Soccer Fan Blog

7:1 win vs Adelaide last night. Oh yes oh yes oh yes. Ra ra ra. We actually are the best in the World and everyone else is, slowly but surely, learning to live with it.

The question being repeated everywhere is, how come only eleven and a half thousand people saw one of the greatest football spectacles we might expect to see in club football?

First a brief recap. Suncorp was always an ambitious stadium for the Roar, and even at the height in the first and second season crowds above 20,000 were rare. With the ‘Suncorp curse’ (remember that?) which seemed to mean that it was impossible for the Roar to score at home even when they were winning away, along with pretty average and/or inconsistent form, crowds trended downward over the first few seasons.

Then, a couple of years ago some accountant demonstrated to a highly astute Roar Board (now all replaced thankfully) that the budget would all add up if they would just radically increase ticket prices, so they did. A few months later they reversed this decision and made the prices cheaper than ever, but it was too late. The crowds had truly plummeted and they never recovered.
In my mind the problem wasn’t merely ticket prices. Soccer is a world game and a local game and there is an enormous amount of it available for spectators to enjoy either on TV or live. Most of the live stuff is free or about $5, and these are the leagues that thousands in Brisbane actually play in every week. The very best stuff (European Champion’s League) is on free to air TV. The A-League was, and still largely is, a mediocre product. Trying to charge top dollar for it was simply ignoring all of this market environment.

But the price is about right now at Suncorp, and it’s especially cheap for under 16s which is also very smart. And the other thing that has changed is that there is now a top-shelf product on show. I’m not going to do any justice here to Roar’s extraordinary football. Every football commentator in the country is writing about that anyway. The point is that even connoisseurs would pay good money to see this football, and indeed fans of other teams, if comments here and there are to be believed, are prepared to travel to see Brisbane play.
So now we have an extremely good product at a very reasonable price. The product can speak for itself if the marketers can get people’s bottoms there in the first place.
Now I have been a vicious critic of this club in the past and no doubt will be again in the future, so I think I’m obliged to also contribute a constructive thought from time to time, and here it is. It’s simple, and I think it would work over time. The Roar have not been idle in promotion and their efforts should be congratulated so far in my view. The issue might be focus.
Target local clubs, as you have been in a way, but one at a time. Start with clubs based close to Suncorp Stadium and work outwards. When you target the Club – say, Annerley Football Club where Jacob used to play – do the afternoon with the club thing, with a bit of a clinic for the kids (members and players of the club only! Must make them feel special), signings and giving away some merchandise – the usual stuff. But maybe even do two events with the one club between home games.

Give the club 100 tickets, half of which are 15 and unders only. Give them an option for more tickets if they have enough demand for them. The seats are in a block, and the more you give away the better. If the Club gets into an opportunistic frenzy and invites friends, relatives, neighbours, milkmen and wandering vagrants and hence want 1000 tickets, where they would all sit in a block, good. If you’ve got the budget for it, provide them with busses as well. You want to make sure they come.
It sounds generous, but it’s just one football club at a time, with home games (approximately 2 weeks) as the framework period. The objective is to introduce the game not to an individual but to a community. Communities of support sustain themselves.
All of this might only work if the premise is true that the football speaks for itself. At this juncture of the Roar’s history, I am supremely confident that it does.

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I might have to be writing a bit this season. Things are exciting at the Roar and I am full of material. If anything I’ve been suffering the writer’s block of someone with far too much to say. So fuck it, I’ll start with a rave. Anything to get the gripes with FIFA (which I still have) from the top of the page and some news of this brilliant team filling the space.

How good can it get for a Brisbane Roar fan? I’ll briefly outline how good it is.

