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

“Don’t scab. Walk out at 20 Minutes: FCK APL,” read the Facebook message from the Melbourne Victory fan group Original Style Melbourne.

“Football without fans is nothing.”

The message also carried the fan group’s logo, which resembles a poster for Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange.

Wild scenes, including a bucket being thrown at goalkeeper Tom Glover, marred Saturday night’s Melbourne derby between Melbourne Victory and Melbourne City.Credit: The Age

The message was one of a series from the group’s account in the days before up to 150 people stormed the pitch at last Saturday’s A-League derby between Victory and Melbourne City.

The last Original Style Melbourne fan group post before members stormed the pitch during an A-League match last weekend.Credit: Facebook

The planned walkout – organised by fan groups across Australia, but led for Victory supporters by Original Style Melbourne (OSM) – morphed into a pitch invasion and violent attack on City goalkeeper Tom Glover that made international headlines. Already this week two dozen people have been charged.

Unpacking what happened last Saturday means picking through a complex stew of issues, including machismo, angry young men and a local bastardisation of a global fan culture that has left the Australian branch of the world game reeling.

The background to the violence was boiling fan anger around the country at a decision by the Australian Professional Leagues – which now runs the A-Leagues – to sell the next three grand finals to Sydney.

APL chief Danny Townsend said at the move’s announcement that it was “really about building tradition” in a single city and added it was needed the league’s sustainability. But the decision also deviated from more than 15 years of a merit-based system that awarded the grand final to the highest-ranked qualifying team. Former Socceroo Robbie Slater called the decision “crazy” and said the game had “shot itself in the foot”.

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.”

Police released this image from Saturday night’s derby pitch invasion.

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.

Socceroos fans celebrate at Federation Square.Credit: The Age

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.

Perth Glory’s Bobby Despotovski makes a Serbian nationalist salute during a game against Melbourne Knights in 2001.

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.

Fans show their disappointment with the APL before the Melbourne derby at AAMI Park.Credit: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

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.”

The attack on City goalkeeper Tom Glover.Credit: Ten News

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 did not sell active zone memberships from its creation. In comparison, Sydney FC was created with an official active fan membership zone, known as The Cove. Sydney also has an independent, unofficial A-League fan group with the same name.

Some administrators view closer official ties with fans’ groups 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.

Victory fans invade the pitch at the Melbourne derby.Credit: Getty

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.

A pitch invader from last week.Credit: Police Media

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.”

Original Style Melbourne fans at a Victory reserves match against Preston Lions in 2021.Credit: Facebook

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.

City goalkeeper Teagan Micah.

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

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