My Life in Football: How the Beautiful Game Found Me

It is November 16th, 2005, and I am at Stadium Australia with a group of grown men who have completely lost the plot. We are crying. We are dancing. We are hugging strangers we will never see again, and at one point — I am not proud of this — I high-five a policeman. John Aloisi has just smashed a penalty past Fabián Carini, and after thirty-two years of being told that football is not our game, that we should be watching something with an oval ball, a bat or some other commonwealth sport, the Socceroos are going to a World Cup.

Other things have happened in my life that are bigger than this. My daughter being born, for one. But it's a photo finish, and on certain days, depending on the weather, I'm not sure which way I'd call it.

What I want to explain — what I've been trying to work out for years, really — is how I got here. Because I didn't grow up in a football family. I didn't grow up in a football town. I grew up in Prahran, then South Melbourne, in a household where Dad barracked for Collingwood and Mum barracked for South Melbourne and still, years later, refuses to call them Sydney. I should have been lost to the Sherrin forever.

And yet here I am, in 2005, weeping into a stranger's shoulder. So what I want to do is walk it back. Because what I have come to understand — slowly, embarrassingly slowly — is that football didn't arrive in my life that night. It had been there the whole time, sitting patiently at the back of the room, waiting for me to notice.

Born into the wrong code

I was born, as it happens, into a football-loving family. Just not the global one — ours was the one with Sherrins and men in alarmingly short shorts shouting "BALLLLL." I drew obsessively from before I can really remember, on anything that would take a pencil, which is the only relevant thing about me from this period. Football — proper football, the kind played with a round ball and feet — did not exist in our house, in our suburb, or in our conversations.

The cruel joke, which I would only get years later, is that a few kilometres up the road a teenage Ange Postecoglou was learning his trade at South Melbourne Hellas. Practically on my doorstep. Did I know this? No, nobody told me. I went to bed at night dreaming of drawing, painting and whatever else four-year-olds in Melbourne dreamed of in 1976, while one of the great football minds of his generation was kicking a ball around a paddock down the street. This is the kind of detail you only notice in retrospect, and then it follows you around for the rest of your life.

Wallsend gets its hands on me

Then Dad got a job at the steelworks in Newcastle, and we packed up the car and moved north to Wallsend. I was small and furious about it, in the way you are only ever furious about the thing that turns out to have saved you. Little did I know at the time, but Wallsend was Australia's secret football capital. The VFL did not exist in Wallsend. Cricket was something that happened on television, to other people, in a different country. Rugby league was a rumour. There was football, and there was football, and there was football.

This is the thing people who didn't grow up in a football town don't understand. It's not that the other sports were unpopular. It's that they had been edited out of reality. The conversation at school on Monday morning was football. The argument in the playground was football. The card you wanted to find at the bottom of your packet of chips was a Col Curran card, who played for KB United, and was — and I would still die on this hill — second in importance only to a Kiss iron-on transfer.

I was nine, I had a mop of floppy brown hair and a first touch that would have made a circus clown wince, but I was quick, and for a brief and glorious window I believed that quick might be enough. It wasn't.

What was enough — what turned out to be the actual point — was that I was really good at art and won my first national award for a poster I designed in 1979. Football and art were the two passions that got me out of bed each morning. Art gave me a way to keep hold of football when I couldn't play it, which, given the first touch, was most of the time. They were feeding each other already and I didn't know.

This, although I would not understand it for another forty years, was where it all started. Not Prahran. Not South Melbourne. Wallsend. A steel town in the Hunter Valley, where football first got its hands on me and never quite let go.

The years I pretended to be someone else

We moved again in the early 80's to another steel town, this time to Port Kembla, living first in Warrawong and then to Jamberoo. Now, Jamberoo is these days a place of pilgrimage for Australian football fans, because Johnny Warren lived out his last decade in the pub there and his family still runs it. I, a future football tragic, was living within walking distance of the spiritual heart of Australian football, and I had absolutely no idea.

What I had instead was an overwhelming need to fit in. Jamberoo was a rugby league town, and so I became a rugby league fan. I swapped my KB kit for a St George jersey, I memorised the team sheet, I worshipped Steve Rogers. And when St George lost the 1985 Grand Final by a single point, I punctured my favourite ball in an act of pretween impetuosity. Nobody in Jamberoo thought any of this was strange. That was rather the point of Jamberoo.

