Football or soccer is one of the most popular recreational sports in Australia. Although professionally the sport remains relatively less popular in Australia than the other codes of football in Australia, a domestic competition in the form of the A-League has been established and a national team competes in the Asian Football Confederation. The national governing body is Football Federation Australia (formerly Soccer Australia). The game is commonly known as soccer in Australian English, although official organisations have adopted "football" — a name also used by other codes of football — as their preferred name.
The game was probably first played in Australia by English immigrants during the 1860s, following the formation of the Football Association in London in 1863, and the circulation of its rules, from that time onwards. However, the first recorded club was Wanderers, founded by a school teacher named John Walter Fletcher at Parramatta in 1880. The first game known to have occurred in Australia under FA rules took place the same year, when Wanderers played the Kings School rugby football team at Parramatta Common on 14 August. However the oldest existing club is Balgownie Rangers, founded in 1883, which still competes in the Illawarra regional league.
The early governing bodies of the sport in Australia had to distinguish themselves from Australian rules football and rugby football, rival sports which had became very popular in the various Australian colonies during the 1860s and 1870s. The New South Wales (NSW) association was founded by Fletcher in 1882 as the English Football Association (later to become the Southern British Football Association); NSW and the neighbouring Colony of Victoria played each other for the first time in 1883. A Victorian association, the Anglo-Australian Football Association was founded in 1884; the Queensland British Football Association followed in 1889; the Western Australian British Football Association in 1896 (renamed the Western Australian Soccer Football Association in September 1925); the South Australian British Football Association in 1902; and a Tasmanian association in about 1910-1912. The first Australia-wide body was the Commonwealth Football Association, formed in 1912, although this folded two years later.
While native-born Australians overwhelmingly played and watched Australian rules football or rugby football of either code, football was highly popular with the various British and Southern European immigrant communities, all of which expanded rapidly during the 1950s and 1960s: the English, Scottish, Greek, Italian, Macedonians and Croatian communities gave rise to most of the largest clubs. At the time, the game served as a bonding force within those ethnic communities, and as a point of identity amongst them and the wider Australian community. A similarly increasing number of British migrants also retained an interest in the sport. Johnny Warren, who was a member of the national team at their first World Cup appearance, in 1974, entitled his memoir Sheilas, Wogs, and Poofters, giving an indication of how the wider Australian community viewed "wogball" in the 1970s.
Both domestic and international football are shown on free to air and pay television in Australia and also can be heard on local radio stations.
Following a A$120million, seven year deal deal between the FFA and Fox Sports, Fox Sports will have exclusive rights from 2007 to all Socceroos home internationals, all A-League and Asian Cup fixtures, World Cup qualifiers through the AFC, and all AFC Champions League matches.
>Representing the most significant TV rights agreement for football in Australia, it is still relatively small compared to the larger codes. A five-year deal to telecast AFL between 2007 and 2011 was signed recently for $780 million.
SBS shows live UEFA Champions League games and retains the Australian broadcast rights to the 2010 FIFA World Cup and 2014 FIFA World Cup finals. Pay Television stations (Fox Sports, ESPN and Setanta) also show English, Scottish, German and Dutch leagues.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Football (soccer) in Australia".
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