1. We have the best coach in Australia. I read around and come across this sentiment often, along with frequent speculations that he will be Australia’s next coach. Behind The Roar is a good short documentary on ‘the Ange Revolution’. I’ll elaborate on why, in my view, Ange is a rare coach, in further blogs.2. Our team has been undefeated for longer than Manchester United’s longest undefeated run (29). Meanwhile the general chatter is that Brisbane is virtually unbeatable and the earnest conversation is “How do you beat them?” I guess I’ll give my views on that by and by as well.3. Our team is enthralling to watch, and this can be confirmed by the dozens of comments I’ve read from people from other teams, as well as the praise of every commentator in the country, but of course I mostly confirm it for myself when I see for myself. I read a Melbourne man say that he didn’t follow the Victory because he thinks the A-League is pretty crap (it has been), but he is going to fly to Brisbane for their games. People travelling a long way to see very high quality soccer is not new. I can see why keen soccer fans in Australia would.4. Our team is good because of Ange’s plan and training, not because we are wealthy. This strikes at one of the great myths, or at least distortions, in World football, that the reason great teams are great is because they have great players. The Roar have no expensive marque player at this time and have won most of the games with a team well under the salary cap. It is a team.5. We have hit the new season in a form looking like where we left off last season. Ange post-match only ever speaks of how the team can improve. He’s serious. They can improve and with sustained determination and training, they will. It actually still looks uphill, if that is possible.6. With Point 5. in mind, we will compete in the Asian Champions League at the end of the season. One of the stupid things about the ACL qualifying is that the A-League winners from the season before qualify. Too often Australian teams have gone into the ACL having lost their players and their form from one year earlier. Brisbane has the opportunity, and it appears the capacity, to head into the ACL very strongly. Playing in it is exciting enough in itself, and that will happen even if for some unforseen reason Brisbane bombs out mid-season.7. Brisbane players are not stars, but they are cool. Ange himself is clearly an intellectual, but Broich has a very cool doco made about him (can’t wait) where he is revealed as a maverick philosopher (Part 1 is linked, but you’ll find part four of the trailer, which has the Roar bits, including a bit of interview with Ange), and Issey is an Artist. But in general, there’s not a lot of machismo in the team, even less without Matty. Our star of game one, Mitch Nichols (who was only tentatively a footballer when Ange got hold of him, incidentally), looks like some kind of sweet choir boy. They’re all lovable.8. In the soccer blogosphere, with its sites and blogs and hundreds of amateur commenters, something that is historic has, I think, occurred. Nobody, not even the most crusty, hard-core, trollish fans of the other teams, say that Brisbane plays badly or that Ange should be sacked. Anyone familiar with football fan sites will know how ludicrous a claim that this is. It’s true.9. We just got a billionaire owner. God knows I’ll probably be writing a bit about Aga Bakrie, but meanwhile the financial woes of the club are over and, well, we can dream! The guy, who owns an Indonesian Club and one in Belgium or something, wants the Roar to go to the top of Asia, and why wouldn’t he? I don’t know what his source is but Michael Flynn over at 442 quoted the new chairman as saying, “I think that if we could have our own stadium in ten years time that would be fantastic.” What? And Ange mentioned a clubhouse, and training facilites. A youth academy?
Good people, that is not all. All of that is merely context for the thing that has happened to the Roar which really is, for this fan, deeply satisfying:10. The kit, for the first time in The Roar’s history, looks cool. It really does.

Go Lads. And for fuck’s sake Brisbane, this sort of moment in a sporting team only comes once. Let’s fill that fucking stadium.

