Football Australia CEO James Johnson has hit back at radio host Ray Hadley after a debate earlier in the week about supposed ethnic tensions in Australian football.

Following a fan brawl on Sunday during an NPL match between Rockdale and Sydney United, Hadley suggested the fight was sparked by the different racial backgrounds of the clubs.

Johnson was quick to reject those claims at the time and has once again looked to stress the incident wasn't caused by ethnicity but rather poor behaviour from select individuals.

"Earlier this week I had a debate with Ray Hadley about that. His view was the incident last Sunday was racially motivated and or related to ethnicity, that because the NCIP had been repealed that this was the cause of the incident. We just don’t agree with that," Johnson told 2CC on Friday.

"Our point was rather about behaviour and in our view it is the behaviour that is the problem, not the NCIP, not the crowd history of football clubs in Australia, not the names of the clubs, it is the behaviour of the people implicated. In our game we accept all people because we are inclusive but we do not accept all behaviours.

"Ray looks at this as a problem with ethnic tension, we look at it as a problem with unacceptable behaviour.

"I think we need to prosecute these types of matters based on facts and not emotion or misinformation. And the facts are you’ve got the NSW Police that have ruled that there are no racial or ethnic motivations in regards to the violence.

"Rockdale, the club, it does have Macedonian roots, but it has many Australians that share different heritages both in its senior team, youth teams and grassroots teams. And importantly, there are no ethnic tensions between Macedonia and Croatia, these are facts.

"On this occasion it is right to separate race and ethnicity from behaviour and we must now take decisive and strong action based on those behaviours. We must weed out those unacceptable behaviours and people, not weed out our history and multicultural nature of our sport."

Johnson believes Hadley's attempt to blame ethnicity came down to differing perspectives which could explain why someone like the radio host might not like the round ball game.

"I think it goes deeper than football and this is purely my view, but what we’re really talking about in my view is the Australian identity," Johnson said.

"This is where I think we have a fundamental difference of some people’s views and that’s why someone like Ray doesn’t like our code.

"My point is Australia has a proud history and in 2021 what makes me feel good about being Australian is that we are very multicultural. And this is what is great about our code is we are very multicultural as well."