Then cricket. The great Anglo-Australian rite of passage, which I took to with all the seriousness of a child who has decided that this, finally, will be the thing that makes sense of him. I read all the ABC cricket books until the pages came loose. I copied Malcolm Marshall's run-up in the back garden. And I got really good. Good enough to make a few rep teams as a fast bowler and opening bat. If I'm honest, though, I wasn't particularly fast, and my batting was more Bruce Laird than Kim Hughes — all guts, no glamour.

Football, the real one, slipped quietly into a back room of my brain and shut the door. Like one of those toys in Toy Story when Andy isn't home. Still there. Just waiting.

I wanted to fit in more than I wanted to be right. So I punctured my favourite ball in an act of pretween impetuosity.

High school. Winter still meant rugby league, but I was beginning to suspect that rugby league required a specific body shape — namely, a refrigerator with limbs — and I did not have it. So I drifted across to soccer, where I joined the school team. The school team was a collection of misfits whose families had come from somewhere else and who brought, between them, more interesting lunches than the rest of the school combined. Our coach was the English teacher. He was great. He had a studded earring and a wicked sense of humour, who taught me a great deal about Shakespeare and not much about the offside rule.

We were terrible. Against the suburban teams of Wollongong, we were regularly thumped 10-nil or more, and we only scored one goal all season. I scored it. It was a toe-poke that crossed the line by approximately a centimetre, one that would have made Robbie Slater proud. The crowd — by which I mean two reserves and a magpie — went berserk. Or at least that is the way I have chosen to remember it, and I'm sticking with the version.

I felt the flicker. That little tug at the sleeve. Hello, remember me? And I nodded politely, and went back to cricket.

Girls, guitars, and an entirely avoidable misunderstanding

By the end of high school, sport had given way to two new obsessions, which is to say girls and guitars, and frankly, the less said about either the better. I formed a punk band. I bought a distortion pedal. I cultivated an attitude of carefully studied indifference that fooled exactly no one. Art was still there, plodding along in the background, refusing to be left behind. But football, which had so completely owned me in Wallsend, had gone very quiet indeed.

I will tell you something about this period that I still cannot quite believe. The pub where I had my first illegal beer at fifteen was Johnny Warren's pub. The same one. I sat in his bar, drank his beer, walked across his floorboards, and did not know. Australia's Mr. Football had blessed those flagstones and I was too busy trying to look cool to notice. That is the through-line of this entire period, if you want one: standing directly on top of the thing and looking the other way.

After high school, I followed my artistic passions and moved to a Surry Hills sharehouse, went to art school and found my tribe. The early '90s in Sydney were a good time to be young and broke and making things. Painting, sculpture, design, film — everything bled into everything else, which is the only way it has ever made sense to me. And in the background, Italia '90 was happening, and suddenly people I had never thought of as football people were huddled around television sets arguing about Baggio and weeping about Gazza.

Two passions, then. Football and art. One had gone quiet. The other was just getting properly started. I had no idea they were heading for the same address.

Europe finally finishes the job

After university I did the only thing an art school graduate with no money is contractually obliged to do, which is leave the country. I worked double shifts in a Darlinghurst restaurant, sold paintings out of dodgy little galleries, and scraped together enough for a one-way ticket. Then I spent six months hitchhiking through Europe with no plan, no language skills, and a backpack that smelled, at the end of it, like a Geography teacher's wardrobe.

That is where football found me again. Properly this time. Not asking.

In Cologne I watched FC Köln scrap to stay up and learned that heartbreak makes the same noise in every language. In Bologna I cheered with locals whose hand gestures had more tactical sophistication than the entire team. In Prague and Barcelona and Bordeaux I joined street games and remembered, suddenly and completely, what it had felt like to be nine years old kicking a ball against a wall for no reason at all. None of it was planned. All of it was the same conversation, held in six languages, about the same ball.

Then Edinburgh. Which is where it actually happened.