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This blog is at heart about my love affair with soccer, an affair that is unwavering after five or six years. From very early on I became aware of the corruption that has been in our game and that is in our game at a high level. I was more properly informed about it after reading Andrew Jennings’ book, Foul! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals. I wrote a review of the book in late 2006.
Now I have a political background of sorts and things like democracy and accountability are important to me as I am convinced that they are important to civilisation on Earth. So the corruption has always bothered me. At the same time I could see the reality that football people, whilst made up of people who may or may not be politically inclined, are often being football people precisely to escape from realities like politics.
The narrative that got thrown around about the corruption, which was and is pretty much universally acknowledged, was that this was part of the meaning of “football is life.” The half-joke that I’ve heard on many occasions is that society is corrupt, and soccer merely reflects as it reflects everything else.
Well it’s not true. There is corruption in society but in decent societies people do at least get busted down when it becomes patently obvious to every single observer.
If you are lost and don’t know about current goings on in FIFA, David Hills at the Observer gives a good summary.
In India, apparently (ok, Twitter told me) the lead up to the FIFA congress where Sepp Blatter was (cough) re-elected was compared with the recent Arab uprisings. If so we only got up to the point where the leader, under siege from people screaming “Go!”, takes the podium and announces that he is going to reform the system, like he’s announced a squillion times before.
We have much less connect, us soccer fans, with our government than the Egyptian people had with Muburak. They could refuse to move and say, “No, we mean it. Go!” We can’t.
Before I go on, there are reasons beyond mere morality that corruption – meaning graft and nepotism mostly- is bad. It leads to inefficient decision making. It has been well demonstrated that fighting corruption improves governance and economic growth, and doing so remains a major concern in many parts of the world.
I don’t want to sound naive here. Corruption happens wherever there is power and money and we should never forget it – it’s a basic insight behind all civic vigilance. But in developed economies people get busted, there are laws in place, accountability standards and penalties that people realistically fear. And in the end, overall, there is lower levels of corruption, which means better decisions are made.
So apart from common decency, the reason corruption in soccer is bad is that it will lead to less development and improvement of football. It’s easy to miss because FIFA is very rich, but it’s no less true. And we’re talking about the world. There’s a lot to do.
Damn it I’m rambling, but I just referred to something about Sepp Blatter that I have always liked, and even believed in: his rhetoric about football being used as a force for good in the world. He has hidden his contempt and rottenness behind this rhetoric for a long time. For me the thought of cleaning up FIFA and making it a modern, fully accountable institution of professionals rather than a “family” (Blatter’s constant term), induces hope in the truth of the rhetoric. It seems to me that the rhetoric (and maybe Blatter is absolutely sincere in it as such) could not work so well as a screen to being a brazen crook if it did not have some truth in it, or at least be credible enough to be seen to have some truth in it by a very many of people.
Anyway here we are. The President is re-elected. The world media, many politicians and every football fan in the world knows, and is saying openly, that the man has no clothes on. But, as the greatest American poet wrote, “Now’s not the time for your tears.”
When almost every delegate voted against the English FA’s motion that the farcical election be postponed, including Australia’s Ben Buckley, and then all mindlessly voted for Blatter, after listening to a series of old tin-pot crooks denounce England’s (uncontroversially principled given that there was evidence pending against half the delegates) stance as based on lies and self-interest, and then applauding Blatter’s speech, that is when we should weep. For it demonstrates that the rot in FIFA after all these years permeates (almost) every federation. Yes, we must face the bleeding obvious fact that Ben Buckley and Frank Lowy, who each spend a good portion of every public statement congratulating the wonderful work of the other even while the A-League veers toward hell, are of the same culture, at least complicit and at worst up to their ears in it.
There are good reasons why FIFA has always insisted upon a separation of a nation’s government and its football federation, and there are cynical reasons as well.
And let’s go back to that bid Australia made for the 2022 World Cup. I can only speak for myself but I can also be honest, and provocatively I’m going to use the pluralised first person.
We were excited all right. We were into it! And even though we’re a long way away from the World, are in a difficult time zone, and are a fair to middling soccer country, we thought we had a chance. Why did we think we had a chance? Because we had Frank Lowy, multi-billionaire, up front for us. Did we have confidence in Frank because of the vast experience and people skills that he undoubtedly has? No. If the position was about technical ability to do the task, or charisma, or both, there would be many better. Was it because he was rich? Partly, but we know all the countries have money, and we also knew he wouldn’t be using his money. I’ll tell you why we believed in Frank Lowy, and it’s the same reason he can’t breathe a word about any of it now.
We believed in Frank Lowy because we had no doubt whatsoever that the process was a corrupt one of bribes and favour swapping and that Lowy could play that game. We thought we had a chance at getting a World Cup because we thought we had a player who could be as corrupt as the best of them.
And we were wrong. We were wrong morally, mostly, but it was very poor judgement as well. We should not have bid for it knowing that it was a corrupt game. We should have saved our 46 million dollars.
That’s my mea culpa as a fan of the game. I was an enthusiastic Like-er of the Support Australia’s World Cup bid’s Facebook page, and I shouldn’t have been there. I was wrong, because I did know that FIFA in general, and specifically the World Cup decision, was utterly corrupt, and that graft and favour was the only way we could win.
Mind you, even in retrospect it remains unbelievable that Qatar would get it.*
Anyway, what in hell is a concerned fan to do? We have no vote in any practical way, obviously.
The voice demanding change is very loud. High profile media are well and truly on to it (this Economist article is a good example). There is a lot of noise on the networks. ‘@changeFIFA’ is good, on Twitter (‘Change FIFA on Facebook – this will link you with many good sources). There are politicians speaking out in England and Europe, Maradona has called FIFA corrupt dinosaurs, the Swiss Parliament is trying to figure out how to impose some law upon their FIFA inhabitants. It’s actually a kind of marvel that Blatter and FIFA can stay among the thickets of the law while the whole planet clamours ‘Foul!’
For the fans there is not much we can do, and that is enormously frustrating. There are some small things we can do though, which will be powerful if numbers come forth, and might indeed be decisive. Much easier than camping out on the streets of Cairo.
Several of FIFA’s sponsors have already made disapproving noises about FIFA and there is a move (‘@FIFA_Boycott’ on Twitter, ‘Demand Change: Boycott FIFA’s Sponsors’ on Facebook) to boycott FIFA’s major sponsors. My own take (tweet, bumper sticker, whatever) on this idea is to rather than the cry “Boycott McDonalds, Adidas and Coke”…
Don’t even mention the four letter ‘C’ word. Drink Pepsi until Blatter is out.The burgers are better at Hungry Jacks until Blatter is out.Take control with Nike until Blatter is out.
I just think that would hurt more.
But furthermore, whilst we cannot boycott games (sorry, the personal cost is too great), we can boycott merchandise. Going to an official game, in full knowledge that our game’s government is utterly illegitimate, is in part a sombre thing to do after all. So from now on I am wearing only black to games until Blatter is out. It is a small statement, but I’m making it.
* Not that that’s the point, and although I think Australia would do a great job, by a fair judgement of the selection criteria, the USA should have gotten the 2022 World Cup. My money is on them getting it still, though I can’t foresee why. It’s just so far away, there are so many random factors and difficulties, and the current actors will be dead or nearly so. It will be in the USA. Only time will tell if I am right or wrong there.

