‘A cultural mess’: Behind the A-League pitch invasion

The Victory protesters believed they had a just cause; what happened on Saturday night arguably destroyed it.

After the pitch invasion, Victory supporters on prominent fan podcast For Vuck’s Sake were left despondent.

One co-host, known as “Budsa” on the podcast, said: “I’m still picking my jaw up off the ground. The initial feelings that I had were just absolute despair and shock at what I’d seen. It was the worst thing that I’d seen as a follower of football in this country in my life.”

A long-time Victory fan, he added that the club’s active supporter group was “a cultural mess … and the leadership is non-existent at the moment”.

He compared last Saturday’s pitch invasion and attack on a player to attending games in Bosnia – a stronghold of soccer’s active support culture – and found the Australians lacking. “I was at some really sketchy Bosnian games in August, September this year. That’s as pure as some of these [OSM] kids think that football should be and is … and there was none of that happening.”

Some podcast hosts speculated that many of those who stormed the field weren’t true supporters and were instead at the game to cause trouble via the game’s rowdy active support section.

Game at a crossroads

The sport should have been on the cusp of a World Cup-inspired revival after Australia’s incredible run to the last 16 and scenes of passionate crowds at Federation Square, which inspired popular live sites elsewhere.

Soccer has vast potential – it has nearly twice as many junior players in this country as play Australian rules – but has struggled since the 1970s to create a successful professional men’s league. Many supporters – dubbed “euro-snobs” by other A-League fans – obsessively follow European leagues but steer clear of the local game.

Something like last Saturday was not meant to happen in the A-League, created in 2004 as a fresh start for the sport after the old National Soccer League was disbanded.

The migrant-based clubs that built the game in Australia in the postwar years were ditched with the NSL, including Greek-based South Melbourne, the Croatian-backed Melbourne Knights and Sydney’s Marconi, which had its roots in the Italian community. In their place, clubs such as Melbourne Victory and Sydney FC were created as free-floating “brands”, tied to no particular community.

It was a controversial decision to disenfranchise the game’s driving force, but it was meant to put an end to some of the enmities, ethnic nationalism and sporadic violence that had given the NSL a poor reputation in mainstream Australia.

One example of the world the A-League was trying to leave behind came in 2001, when striker Bobby Despotovski, of Serbian background, performed a three-fingered Serbian salute in Sunshine in front of Melbourne Knights fans, who were largely of Croatian background. Chants of “gypsy” rang out from the crowd, while a security guard was kicked in the head in the ensuing brawl.

That was the old world that billionaire Frank Lowy and others wanted to put an end to by creating the A-League. But last Saturday was in many ways much worse than anything the NSL produced.

It was not so much toxic nationalism – which still persists among some second-tier traditional Australian clubs – but what appears to be an aping of aspects of global “ultras” fan culture.

That culture involves fanatical support for a team and often the use of flares, as well as elaborate choreographed images, and is meant to create a hostile environment for opponents. In Europe, ultras sometimes come with a political message, from both the far right and left.

James Skinner, a director of the Institute for Sport Business at England’s Loughborough University and former board member of Football Queensland, said this culture has been transplanted to the A-League by a small subset of fans.

“Some will use the argument that these [perpetrators] aren’t really football fans – they’re just there to engage in violent behaviour. I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think they are very passionate about their team, it’s just that they act out their resentment, or how they feel, through violent actions, rather than doing it through other ways.”

A paper co-authored by Skinner in 2010, titled Coming in from the margins: ethnicity, community support and the rebranding of Australian soccer, outlined the issue of the league isolating fans.

“Those seeking to market and promote soccer as a successful sports commodity have prioritised developing the Anglo-Australian market; ignoring strong ethnically based market segments does not seem a wise move. It is these populations who have, after all, sustained the sport in Australia.”

Skinner wondered if the way the APL communicated the grand final announcement further alienated fans who already feel disenfranchised and disrespected by the league. “Nobody’s defending the behaviour that’s happened. But you have to ask yourself … if it was handled differently, would it have happened?”

Other soccer administrators and fans put the blame squarely on fringe, anti-authoritarian elements of Victory’s active support seeking to emulate hooligans overseas.

The big club

Victory has been among the most successful A-League clubs, drawing by far the biggest and most passionate crowds in a league that grew quickly in its early years but has since seen attendances stagnate and decline. In 2019-20, the last pre-pandemic season, Victory crowds were nearly twice as large as the next-biggest club’s.

Victory’s active supporters have taken pride in being an unofficial group from the club’s inception. In comparison, Sydney FC was created with an official active fan section, known as The Cove. Some A-League supporters deride The Cove as being an inauthentic, corporate creation.

But some administrators view the official link as a light form of regulation to retain the league’s unique selling point – a party-like atmosphere – while trying to avoid an anarchic, at-times violent element that can deter families from attending matches.

Flares are another element of international active soccer support that conflicts with AFL and NRL notions of appropriate fan behaviour. While their use is banned, soccer administrators have previously proposed “safe smoke” devices to be provided in active sections to promote the game’s atmosphere while avoiding the inherent dangers of uncontrolled pyrotechnics. However, some fans have opposed this, believing it over-sanitises the game’s culture.

For Victory bosses and the authorities – including police and security – managing OSM has been like riding a tiger. The North End of AAMI Park is unofficially considered OSM’s home, although many fans who consider themselves a part of the North End don’t identify with OSM.

Seats to the area are sold by Victory as part of their $289 annual “North End Active” membership package, marketed as “truly unrivalled match day atmosphere”.

