Australia’s Evolving Appreciation for Soccer
I wasn’t raised in a religious household, and I went to a series of secular schools, but in my early twenties, I became a disciple of the Greek Australian soccer coach Ange Postecoglou. Postecoglou is best known, globally, as a former coach of Tottenham Hotspur, a perpetually underachieving Premier League club that, after his arrival, won their first trophy in seventeen years. (He also nearly got them relegated.) I knew Postecoglou as the coach of the Australian men’s national team, which he led, with similar inspiration and inconsistency, 2013 to 2017.
Soccer in Australia has historically been a forgotten sport. It was a game played mostly by migrants and by women, and was always overshadowed by cricket, rugby, and Australian-rules football. To watch soccer, you had to tune in to a channel called SBS, a public broadcaster that had been founded by the Australian government in the seventies to provide programming for the migrant community. When I was a kid, SBS’s flagship soccer show was called “The World Game,” and I tried to watch it every Sunday at 5 P.M. to catch highlights from the other side of the globe. In soccer, as in most sports, a lot of fans only consider you an authentic supporter if you have a long-standing, long-suffering tie to a local club. Growing up, I didn’t have a local club; I had the national team. When I was eleven, Australia qualified for the World Cup for the first time in thirty-two years, after a tense penalty shoot-out with Uruguay. I could hear people whooping and cheering in the street.
In the mid-twenty-tens, Postecoglou took over, and, under him, the team played in an optimistic, entertaining style aimed at controlling the game and keeping the ball. Australia didn’t necessarily have players who were comfortable doing this, but Postecoglou believed that he could build a team that did. It was a sense of underdog idealism that overlapped perfectly with my own political inclinations. A better world was possible—one where Australia plays attractive, sophisticated soccer against European teams. Even failure was a foundation. In the 2014 World Cup, in Brazil, Postecoglou’s Australia spooked a talented Chile in one match, and took the lead against the Netherlands in another. (The team lost both matches.) The games aired in Australia at 7 A.M., and I watched them before my shifts at a combined DVD-and-home-goods store in Sydney. In 2015, the team, whose nickname is the Socceroos, won the Asian Cup, beating a South Korean team led by Heung-min Son.
Australia’s coach in this year’s World Cup, Tony Popovic, is no Postecoglou. He is a pragmatist who derives joy from defensive shape and well-timed counterpunching. But the squad, for the first time in a while, has the glimmer of romance and promise. The players are young and fast and technically proficient. Jordan Bos, a twenty-three-year-old left-back from Melbourne, has been impressing in the top Dutch league with his intelligence and intricate footwork. The vice-captain, Jackson Irvine, who plays for St. Pauli, in Germany, is politically outspoken and articulate. And fans have been delirious for years about our most exciting attacker, Nestory Irankunda, a twenty-year-old prodigy from Adelaide, who plays for Watford, in England, and who can strike the ball with unteachable grace.
Recently, Australian players have been courted by European national teams. The most prominent of these has been Cristian Volpato, a Sydney-born attacking midfielder with Italian heritage, making him eligible to play for either Italy or Australia. As a teen-ager, he was scouted by the Italian club Roma, and became infamous among Australian fans for studiously ignoring offers to play for the Socceroos, and then posting, on Snapchat, the crying-laughing emoji when Australia lost a key qualifying match to Japan in 2022. The sense was that he was waiting for an offer from the Italian national team. “I’m off Volpato anyway,” a friend of mine texted me a year or so after the Snapchat incident, “Don’t want him even if he turns out to be Messi mark II.”
A few weeks before this year’s World Cup, I woke up from a fitful sleep, at around 5 A.M., to see the news that Volpato, after years of silence, had been called up to the squad. Volpato had never played for Australia before; now, at the last minute, he would fly to America to join the Socceroos’ boot camp. It was like a plotline out of wrestling: the perfect heel-face turn.
As the opening game approached, the same historical insecurities lingered. An English colleague of mine, who is a season-ticket holder for the New York City Football Club, in Major League Soccer, asked me what I thought about the team’s two young Australian players, Kai Trewin and Aiden O’Neill, who had just been picked for the World Cup team. To be honest, I barely knew who they were. I expressed a middling disappointment. “Oh, but they’re good!” she said cheerfully. I resolved to bring my idealism back.
It was quickly rewarded. In Australia’s first game, the team beat Türkiye, which had been heavily favored, in a strangely decisive 2–0 victory. Before the game, the Turkish midfielder Arda Güler, who plays for Real Madrid, had yelled to his teammates, in Turkish, “We are much better than them,” in front of the Australian players, as they stood in the tunnel. Midway through the first half, Irankunda, sprinting, flipped the ball past a Turkish defender and then slotted it into the goal with his right foot. Later, Connor Metcalfe, a classy midfielder, strolled through a line of defenders and scored off his left foot. The next day, at my local café in Brooklyn, an American man overheard me talking about the game, and said, glowingly, “Dude, that was a big upset.”
