By grazorblade - 7 Oct 2024 6:19 PM
Found this old report
https://pfa.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Attachment-1-in-text-FORTHEFANS.pdf
I wasn't a football supporter at the time (although I played as a kid, and tried to catch to 1 minute of highlights on the news I had no other access), so I missed all of this. Would be curious to hear more about it from those who lived through this era. But a few things stuck out to me
1) only 18% listed the reason for not being an nsl fan as participation being restricted to ethnics
2) they aimed to recruit 50 aussies abroad. This implies there were much more than 50 aussies abroad worth recruiting. When doing analysis of previous generations of youth development it can be hard to track how many players were in europe during our golden generation. Most of the time, if you are good enough to play in europe you are good enough to play for the roos. There are only a few players before or after that never played for australia after getting more than a couple of dozen games in any decent league in europe
3) It is interesting that between this and the bradford report, the ideological foundations for the a league were being made over a period of a decade
4) The apl recommendation of multiple teams in sydney and melbourne eventually got followed and the bradford reports recommendation that we have a 2nd tier to make p&r possible might get followed. I wonder why the a league started with the 1 team per town model, no underage teams, no path forward for discarded teams and at least 20 years before we get a nst.
5) In the sbs documentary on Johnny Warren they kind of credit him a lot for the start of the a league. Is this nonsense or would he have been happy with the path we took? Where was he ideologically on the apl report and the bradford report?
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By grazorblade - 8 Oct 2024 5:19 PM
+x+x+xJohnny was always against the scapegoating/demonisation of the ethnic clubs’ existence as pretext for wanting broadbased reform, so he definitely wouldn’t have been cool w/the “old sokkah/new football” dichotomy as a dogwhistle for this sort of thing. That being said, like Les Murray, he would’ve nonetheless been resigned to the rhetorical inevitability of it anyway. Yeah that sounds reasonable. Its not the first time ive seen the a league presented as a fulfilment of johnny warrens mission. Seems a bit disrespectul. From what little ive seen in his own words, I think he would have had a nuanced take, celebrating the crowds, not talking down the standard, but not too thrilled about the scapegoating, throwing away our history etc History is often written by the victors Grazor.... Hopefully the "sins of the past" are erased soon enough.
Curious if anyone has asked warren's family what he would have thought
Any rumours about the fa announcement?
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