I was making rent painting murals, working in bars, playing in a band that nobody much liked, and occasionally earning twenty quid standing in police identity line-ups, which is a story for another day. And my weekends were spent at Easter Road, watching Hibernian, scarf round my neck, Bovril in my hand, surrounded by men in their sixties who could swear with more invention and beauty than most poets I have read since. I was living a life inside an Irvine Welsh novel and it was great.

I did not, in Edinburgh, watch football. I felt it. The noise. The shared hope. The completely unjustifiable conviction that everyone in the ground was on the same side of something that mattered. Reader, I was gone.

And in October 1993, in a pub on Leith Walk, I watched the Socceroos draw 1–1 with a returning Maradona at the SFS, and then lose the second leg in Buenos Aires, and I cried over a beer in front of a room of Scots who could not have cared less. Maradona, in the tunnel afterwards, told our captain that his tears of pain would one day be tears of joy. I chose to believe him. I had no choice.

I did not watch football in Edinburgh. I felt it. Bovril in hand, snow on my coat, completely and embarrassingly gone.

Following the Socceroos by short-wave radio

After Europe, I travelled again through southern Europe and the Middle East and eventually followed a girl to Portland, Oregon — a city more interested in dunking basketballs than passing footballs. I found the game there too — in expat pubs at 2am watching Serie A on tape delay, in shouting matches with bartenders who didn't know offside from offshore. But my heart, the bit of it that was still operational, was eight thousand miles away with the Socceroos.

This was pre-internet. Following an Australian football team from Oregon in 1994 was approximately as straightforward as tracking a small submarine. I paid twenty US dollars for a week-old copy of the Sydney Morning Herald just to read four paragraphs about a qualifier against Vanuatu. I bought a short-wave radio, which became — and I mean this — the single most important object in my life. I tracked the golden generation through static and atmospheric interference. Kewell at Leeds. Viduka at Celtic, terrifying centre-backs. Schwarzer at Middlesbrough. Real footballers playing for real clubs, and they were ours.

By 1997 I'd moved down to San Francisco, working in advertising, still carrying the short-wave radio around like a baby. Thankfully, the internet was robust enough for me to avoid the hefty $20 newspaper habit in readiness for November 22nd. The Socceroos needed a draw in Tehran. I was alone in my apartment at an ungodly hour, hunched over my computer. We led 2–0. We were going to France. I knew it. I could feel it. Then Iran scored. Then Iran scored again. Then a third. The modem spluttered. I sat in the dark for a very long time and stared at the wall.

I have had my heart broken by women, by jobs, by a particular landlord in Edinburgh. None of them got close to Tehran. I wasn't even in the country. I was orbiting the team from twelve thousand kilometres away, listening to the dream dissolve into white noise. To this day I cannot hear short-wave static without flinching slightly.

The morning we beat England

Home, eventually, because everyone comes home eventually. By the late 90's I was back in Sydney, working in publishing, and found myself surrounded by colleagues who spoke fluent football in five languages between them. We formed a team. They were good. I was not. But we had heaps of fun.

Then the 2000 Olympics arrived, and Sydney remembered, briefly and completely, that the rest of the world plays one game. I bought tickets to everything I could afford and a few things I couldn't. The Nigerians and the Japanese and the Brazilians and the Chileans were all jammed into the same stadiums together, trading scarves and bad Spanish and worse predictions. It felt, for a few weeks, exactly like Wallsend had felt — football as the only thing happening.

Then the final. Cameroon, 2–0 down to Spain at half time, came back through Mboma and a kid called Samuel Eto'o, levelled it at 2–2, and won on penalties in front of 104,000 people. Afterwards, Sydney lost its mind. Cameroonians dancing through traffic. Drums in the street. Strangers grabbing strangers and pulling them into the celebration. I danced with people whose names I never knew, in a language I didn't speak, for a team I had no business supporting. It was one of the great nights of my life. That is what football does. That is only what football does.

And then, three years later — 12 February 2003 — the morning that finished the job. Australia versus England, Upton Park, 8.30am Sydney time. We piled into the agency boardroom with beers, which was either entirely reasonable or career-limiting, depending on who was watching. Aloisi, Kewell and Viduka dismantled the motherland, and when the final whistle blew, the champagne corks hit the ceiling tiles. For one perfect Wednesday morning, the balance of footballing power had shifted, and the agency creative department was the last place on earth still celebrating.

