Banned: When FIFA Kicked Australia Out of World Football

Here is a fact I like to deploy at barbecues, usually around the time someone starts explaining the offside rule to me: for three years in the early 1960s, Australia was banned from world football. Not struggling. Not overlooked. Banned. Sent to the naughty corner by football’s head office for the ancient sin of not paying our invoices.

Most football-loving nations measure their darkest hour in penalty shootouts. England has 1990, 1996, 1998, 2004, 2006 and 2012, which is less a wound than a lifestyle. Australia's darkest hour was administrative. We didn't lose on penalties. We lost on paperwork. And honestly, once you know the whole story, it's hard not to feel a strange, perverse pride about it — because the crime we were banned for was, essentially, loving football too enthusiastically and paying for it too reluctantly. Which, if you've ever bought a fistful of dynamically priced World Cup tickets on your credit card trying to follow the Socceroos, is the most Australian football crime imaginable.

▪ Before the ban: why Australia missed the first six World Cups

A reasonable question at this point: hang on, what about the World Cups before 1960? Where were we in 1930, when Uruguay hosted the first one? Or 1938, or 1954? The slightly deflating answer is that we weren't banned from those. We simply weren't members. The World Cup is a FIFA tournament, and for its first six editions, Australia wasn't in FIFA at all — which is a bit like wondering why you never won the office footy tipping comp at a company you didn't work for.

It wasn't for lack of early ambition. The first proposal that Australia join FIFA was put forward way back in April 1914, at a Commonwealth Football Association conference in Brisbane — and then took the best part of half a century to actually happen. Part of the problem was that Australian football orbited the British game, and the British associations spent most of the interwar years storming in and out of FIFA like teenagers slamming bedroom doors: out in 1920, back in 1924, out again in 1928 over the burning question of paying amateurs for their time off work, and not properly back until 1946. England didn't play a World Cup until 1950. If the mother country was sulking outside the tent, colonial Australia was hardly going to wander in on its own.

And then there was the small matter of geography. In 1930, getting a football team to Uruguay meant weeks on a ship, at a cost no amateur, district-run Australian association could dream of covering — only four European nations managed the trip, and they were a fraction of the distance away. Our internationals in those decades were whoever came to us: touring English amateurs, South Africans, Chinese and Indian sides. Australia finally received FIFA provisional membership in November 1954 and full membership in June 1956, which means we were fully paid-up members of world football for less than four years before being thrown out of it. That must be some kind of record. It's certainly a very us kind of record.

▪ It starts, as these things do, with a promotion that never happened

In 1956, Sydney Hakoah — a club founded by Jewish immigrants back in 1939 — won the NSW second division. Won it clearly, properly, no asterisks. And everywhere else on earth, winning the second division means one thing: you go up. But the NSW Soccer Football Association, run largely on old British district lines, refused to promote them. Hakoah was a migrant club, a Jewish club, a club that represented a community rather than a tidy geographic district — and as far as the men in charge were concerned, that was reason enough to keep the door shut. It looks like a small administrative decision from here. It was a lit match dropped in a dry paddock.

By 1957, a group of clubs had had enough and broke away to form the NSW Federation of Soccer Clubs: a rival competition where clubs kept their own gate takings, players could be paid, and a team didn't need to represent a leafy district to play in the top flight. It was ambitious, chaotic and slightly outlaw — three qualities that would define Australian football for the next fifty years. And ambitious, chaotic, slightly outlaw competitions need one thing above all else: players. Good ones. Better ones than we had.

▪ The great player heist

To understand how any of this was possible, you need the bigger picture: Australia in the 1950s was mid-way through the greatest population experiment in its history. ‘Populate or perish’ went the government's slogan, and populate we did — roughly two million migrants arrived between 1945 and 1965, driving the population from about seven million at war's end past ten million by 1959. The first wave was more than 170,000 displaced persons between 1947 and 1953, people whose homes and countries had been flattened or swallowed whole; then came hundreds of thousands more from Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia, all chasing a better life at the bottom of the world. By 1955 the one-millionth post-war migrant had already stepped off the boat.

And here's the bit the official immigration posters never mentioned: they brought football with them. Every ship into Sydney and Melbourne carried people for whom the round-ball game wasn't an exotic curiosity but simply the game — the thing you'd played in the street before the street stopped existing. The clubs they founded and filled — Sydney's Hakoah and Prague (the latter formed by Czech migrants, named for the home town rather than based in it), Melbourne's Wilhelmina and dozens more — were something between a football team and an embassy: a place to speak your own language, argue in it, and watch football played the way you remembered it. Australian football's post-war boom wasn't a marketing strategy. It was two million homesick people voting with their boots.

