Football

The show goes on for football in Australia but at what cost? | Samantha Lewis


“How can we keep the sport alive?”

This question, asked by FFA CEO James Johnson at a press conference on Monday morning, is one that Australian football has been asking itself a lot lately. From falling crowd figures to indifferent club owners, a bushfire crisis, a gutted sports media and now a global pandemic, the Australian game finds itself forced – like a reluctant side-kick into whose nervous hands the pliers have been thrust – to make some life-or-death decisions as the clock ticks agonisingly downward.

Some decisions have been made, though; some wires have been snipped. At the professional level, in accordance with questionable government guidelines, football has retreated into the safety of sanitised stadiums. While the W-League semi-finals and round 23 of the A-League were played openly, albeit in front of anxious and scattered crowds, the women’s grand final and the men’s season will continue behind closed doors.

Elsewhere, state and grassroots competitions will go ahead with “greater precautions” in regard to hygiene and social distancing: no sharing of water bottles, no unnecessary spectators, no shaking of hands or pre-match huddles. But the irony of encouraging social distancing in a close-contact sport – seen in players light-heartedly forgoing handshakes only to grab at each other’s shirts and shoulders minutes later – is difficult to ignore.

These decisions were made, according to Johnson, from “the starting point [of] the health and well-being of our community, of our participants […] We also want to be a good citizen to the broader public and do our part in helping the issue that the whole country is in.” And therein lies the paradox of Johnson’s “local but global” mantra: for in prioritising the local football community (or, in the more conspiratorial parts of the internet, the game’s main broadcaster) by allowing competitions to continue, FFA de-prioritises the global community that football is inextricably part of.

Indeed, despite Johnson’s insistence that the governing body are being “agile,” “responsive” and other comforting adjectives as this catastrophe unfolds, the fact remains that FFA’s decision could do more harm than good in the long run. That’s because these various industry-wide shutdowns we’re currently experiencing are aimed at achieving a single goal: flattening the curve. As health experts around the world have increasingly and desperately stressed, the appropriate response to a pandemic is to take what feels like overly-cautious measures now in order to prevent exponential spikes in infections and deaths later; to slow the spread of the virus and ensure our health systems can carry the increased patient load over a longer period of time.

This includes removing ourselves from environments that may lead to us becoming a preventable burden on those systems, including sport. As NSW Minister for Health Brad Hazzard said on Monday afternoon: “If the community can help do what we’ve asked them to do, then we can manage it out over a longer period, with far less people taking up more beds in our hospitals.”

The question, therefore, should not be how can FFA keep the sport alive (football, like all sport, will survive with or without its professional manifestations), but rather how can FFA keep people alive? As the highest-participation sport in Australia with almost two million people registered last year, it’s virtually impossible that football players, teams and leagues won’t be affected by the coronavirus. Continuing to allow games to go ahead – whether in professional or grassroots environments – doesn’t just risk spreading the virus within the football community, but it also risks burdening the already-stretched health system through the thousands of unrelated injuries sustained through playing the game each year, taking time and care away from those who currently need help the most.

It’s this global responsibility that some groups within Australian football are beginning to recognise. Barely 12 hours after FFA’s media conference yesterday, Football South Australia decided to suspend lower-tier competitions entirely. Soon afterwards, as more A-League and W-League players expressed anxiety and confusion at FFA’s decision, the players’ union released a statement saying: “The players have an acute awareness of the gravity of the current situation across the community and how acutely it may impact on some of their peers. The players are committed to solidarity. If the league continues, no player group should disproportionately carry the burden imposed by doing so.”

As these groups acknowledge, the ethical ropes that tie Australian football to the rest of the world cannot be simply cast aside when the existence of its professional, profit-driven forms becomes tenuous. To ignore that connectedness is to negate the very principles being used to structure a new era for the Australian game: this player-centric, local-but-global mantra. And so the paradox wheels round again: for while football’s greatest strength is in bringing people together, its responsibility now must be in keeping them apart – because that, for the time being, is how we keep them alive.



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