Footage of the absolute scenes from Darling Harbour (and Fed square) over the weekend have many people asking, why don’t more Australians play football?
The awesome scenes of support for the Socceroos (regardless of how many of us simply jumped on the bandwagon at the last moment) at Sydney and Melbourne’s respective public World Cup watching venues on Sunday morning begs the question: why on earth don’t more Australians play football?
WATCH: wild scenes in Sydney as the Socceroos take on Argentina
The AFL’s recent (and supposedly snide) jab at soccer may be the easy answer (we have way too many competing codes) but could reality be more complex? A recent post by Optus suggests football actually receives less funding than many other codes in Australia, by some metrics, with goalkeeper great Mark Schwartzer calling it “unfair” and “wrong.”
As Optus yesterday pointed out on Instagram, when it comes to Australian sports funding, football (which gets $7,903,750) gets less than basketball ($8,018,784), swimming ($9 odd million), sailing ($9 odd million) hockey ($9 odd million), athletics ($10.7 million) and cycling ($14.4 million).
Commenters were pretty pissed off, with one writing: “This is seriously a joke. Makes me sick!!!!!!!! Sailing! Come on man. AUSTRALIA WAKE UP.” Another said: “Sailing and Hockey getting more funding than the biggest sport on the planet, absolute madness.”
Could this be the reason more Aussies don’t play football? Perhaps. But it may also be a case of the chicken and the egg. Either way: if we want to ever win a World Cup, we’ll need more dollaroos.
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