This is where the story gets genuinely cinematic. In the late 1950s, Australian clubs started signing European footballers — proper ones, first-division Austrians and Dutchmen — and simply not paying transfer fees to the clubs they left behind. The players were technically migrants, you see. They weren't being transferred, they were emigrating, and if they happened to lace up their boots for Sydney Prague or Hakoah or Melbourne's Wilhelmina shortly after stepping off the boat, well, that was just a lovely coincidence.

The most famous of them was Leo Baumgartner, the Austrian playmaker they called the little professor, who arrived in 1958 to play for Sydney's Prague and became the face of the whole affair. Dozens more followed — Austrians, Hungarians, and a small armada of Dutchmen bound for Wilhelmina in Melbourne. FIFA was so unimpressed that some of these players were suspended while they were still at sea, which I find magnificent. Imagine being banned from world football somewhere in the Indian Ocean, halfway between your old life and your new one, with nothing to do about it but order another beer and watch the horizon.

Some players were suspended by FIFA while they were still on the boat to Australia. Banned in international waters. You have to admire the efficiency.

The European clubs, understandably, wanted their money. FIFA's rules said transfer certificates were required and fees had to be paid. Australia's governing body, the Australian Soccer Football Association, shrugged in the general direction of Zurich. And FIFA, which has forgiven many things over the decades — some of which are still before various courts — found that the one thing it could not forgive was not being paid.

▪ April 1960: the door slams

On 4–5 April 1960, FIFA's Executive Committee met in Zurich and voted — unanimously, which stings a bit — to suspend Australia's membership for failing to honour the transfer regulations. Even Sir Stanley Rous, the FIFA president who was genuinely fond of the game in far-flung places and wanted everyone inside the tent, couldn't argue Australia's corner. We had been asked to pay. We had declined. Out we went.

Think about what that meant. No internationals. No Olympic qualifiers. No pathway to the 1962 World Cup in Chile, which Australia had been eyeing via the Asian route. While the rest of the world was watching Garrincha invent new angles in Santiago, Australia was footballing North Korea, in the diplomatic sense: isolated, unrecognised, talking mostly to itself.

And here's the truly Australian part: domestically, the game was thriving. The exile years coincided with one of the most vibrant periods club football in this country has ever seen. Crowds poured in to watch Baumgartner and the imports. Wilhelmina's Dutchmen were winning titles in Victoria. There was even a competition in Melbourne called the Laidlaw World Cup, contested between migrant community clubs, because if the actual World Cup wouldn't have us, we'd simply run our own. We were like a band that gets dropped by the label and responds by selling out pubs every night of the week. The problem wasn't the music. The problem was the contract.

▪ Paying the bill, swallowing the pride

Getting back in required the full walk of shame. The old Australian Soccer Football Association — the body actually holding the FIFA membership — disbanded in 1960 under the weight of it all. A new organisation, the Australian Soccer Federation, was formed in 1961, and it spent the next two years doing what the old one wouldn't: paying. The outstanding fines and compensation to the aggrieved European clubs were settled, and on 1 July 1963, FIFA lifted the suspension.

There is one final indignity worth savouring. FIFA, in its official records, treats July 1963 as the date Australia joined. The earlier membership — the 1956 admission, the whole first marriage — has been quietly written out, the way you might remove certain photographs from the mantelpiece. As far as Zurich is concerned, we didn't rejoin world football. We were born in 1963, fully formed, with a debt already paid and a reputation already dented.

FIFA's official records treat 1963 as the year Australia joined. The first marriage has been quietly removed from the family album.

▪ The hangover lasted decades

Readmission didn't mean belonging. Australia spent the sixties knocking on the Asian Football Confederation's door and being told, repeatedly, that we weren't Asian enough — a rejection that would take until 2006 to reverse. So in 1966, Australia and New Zealand, two nations united by mutual rejection, founded the Oceania confederation with Fiji and Papua New Guinea: football's smallest lifeboat, bobbing about in the world's largest ocean.

Our first crack at World Cup qualifying finally came in 1965, against North Korea in Phnom Penh, and it went about as well as a first date conducted entirely in a language you learned on the plane. The Koreans went to England in 1966 and famously beat Italy. We went home. It took until 1974 for the Socceroos to reach a World Cup, and another 32 years after that to reach a second one — a drought that Australian football fans of a certain age still speak about the way other people speak about the war.

But trace it all back and it starts here: a denied promotion, a breakaway league, a boatload of Austrians, an unpaid invoice and a unanimous vote in Zurich. Australia's relationship with FIFA didn't begin with a handshake. It began with a red card. And in a strange way that's the origin story this footballing nation deserves — not gifted a seat at the table, but banned from it, made to pay our way back in, and then made to prove, decade after stubborn decade, that we belonged there anyway.