"We're Not Like the Sokkah" — How Australia Tried to Keep Football in Its Place

There's a moment you'll recognise if you follow the game in this country. Someone finds out you support football — real football, the round ball kind, the kind played by eight billion people on six continents, the kind that doesn't require you to be shaped like a wardrobe to appreciate — and their face does a thing. A small, involuntary thing. A twitch at the corner of the mouth, a micro-flinch, like you've just admitted to collecting thimbles or doing amateur ventriloquism. And then they say it.

"Oh. Soccer."

Not "football." Soccer. Said with a particular flatness, a deliberate withholding of enthusiasm, as if the word itself is a polite way of saying: that's not really a serious sport, is it. Not here. Not really.

One specific moment, then, because this blog isn't about a vague cultural tendency — it's about something that actually happened, on camera, on Channel 7 news, in September 2019.

Richmond had just won the AFL grand final by 89 points, in what has been described with admirable restraint as "arguably the most anti-climactic borefest season-decider in Australian sporting history." Afterwards, thousands of Richmond Tigers fans poured onto Swan Street in the club's home suburb of Melbourne. Dozens of flares went off. Police moved in. Dozens of fans were arrested. A man climbed onto the roof of a nearby store and set fire to a cardboard effigy of a GWS player.

Channel 7 covered it as celebration. High spirits. Good Aussie blokes letting off steam after a big win.

At some point during coverage, a Richmond fan was interviewed. She was delighted, understandably. Her team had won. And when the subject of crowd behaviour came up, she delivered the line that has lived rent-free in the heads of football fans ever since:

There it is. Five words. The whole thing, compressed into five words.

Think about the precision of that sentence. She's defending her sport against the implicit charge of crowd trouble — while flares are quite literally going off around her — by invoking football as the thing that's actually dangerous, actually unruly, actually Other. And she almost certainly had no idea she was doing it. The phrase came out of her mouth the way a reflex works. It wasn't fetched. It was pre-loaded.

We're not like the soccer. Meaning: our violence is cultural, theirs is criminal. Our fans are characters, theirs are hooligans. Our game is Australian. Theirs is... something else. Something foreign. Something to be managed, monitored and kept, politely, at arm's length.

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The double standard isn't new. It's as old as the game's presence in this country.

In November 2015, journalist Rebecca Wilson used a confidential list of 198 fans who had been banned from A-League matches — around 50 per cent of them Western Sydney Wanderers supporters — to publish their names, their photographs and their alleged offences across the front page of the Sunday Telegraph. Some of the people named had never been banned. Some had been banned on spurious grounds. And some were under 18 — children, their faces in a national newspaper, labelled as louts.

The establishment's response was to cheer her on. Alan Jones, who sat on the SCG Trust board and was not exactly a disinterested party, went on his 2GB show and declared that Wilson had performed "an outstanding community service." Then — in one of the more remarkable sentences in the history of Australian sports broadcasting — he asked on air whether the situation was "like terrorism in Paris," and whether football's leaders had "no guts."

Terrorism in Paris. For flares at a football match.

Now imagine: 198 AFL fans, some of them teenagers, having their faces and names published on the front page of a national newspaper. Imagine Alan Jones comparing the Richmond Swan Street celebrations to the Paris attacks. You cannot imagine it, because it would never happen. The framing would be different. The language would be different. The whole register would be different. Because the people involved would be different.

That is what "it's not like the soccer" means. Not as a personal insult from one woman at a grand final. As a structural truth about how Australia has always reported on this game and the communities who love it.

A brief history, because it matters.

Football arrived in Australia in the 1870s. It struggled against the full-contact codes but kept finding footholds, mostly through migrant communities. The most prominent clubs in the 1950s and 1960s were built by Greek, Croatian, Italian and Macedonian communities — South Melbourne, Sydney Olympic, Marconi Stallions, Melbourne Knights. These were clubs that meant everything. Communities that had arrived with nothing, rebuilding lives in a country not always glad to have them, and finding in football something that crossed every language barrier.

