By day, Andrew Howe works as a demographer for the Australian Bureau of Statistics. By night, he’s the beloved statistical guru of football in Australia – and he estimates his database includes a whopping 20,000 games.
That includes a century of Socceroos games, as well as Matildas matches, men’s and women’s national league fixtures (from the A-leagues and the NSL it replaced) and even youth fixtures. It’s been a labour of love for over thirty years – but remarkably, football wasn’t even his first sport.
Listen to Andrew Howe on the Fox Football Podcast below!
“I’m a Shire boy. I grew up in the Sutherland Shire in southern Sydney,” Howe told the Fox Football Podcast. “I followed the (Cronulla) Sharks – I still follow the Sharks. I didn’t miss a game for many years as a kid. And I knew nothing about soccer, really!
“For something to do on a Sunday, one of my mates said: ‘Let’s go to one of these NSL games.’ I still don’t know why we did that, but four or five of us trotted along to Lambert Park in inner Sydney for an NSL (National Soccer League) derby.
“It was an Italian derby, two Italian-backed clubs – APIA (Leichhardt) against Marconi. We’re talking 1988. And I was hooked!
“We had a few beers at a pub and walked to the ground. As I was wandering to the ground, I could just hear this vibe from a small but packed venue, Lambert Park. It just sounded and felt different to rugby league crowds.
“I was just intrigued, like who are these people? I grew up in the Shire, I’d barely been out of the Shire. I sort of opened myself up to the world.”
Howe started researching those iconic ethnic clubs – “Croatians, Macedonians, the Greeks, etc,” but there was a real lack of statistics about the game.
“I’ve been a numbers man for as long as I remember. I was just looking for stats about the game, the clubs and all that. There wasn’t much out there, so I set about starting my own collection. That was thirty years ago now and I’m still doing it.”
What started out with scraping local newspapers for scores and match reports has led to a massive digital database charting the history of Australian football.
“It was difficult, but it was sort of fun,” he laughs. “We relied on newspapers back then, soccer newspapers – and even they weren’t complete.
“What you found in the ‘70s and ‘80s was the Australian ethnic press – the Italian and Greek and various Yugoslavian communities had their own newspapers and they were really good sources for the weekend’s NSL games and that sort of thing. I’ve basically got a crapload of newspapers at home!”
These days, it’s all digital – which is lucky, given his official guides to tournaments like the A-League men’s and women’s seasons run into hundreds of pages!
“I don’t know any other way,” he jokes. “I like to pack in the information.”
And while those public guides are crucial to media covering football in Australia and at international tournaments, he’s equally popular among the fans for sharing the most wonderful tidbits on his Twitter account.
“A lot of people know me for my trivial stuff,” he jokes – not that he minds.
THE HIDDEN SOCCEROOS
His latest massive project, published just before the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, was a second edition of his Encyclopedia of the Socceroos – the definitive book detailing every Australian men’s international player.
The first edition came out four years ago, just prior to Russia 2018. For the new edition, however, he took on a much bigger challenge – adding in not just the players that have earned a Socceroos cap since 2018, but going back over the century of Australian internationals to add in a whole new category of players.
Those players are ones who pulled on the green and gold to represent Australia, but in ‘B-Internationals’. A-Internationals are official matches against other official international teams. Howe’s Encyclopedia now includes official matches against opponents that weren’t official international teams – taking the list of Australian players up by 325 players to a whopping 954 in all.
“Australia’s first official games were in the tour of New Zealand in 1922,” Howe says. “The first A-International game was against New Zealand (a match celebrated in September with a double-header against the same opponents).”
“But actually,” Howe adds, “the team had played in warm up games against NZ provincial sides before that! It’s these sorts of games where players are wearing the green and gold – though back then it wasn’t green and gold.
The list of opponents ranges from bizarre to unbelievable – and some matches that Aussies will never want included in the official A-International record books.
“In the 1920s and 30s, you had teams like Chinese Universities; a team touted as Palestine but they were really a Maccabi Tel Aviv (club) side; a team touted as Yugoslavia but they were a Hadjuk Split (Croatian) club side; we’re talking the 1940s and 50s.
“(There were) various English representative sides that weren’t the official English ‘A’ team. An English FA selection, a couple of other English-based teams. Fortunately, Australia’s biggest defeat was against one of these ‘other’ England teams: 17-0! We got smashed, but fortunately it’s not an A-International.
“So we can sort of hide that 17-goal drubbing from the official records of A-Internationals! And England as well – when you look at England’s biggest victories you don’t see Australia’s name.”