Last week, I flew across the country to watch Australia’s second group game, against the U.S.A., in Seattle. Interactions between Australian and U.S. soccer fans, I’ve found, alternate between the solidarity of self-deprecation—after Australia lost a friendly match to Mexico, a U.S. fan tweeted a meme with the caption “US vs Australia: trash vs garbage”—and the aggression of two small dogs who can finally beat up on each other. The U.S. had also exceeded expectations in its first game, with a 4–1 win against Paraguay, and both teams felt a second victory was there for the taking.
Seattle was surprisingly full of soccer. I waved at people wearing Socceroos’ and Matildas’ (the Australian women’s team) jerseys on the Bainbridge Island ferry, and nodded what’s up to guys in U.S.M.N.T. hoodies. I hadn’t been back to Australia for over a year, so it was nice to feel that, for a moment, it had come to me. At Ray’s, a Seattle institution, a lunch along the Puget Sound was punctuated by an Australian man behind me talking loudly about how he had recently purchased an expensive subwoofer. Australians are among the world’s greatest travellers; at the stadium, I ran into about eight people—planned and unplanned—whom I had gone to university with.
Before the game, I had been told that the Australian fans would gather less than a mile from the stadium and march to the stands. Footage I’d seen from the previous march, in Vancouver, was pretty rowdy. In Seattle, kickoff was at noon, and the march had to begin at 10 A.M. Many fans had arrived, and started drinking, hours earlier. The march turned out to be more of an amble, and many of the chants were about social-democratic issues. “We’ve got free health care,” some shouted. Another chant was about rejecting Trump’s proposed tariffs. One of the most celebrated Australian chants of this World Cup has been, “The Aussie boys are on a bender / Donald Trump is a sex offender.” American fans would invariably turn to us and hasten to say, “We don’t like him either.”
Türkiye, in Australia’s first match, had been sluggish and unthreatening. The U.S., under its coach Mauricio Pochettino, played a much more pressing, rotating, and suffocating game. The U.S. players buzzed around and flicked the ball among themselves, and Australia seemed to freak out. Popovic had also inexplicably benched Irankunda and Metcalfe, the two goal scorers from Game One. The U.S. scored with their first cross of the game, in the eleventh minute, when the ball skidded off the Australian defender Cameron Burgess for an own goal. They scored their second after the Australian goalkeeper was deceived by a looping deflection. “The worst thing has happened,” the man in the seat next to me said. “We have to take the game to them now.”
At halftime, Irankunda and Metcalfe came on as substitutes, and the team started to gel and to threaten. In the sixty-first minute, Popovic sent in Volpato. After his years of national wavering, Volpato’s entrance officially tied him, for the rest of his life, to Australia. And, on the field, he exuded a sudden calm. The first half had been defined by a kind of skittering physicality; Volpato moved through the field with the ball seemingly attached to his foot. (In Sydney, a friend texted my group chat after the substitution, “Send him back to Italy,” and then, three minutes later, “This is so much better.”)
Still, Australia lost. Soccer tragics in Australia like to quote Johnny Warren, a former captain of the men’s team, who later became SBS’s leading soccer broadcaster. Warren was famous for saying “I told you so,” a hopeful phrase that he imagined telling people in a future when soccer became the country’s dominant sport. In recent years, his conviction has become increasingly true. Australia’s national women’s team is one of the country’s most popular teams, has some of the world’s best players, and routinely sells out stadiums. And, on Friday, thousands in Australia will wake and gather, before dawn, to watch the Socceroos play Egypt in the round of thirty-two.
Warren, who died in 2004, also used to say that Australia should stop aiming to just qualify for World Cups, and start talking about winning them. One of Australia’s leading young players, the center-back Alessandro Circati, echoed him before the U.S. game “I don’t want to be the underdogs for the rest of my life. I want to be a team which everyone faces, and it’s, like, ‘Ah, we’ve got to play Australia.’ ”
As I prepared to board my flight out of Seattle, highlights played on a big screen in the departure lounge, and I was forced to watch Burgess’s own goal one more time, before I fled to my gate. On the plane, I sat next to an American man who had been at the game, and who coached high-school varsity soccer in New Jersey. The entire plane seemed to be soccer fans, and it felt nice to be among fellow-believers. I watched as my seatmate pulled up his phone, uploaded a photo he’d taken at the game, and started drafting a tweet. “Amazing trip to my first World Cup Match,” he wrote. “Enjoyed meeting A LOT of Aussies who traveled much further than I did to see this match.” He deleted and rewrote a few sections, but one line stayed the same. “America has embraced the beautiful game and I love it.” ♦
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