But that same association — between football and migrants — was weaponised against it. The game was constructed, deliberately and repeatedly, as a foreign game. Not one for "real" Australian men. It was called "wogball." The word "soccer" was part of the same process of othering. A way of saying: this is their game, played by those people, and it doesn't really belong here with the rest of us.

Nobody understood this more clearly, or articulated it more furiously, than Johnny Warren — captain, broadcaster, patron saint — who titled his 2002 memoir after the three categories of people you were assumed to be if you played the game. Women. Migrants. Gay men. The three groups considered second-class citizens of the day. If you played soccer, Warren wrote, you were considered one of them.

Warren died in 2004, still fighting to have the game taken seriously in its own country.

And it isn't only history, or the media. It's the grass — the fields, the fences, the council budget lines where the hierarchy stops being a tone of voice and starts being concrete.

OK, you might have guessed by now that I'm not exactly an AFL fan. I tend to gravitate towards games of skill over pure feats of stamina. Watching AFL, to me, is a bit like watching a bloke chasing a chip packet on a windy day. Something is happening. There is definitely effort involved. Whether any of it was intentional is another question entirely.

Football, though. Real football, the round-ball kind, with the geometry and the first touch and the technique that takes ten thousand hours to acquire and a lifetime to refine. It is a sport of skill. The reason it is the most popular game on the planet isn't an accident of history or media rights. It's because at its best it is genuinely more beautiful than almost anything else you can watch. The right pass, timed perfectly, into the right channel, at the right moment — there is simply nothing like it. You either feel that or you don't, and if you don't, I am sorry for you, but I am not going to pretend it isn't true in order to seem diplomatic.

Which brings us, finally and with some relief, to sokkah.

The genius of sokkah — and it really is genius, the kind of thing you wish you'd thought of — is that it takes the weapon and makes it ridiculous. It takes the sneering flatness of "soccer," the deliberate downgrading implied every time it gets deployed by someone who doesn't rate the game, and amplifies it into absurdity. It says: fine, you want to call it that? We'll call it sokkah. We'll put it on a tee. We'll build a whole collection around it. We'll sell it to the community that was told for decades it didn't count, and we'll make the insult into a badge.

This is how reclamation works. It happened with "wog" in Australian culture — you take the slur, you spin it, you hand it back as something worn with pride. Sokkah is doing the same thing at a slightly lower temperature, with better typography and a shorter production lead time. Strip Tees describe themselves as "football on a shirt — terrace banter meets design culture." That's right, but it understates the thing. What they're actually building is a counter-archive. A record of a community that was told it didn't count, picking up the language used against it and wearing it with pride.

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Something is shifting. Finally, genuinely, something is shifting.

The 2023 Women's World Cup broke the most-watched TV event in Australian history. More than 11 million Australians watched the semi-final against England. Channel 7 — the same Channel 7 that, as was revealed in a 2005 Federal Court case, had purchased the rights to the National Soccer League specifically to bury them to the benefit of the AFL — pushed back its 6pm news bulletin to show the Matildas quarter-final live on the main channel. The AFL moved the Carlton–Melbourne bounce time at the MCG so the Matildas wouldn't clash. The MCG showed the Matildas on the big screen. The cathedral of AFL football. Showing the sokkah.

Strip Tees, meanwhile, were invited to exhibit their Johnny Warren artwork at the Grit and Gold exhibition celebrating Australian sporting history at the National Library of Australia — their work hanging alongside legendary Australian artists like Reg Mombassa. Football culture. In the National Library. Things are different now.

The Socceroos have qualified for the 2026 World Cup in North America. The Matildas are among the best women's football teams on earth. The A-League has real culture now, real supporter groups, real communities. And Strip Tees makes tees and hoodies and hats and beanies and bucket hats and swimwear — the whole terrace wardrobe — because enough people finally feel proud enough about this game to wear it.

Sokkah. The misspelling that contains a history. The joke that isn't quite a joke. The badge worn by everyone who was told, for a very long time, that the game they loved wasn't really Australian.

It always was.