The Socceroos love playing for Australia. Why doesn’t Australia love them back?
There’s never been a better time to get behind the Socceroos.
In June, they’ll play at their sixth consecutive World Cup, and a deep run into the knockout phase is eminently possible. Coach Tony Popovic has assembled a squad with more upside than perhaps any team Australia has sent to the game’s biggest stage: in Nestory Irankunda, Alessandro Circati, Mohamed Toure and Jordan Bos, there is the nucleus of a group that, over the next decade or so, could do some seriously special things.
So why does it feel like people aren’t that interested?
They will be, of course, when the World Cup is on. It’ll be the biggest thing since sliced bread – just like Qatar 2022, when the Socceroos produced their best-ever finish and huge crowds flocked to public squares to watch them at stupid o’clock.
But when the World Cup ended, people moved on. Nothing stuck.
That’s the nature of the public’s transactional relationship with this team: uber-passionate once every four years, and too casual in between.
We are, perhaps, so used to them competing at the World Cup that we take it for granted.
In 2006, when Socceroos qualified for the first time since 1974, 95,103 people turned up at the MCG to watch their “farewell” fixture against Greece. Sure, Melbourne has the world’s biggest Greek-speaking population outside of Greece, which helped fill out the stands. But the trend line here speaks for itself: 55,659 to wave the Socceroos off against New Zealand in 2010, 50,468 against South Africa in 2014, and then 25,392 against New Zealand in 2022. (There was no farewell game in 2018.)
On Friday night, just 23,798 fans watched them beat Cameroon. Unless you were there, you probably didn’t know it was even on.
There are many explanations for that poor turnout: the stormy weather in Sydney, Cameroon’s minimal pulling power, and the fact it had been less than a week since the Matildas played an AFC Asian Cup final at the same venue. Many football-going punters allocated their discretionary funds accordingly.
But the Socceroos play Curacao on Tuesday night – their last game on Aussie soil before the World Cup in the US – and it’s hard to imagine AAMI Park in Melbourne will be jam-packed for that, either.
Maybe it’s too early. Most farewell games were played immediately prior to the World Cup. This year, Popovic has put preparation first and organised a training camp in Spain from mid-May. The trade-off is that nobody catches World Cup fever three months out.
We’re not here to allocate blame, but the one group who cannot be faulted is the players. They deserve better.
This current crop is the most likeable the Socceroos have had in many years. They all behave. They all have cracking stories to tell. They all look forward to each international break like it’s the highlight of their seasons, and always speak glowingly about their pride at playing for Australia. And they are diverse; no sporting team better reflects the multicultural make-up of this country.
When Australia won the co-hosting rights to the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, Football Australia spent a lot of time building the brand of the Matildas, both as a team and the individuals in it. That included a documentary on Disney+ which helped introduce newcomers to the players: who they were, what made them tick, and why what they were doing mattered – one part of a multi-faceted push that turned them into household names or further elevated the ones who already were, like Sam Kerr and Mary Fowler.
To be fair, FA had a head start. The rise of the Matildas was accelerated by having a home World Cup to look forward to, and was wrapped up in a broader social movement connected to women’s sport and equality – comparable in impact to the 2005 Socceroos’ drought-breaking qualification, which brought football into to the Australian mainstream for the first time. You can’t replicate those conditions.
The one thing today’s Socceroos don’t possess, which the Matildas have in spades, is star power – and it might be their biggest obstacle.
There’s no clear Kerr or Fowler equivalent in this squad – a world-class player at a big-name club – or even modern-day versions of Kewell, Viduka or Cahill who can appeal to the uninitiated. Not yet.
They’re all very good players, a handful of whom play regularly in Europe’s top-five leagues. But there are none in the Premier League right now, which has grown so enormous that the whole concept of Europe’s top-five leagues is perhaps outdated. To borrow a phrase from Paul Keating, unless you’re in the Premier League – or one of six or so continental giants – you’re camping out.
And if you wanted to get in early and follow, say, Irankunda at Watford, you’d first have to figure out what streaming service you need and then pay for it – on top of your other subscriptions, your FA+ membership, your match ticket and your new jersey.
Following their journeys requires effort. And in today’s attention economy, effort is the enemy.
There’s definitely more FA can do to promote the Socceroos. But even if they did everything right, nobody can turn potential into profile overnight. You can’t manufacture star power. It comes from playing at the biggest clubs, in the biggest leagues, in moments that cut through.
Rusted-on football fans will wait patiently until that happens. They’ve staked their emotional welfare on the assumption that it will.
For everyone else, the Socceroos will be what they are: a team Australia rediscovers in World Cup years, and forgets just as quickly.