when I attend Heart games, so your point doesn't ring true for me at all. Stand by the gates at your next game and watch the fans walk in, there are heaps of children and women, you'll just find most of them not sitting in the AA areas.
And do you have statistics to back up your claims of the reasoning behind ejections at AFL as compared to the A-League? You want to know how many fights I've seen at the AFL? Plenty, they just don't get any coverage from the media. There are unruly dickheads at every sporting event, unfortunately there's still too many people in society who just like to cause trouble for no reason at all.
It's not fair to talk down Football due to the behavior of a minority. There is practically never crowd trouble outside of matches involving Victory fans and WSW fans, in fact, most of the WSW crowd trouble is when they play the Victory. Seems to me there is a problem in certain fan-bases (WSW and Victory mainly) rather than the sport as a whole in this country.
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