That morning, whatever residual doubts I'd had — whatever flirtation with other codes and other identities — evaporated. I was all in. Completely, unrecoverably, embarrassingly all in.

Twenty years of Sunday football and unreliable knees

Around the same time, club football took hold of me properly. Same group of mates, increasingly unreliable knees, twenty-plus years of Saturday games and hobbling Sundays. We weren't the best squad, but we were absolutely the best team, by which I mean we never won anything and didn't care.

Every match was followed by a feast that would have embarrassed MasterChef. We took turns cooking national dishes — Greek souvlaki, Japanese curry, Italian pasta, English Toad In the Hole (whatever that is). The Brazilian BBQ days drew crowds from neighbouring streets. There were beer cartons (rule: it had to be a beer none of us had tried before), a DJ set from one of the lads, hand-built Man of the Match trophies made from outgrown kids' toys spray-painted gold, and a weekly joke competition that ran on a strict no-recycling policy.

It was, in the most literal possible sense, a cult. And in the background of all this, the Socceroos were quietly assembling themselves into something. We had done the heartbreaks. We had done the time. And then came 16 November 2005.

Aloisi. The night everything paid off

You already know about this night. I told you at the start. But what I couldn't tell you at the start — what you needed Wallsend and Jamberoo and Easter Road and Tehran for — was what the moment actually was, when it landed.

It wasn't a surprise. It was a reckoning. Every drift, every false start, every sport I'd taken up and put down, every short-wave broadcast in the dark — all of it compressed into the moment Aloisi struck that ball. The game hadn't just qualified for Germany. It had come, after thirty-two years, to collect.

I have watched the footage more times since than is strictly healthy, and the thing that gets me is never the penalty. It is the second before it. A whole stadium deciding, all at once and against thirty-two years of evidence, to believe.

It wasn't a surprise. It was a reckoning. The game had finally come to collect.

A new dawn, whether we were ready or not

Something else happened in 2005, almost lost in Aloisi's slipstream. The A-League launched. The old NSL — the league that had carried Australian football through twenty-odd years of being told it didn't matter, built on the back of ethnic community clubs called things like Hellas and Juventus and Croatia — was gone. In its place, something shinier, cleaner, and more aggressively marketed.

For long-time fans this was complicated. The NSL had its problems — the politics, the dwindling crowds, the sense that the game was sometimes eating itself — but it had soul. It had history. It had the smell of souvlaki and the sound of drums and the unmistakable feeling that football belonged to people who had carried it here from somewhere else and would not, under any circumstances, be putting it down.

The A-League was different. Sydney FC, not Sydney United. Melbourne Victory, not Melbourne Knights. The Crawford Report had decided that ethnicity was a liability. New football versus old soccer. As a brand guy, I understood the logic, but blowing up the game and forgetting the past game alienated the previous generation. Football needed a change, but instead of the revolution we got, perhaps it just needed a little evolution.

So while I wasn't sure I trusted the execution, the crowds rolled in, and for the first time in my life, Australian football had a mainstream league and a real World Cup to look forward to, simultaneously, and the whole thing finally looked like it was pointing in one direction.

Three World Cups I somehow failed to attend

Here is the part where I would like the court to note my remorse.

I missed Germany 2006. I bought a house. Financially sensible. Spiritually catastrophic. Plainly the wrong call.

I missed South Africa 2010 because I had a baby, which is the one I will allow myself, on the grounds that a jury of my peers would probably acquit.

I missed Brazil 2014 for no good reason whatsoever. Just dumb. Straightforwardly, inexcusably dumb.

But here is the thing. I watched every single minute of all three from a pub, theatre or sofa. Every group game, every shootout, every miserable corner. Germany 2006 was extraordinary. When Tim Cahill came off the bench against Japan and scored two in seven minutes, I was outside the Agincourt Hotel on Broadway, beer in hand, no dignity left, dancing with people I'd never met. Strangers high-fived strangers. Cars beeped. People who had never watched a football match in their lives were suddenly delivering passionate opinions on the offside rule.

Later that same World Cup, I sat down with my Italian father-in-law, watching the heartbreak of our match against Italy. Fucking Grosso.