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The last time I wrote about the A-League or the Brisbane Roar was April last year. The short of what I had to say then was, “the Brisbane Roar cannot repeat its original seduction of this consumer. This time they’re going to have to realise a product that is worth it for me to seek out.”

They have done it. Not only has the A-League improved in that short space of time, but the improvement has been led by my own home team, Brisbane Roar. I’m not exagerating and it’s far from my observation alone. This season the Roar are playing a quality of soccer that is worth paying concert prices for, and that is not easy to do. In response several other teams started getting serious about high quality play, namely Central Coast, Gold Coast and Adelaide.

It takes time and patience to build to this level. You actually have to be prepared to lose a bit as you learn a system, and Ange did that last season (stating his intent clearly, but we had to wait and see to believe he was serious). And now we can say not only that The Roar are 27 games undefeated, but that they have an opposition in the Central Coast for the Grand Final who have shown that they can match it.

The Grand Final is anyone’s game.

I’ve been to five or six games this season, including the last two, and I can say that the atmosphere has improved markedly too. The fans’ singing is getting brilliant, and Suncorp even with 21,000 (v Gold Coast) or 25,000 (Central Coast semi-final) produces full elation when the home side scores. I’ve paid $28 to go to these games and it has easily been worth it.

Times are tough though and with the exciting prospect of a really full house for the Grand Final, I was frankly pissed off with the FFA for doubling the price. They didn’t in a way, because it’s only $3 more than the Grand Final in Melbourne last year, and as others point out it is cheaper than the finals of other codes.