All clubs have active support groups and while most are not officially tied to the clubs, they usually make up clubs’ most fervent fans.

Within OSM itself exist smaller factional support groups, known as “firms”, such as Horda, M3 and Nomadi. Others that have existed within the club’s history include Back Row Melbourne (formerly Back Row Hooligans) and the Blue and White Brigade. These groups vary in size and reputation.

Horda and its supporters were banned from displaying banners at matches back in 2011, after the rivalry between Horda and a Melbourne Heart (now Melbourne City) support group ended in an attempted kidnapping.

Four Melbourne Heart supporters were charged with conspiracy to falsely imprison after they were found waiting in a car park, where they planned to abduct a Victory fan they suspected of stealing their group’s banner.

Victory could not say whether that ban was still in place at the time of Saturday’s match, but images of men wearing Horda T-shirts were seen during the pitch invasion.

In 2013, around 50 fans swarmed a security officer and then punched a police officer in the back of the head, pulling him to the ground. At that time, police believed Horda members were responsible.

As recently as last year, The Age uncovered images of OSM fans at a match against Preston, which is Melbourne’s largest Macedonian-background club, with a sign that read “Gypsies run home! With love Horda.”

Victory fans were also involved in brawls with Western Sydney Wanderers supporters on Bourke Street in 2013, throwing flares, chairs and sticks at each other in the heart of the city. 

Earlier this year, Victory fans targeted Adelaide’s Josh Cavallo, one of the few openly gay professional sportsmen in the world, with homophobic abuse.

In another incident this year, dozens of Victory fans clashed with fans of Springvale White Eagles at a match at the Serbian Sports Centre in Keysborough. OSM said they were attending that game.

City’s women’s team goalkeeper Matilda Teagan Micah, meanwhile, was pelted with glass bottles by Victory fans at a match last year.

Carlo Carli, a former Labor MP and current president of inner Melbourne club the Brunswick Zebras, was at last Saturday’s match, seated a few aisles away from OSM. “COVID just about wiped out the A-League; this was starting to look like a good season,” he says. “It’s a very big danger for the whole A-League project. The game is huge, as is its reach. It will recover, but it is a really big hit.”

As an MP, he was involved in discussions with earlier iterations of active fan groups over which stadium would host Victory matches. At the time, he said, they were well-led. He says now there is a clear lack of leadership all round, from the active fans and the club.

“The active supporters are a legitimate group and need to be treated as stakeholders and lines of communication with them,” he says, though he adds that the protest was clearly badly managed and included elements of “losers and alienated angry men” with right-wing views.

OSM itself was created in 2019 after earlier problems with active fans. In 2016 the club was issued a $50,000 fine, and had points deducted, after the game’s governing body found the club guilty of bringing the game into disrepute because of fan misconduct.

Victory’s major active support group, North Terrace, disbanded that year, just days after four Victory fans were arrested and 13 evicted from the 2016 Melbourne derby.

After Saturday’s violence OSM apologised, saying it condemned the actions of a “minority of active fans”. The group, via its anonymous Facebook page, did not respond to requests for an interview. It lists no identifiable leaders or spokespeople.

In another statement issued on Monday night, the group reiterated the sentiment, adding that “none of this was ever part of the plan”. “The only plan was always to walk out at the 20th minute. OSM did not kick-start and unite a league-wide boycott campaign to ruin it instantly. This is a ridiculous claim.

“The chaos on Saturday night was not on any level premeditated by OSM.”

On OSM’s Facebook page and on other Victory fan pages, many fans reacted with fury at the group. One stated: “You lot incited this with your messaging through the week.” Another asked why so many active fans were “dressed like criminals”, with full black clothes and in balaclavas.

One young fan, who has been a Victory supporter for over a decade, left the north terrace at the 15-minute mark to sit elsewhere. “It just felt like something was going to happen. I’ve been sitting in the North End for years. I’ve never seen it that bad. It was horrific.”

Not speaking to media and blurring out faces of fans posted online – even when the images are innocuous – are part of the code, a level of distrust developed over time by a belief that coverage has been sensationalist or unfair. This fan chose to speak with The Age on the condition of anonymity because he wanted the supporters who condemned the violence to be represented.

Professor Ramon Spaaij, a researcher in sociology of sport and fan cultures among soccer followers at Victoria University, says it is important to note that Australia doesn’t have a history of the same “hooliganism” seen historically in Europe or South America, where fans go to matches intending to pursue violence.

Spaaij says there were two clear causes of Saturday’s events: “It’s no surprise that we’re dealing with mostly young men. That engagement in aggression and violence is sort of associated with that sense of masculinity, kind of proving yourself,” he says.

“Particularly in groups of young men there can be this group dynamic of engaging in risk-taking behaviour, including sort of provoking other fans, police, authorities of whatever type.”

The other aspect is an “us versus them” mentality prominent among the firms and the governing bodies of the sport, he says.

“That sense of really strong in-group and out-group identity, and this [sense of] hostility towards out-groups,” he adds.

He says the congregation of these firms, who have this strong in-group identity, is partly linked to a co-opting of rituals from overseas.

“There’s lots of elements of that culture to borrow from other places that can be integrated into the fan culture – and sort of this hooligan style is one of those.”

But Spaaij adds that “the overwhelming majority of fans are actually part of the solution” and must be included in conversations on the sport’s future. “[Some] active fan groups actually reject that violence and are deeply outraged or even scared in terms of safety, but still really want to be a part of growing the game in Australia.”

with Marnie Vinall

News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.