That is what the Socceroos do. That is what they have always done. They make the country forget, briefly and completely, that it was ever pretending football didn't matter. Three World Cups. All watched from the wrong country. I am a man who owns a boat and never takes it out of the garage.

How Strip Tees got started

In 2017 I did some consulting with an A-League club, helping their CEO think through marketing strategy. At some point I floated the idea of a proper lifestyle merch line — something fans would actually wear, something that lived outside the stadium, something with a bit of design culture in it. He listened politely. He couldn't quite see the commercials. The meeting moved on.

But the idea didn't move on, because that's not how ideas work. By 2018 I had my excuse. Russia. I was not, this time, missing a World Cup. I went looking for something to wear, something that said I'd been here all along and wasn't a bandwagon tourist, and I found — let's not be polite about this — rubbish. Official kit, knockoff merch, things that looked like they had been designed in twenty minutes by a man who didn't really like football. So I designed my own.

Super Timmy. Mooy Mooy Mooy. Mooyakovsky — Aaron Mooy reimagined as Russian Constructivist propaganda. And Supreme Leader, a portrait of Mile Jedinak that made him look like a stern Eastern autocrat — part Stalin, part Rasputin, all moustache. I wore them to matches mostly to make my mates laugh. But strangers in Samara kept stopping me. Where do you get one of those?

And standing outside the Cosmos Arena, surrounded by new friends from four different continents, chanting "Aussie Aussie Aussie, Mooy Mooy Mooy" in the sunlit absurdity of a World Cup afternoon, the penny dropped. This wasn't a laugh. This was the two things I had loved my entire life — art and football — finally, properly, meeting each other. The poster-winning nine-year-old in Wallsend and the sobbing idiot in Stadium Australia turned out to be the same person, and Strip Tees was what happened when they finally shook hands.

The summer I watched my daughter fall for it

If the early '90s were when football found me, 2023 was when it found everyone else, all at once. The Women's World Cup rolled into Australia like a tide nobody saw coming — joyful, defiant, impossible to argue with. Green and gold everywhere. Face paint. People who could not have told you what an offside trap was on the morning of the first game, by the quarter-finals delivering passionate views on the back four.

I was not, this time, watching alone. I was on the road with my now-teenage daughter, my own little teammate, and we followed the Matildas around the country. We screamed against Canada and Nigeria. We lost our voices against France. We dared, very briefly and very stupidly, against England. And when the dream slipped away we held each other and cried in a packed stadium full of people doing exactly the same thing.

Watching my daughter fall in love with the game I'd spent a lifetime circling was something I'll never forget. The game that had been chasing me for decades had finally caught us both. Simultaneously. In a stadium full of strangers who all felt like family.

That's football. That's always been football.

The game that was always waiting

I've spent a lot of time thinking about why football got me the way it did. I still love cricket, but it doesn't quite have the same grab. I look at the Australian team and I don't see the real Australia looking back. But football — football gave me everything at once. Beauty and heartbreak. A game that matters everywhere. Community and loneliness. Art and noise and colour and the particular agony of a penalty missed in extra time by a player who will never quite recover.

Like most non-Aboriginal Australians, I'm a mongrel in the best possible sense. Scottish and Portuguese mostly, with Eastern European, Scandinavian, North African, and even Nigerian threads woven through the genes somewhere. I see that mix on a football pitch — in the faces of the players, in the flags in the stands, in the songs that cut across every accent in the country. The Socceroos and Matildas don't just play for us. They are us. The real us — messy, diverse, occasionally heartbreaking, and stubbornly optimistic.

Strip Tees exists because of all of it. The KB United cards and the Hibernian scarves and the short-wave radio crackling in the San Francisco dark. The Cameroonians dancing in Sydney and Aloisi running away from himself at Stadium Australia. My daughter weeping in a packed stadium in 2023, having fallen in love with something she didn't know she'd been waiting for.

Art was always there. Football found me in Wallsend and never really let go. Strip Tees is what happened when the two of them finally stopped pretending they weren't heading for the same place.

Football found me in Wallsend and never let go. Strip Tees is what happened when art and football finally stopped pretending they weren't headed for the same place.