But for the Brisbane fan the price had doubled. To me that was a big mistake because it would dampen demand just when we had a shot of filling the 53,000 seat house. “Why not go for the full house?” I screamed on Facebook. It’s tough times in Brisbane. A number of friends backed the impression up saying they would not go or were considering not going due to the price.

I may have been right or wrong about my take on the commercial judgement, and nobody can be blamed for not having a spare recreational $56 in these times. But now I ask a seperate question. Is it worth it? Is the football being offered for the A-League Grand Final, in itself, worth $56 a ticket (that’s the cheap seats)?

Yes it is. No worries. I truly hope that the price does not keep the people away because anyone who goes will witness a true contest of really good teams. The two best teams to have ever graced the League, I would say, and I know many ‘experts’ agree with me.

In my anger at the price, and feeling the pain in my pocketbook, I considered not going. I really did. But how absurd.

I’ve followed this team for five seasons. I’ve sometimes despise the Board and the FFA but I love the team, know their names and they’ve been through near misses and tough times. They deserve this. Ange deserves this for taking the time and effort (and study) to be a proper coach. Matty McKay, Brisbane boy and Captain, deserves this after sticking with the team for six years, from the very beginning. Brisbane deserves this because it is the finest city in the world and keeps producing good soccer players (Fozzie asks if there is something in the water).

Last I heard 30,000 tickets have been pre-sold. It looks like I may have been wrong. If Suncorp comes close to selling out, I was totally wrong and the FFA made a wise business decision.

Sunday 13th March, 4pm. Brisbane Roar v Central Coast Mariners. My advice is be there.

Go the Roar. Go Brisbane. Go Soccer.

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I’ve spent the last several days mostly at home vigorously failing to write down any of my many thoughts. South Africa is unfinished business for me. I know that much. My blogging was not up to my intentions of course, but stands as a sort of series of photographs, incomplete and some blurry, but nevertheless captured memories. But I don’t think I’ve finished.

I think a lot about South Africa, and what it has done. There is rightly an impression that South Africa must be a bit backward politically, that finally in 1994 it shrugged off institutional racism. But as a microcosm of the World it seems to me that it is the first not the last.

Because South Africa is a microcosm of the world, and a world which is globalising faster than everyone is comfortable with. South Africa contains both the First World and the Developing World, but in 1994 the borders were removed. Maybe we should keep a careful eye on it. Maybe we should study Mandela’s politics carefully. It might be the best model we have to pull down the global apartheid which is holding back millions of human opportunities in every direction.

Australia may feel blessed to be an island, and to be able to pretend that we can seal ourselves off from the problems of the world around us with our own version of barbed wire, but this world is becoming one very rapidly, and ultimately I fear the barbed wire is going to hold us back.

Don’t talk to South Africa, which shares a very permeable border with Zimbabwe, about refugees. Actually, if you’re Australian you better keep your mouth shut about that topic pretty much wherever you go.

This current Australian election reveals to us more starkly than ever the inadequacy of federal government when it comes to the real issues of our day – population, poverty, climate change, terrorism, sustainability. These problems, for both major parties, are things that can be kept out by border security and xenophobia. But they can’t. Addressing these things – and Australia still isn’t even big enough to spend the recommended 0.09% of GDP on foreign aid – is addressing Australia’s biggest problems. Educating and developing the World is the highest priority for Australia’s interests. Meanwhile any interplanetary visitor would be reporting back to its people that Earth practices apartheid and that the current Australian election is the western elite once again voting for it.

I refer to the fact that Pauline Hanson’s then-controversial views on refugees have now permeated both sides of parliament. For anyone who still feels strongly about this issue, the only political refuge, unfortunately, is the Greens.

“Build the fences higher,” is not going to work. At some stage in the medium future, the World is going to have to pull the fences down and let the people of the World live where it is good for them to live and get jobs where they can get jobs. If facing that sort of music horrifies us, we should think of the white South Africans, and not feel so self-righteous when we do so.

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