INCREDIBLE STORIES OF 100 YEARS OF HISTORY
If some of these results are incredible, some of the stories of the players are equally remarkable.
“There’s a lot of stories the fans don’t know about the men’s national team,” he says with a smile.
“One player, I saw he played for Australia in 1939. The next step is looking for what clubs they played for in Australia. There was a ten-year gap between 1940 and 1951. I wasn’t sure what happened. Then I found out he was a Jewish Australian-born player.
“He went and established the first Israeli Air Force after a worldwide recruitment campaign, along with his wife … she was quite high up in the military. They were overseas establishing the Israeli Air Force!”
“The player who died at the youngest age (was in) World War II, Wally McGee. 23 years old, he died in Papua New Guinea in a war-related helicopter crash. I don’t think anyone knew!
“He had already lived a pretty remarkable life, being (an international representative) in swimming, water polo, and obviously football. Went to war and by the age of 23 his life was ended. There’s some really interesting stories.
“Or Jack Mitchell – an Adelaide player who sort of swapped between Sydney and Adelaide clubs in the 1920s and ‘30s. We’re talking Depression years, a lot of these players followed the work. He worked on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. One transfer was because he was getting married in Adelaide. To get back to Sydney, he travelled by bicycle via Melbourne – as you do!
“I’ve read these things in the past and thought: ‘That sounds like a made-up story’! But looking at the newspapers from around 1930, you could actually follow the trip. It was a celebrity event. This player got on a bike and rode from Adelaide to Sydney because he couldn’t afford the train trip.
“These little nuggets, that’s what keeps me going!”
And while he can’t share his favourite stories from all 954 players, he says: “Hopefully it’s inspiration for others to write more, to be interested by these little tidbits.”
Pele – Remembering the King of Football | 01:26
HOW THE SOCCEROOS HAVE CHANGED OVER TIME
The 2022 Socceroos squad is the most diverse national team in our six appearances at the World Cup.
“This is our sixth qualification. The 1974 pioneers, they were actually a majority overseas-born. But in term of the source countries, they were a lot more limited though – mostly United Kingdom, Scots and English, around the same number of each. A sprinkling from a couple of other European countries – a couple of Balkan players …
“Compared to the 2006 to the 2018 squads, suddenly we’ve got a lot more diversity in terms of those direct birth countries. The 2006 squad, we’re talking second-generation Australians with a lot of those, especially Croatians.
“But (in 2022), this squad has a bigger mixture of those source countries.”
It all adds up to a remarkable geographic mix.
“In the squad there’s a Scottish born, South African born, Egypt born, English born, and two Australian born (players). One of those Australian born – Harrison Delbridge, born in Sydney – basically grew up in the US, the first US college product to play for the Socceroos!
“Martin Boyle and Harry Souttar are the most northerly-born Socceroos in the 100 years, born in Aberdeen. Nathaniel Atkinson is one of the most Southern-born, born in Launceston – but Hobart is just a little further South.
“And Thomas Deng was almost born on the equator in Kenya!”
While the modern diverse squad is little surprise, fans might be a little surprised at the diversity of backgrounds of the very first Socceroos players.
“Some of the players from the ‘20s and ‘30s – they weren’t just Australian, English, and Scottish. There was an Egyptian-born player. Kuol (2022 World Cup star Garang Kuol) wasn’t the first Egyptian-born player!
“(There was also a) Swiss-born, a Guyana-born player in the 1930s – Guyana is in South America. But it’s not just where these players were born, their backgrounds and history (are fascinating).”
For Howe, whose day job is to “analyse data on migration and births and deaths to get that best picture on the Australian population,” there’s a natural intersection between that work and his hobby.
“What I like to do with the Encyclopedia and the history of the Socceroos is relate the history over time of the national team with the history of Australia as a nation, in terms of its migration and settlement.”
Part of that is looking at how migration has changed over time – and he thinks the Socceroos can tap into an under-represented demographic of migrants.
“Migration in Australia has diversified in the last few decades … What we’re seeing now is partly a reflection of the post-WWII migration programs, and also refugee programs.
“What’s been really interesting in the last 10 or 15 years, in line with the Australian population becoming a higher proportion of overseas-born, we’re seeing a higher proportion of direct overseas-born (players) in our national teams. It’s really interesting.
“The interesting thing with what I mentioned before about history of the Socceroos reflecting the history of migration, there are some contrasts. South and East Asian migration is big to Australia, but we don’t really see that in the Socceroos. I see that as a growth potential!”
The Encyclopedia of Socceroos Centenary Edition by Andrew Howe is available now from fairplaypublishing.com.au and all good bookstores.
