Footy Diplomacy
*Many fans of Australian rules football like to think of it as the world’s greatest game. Yet this grand assertion is often accompanied by an awareness that it is a professional sport, in only one, sparsely-populated country in which it competes directly against the rugby codes for interest during winter. The dominant administrative body of […]
Love the Training
It’s getting late on Tuesday afternoon. It could be any Tuesday of any week of the year: coaching and training is relentless. There are always runners in our group, Love the Run, with events coming up and each race needs to be prepared for adequately. Each runner’s race needs to be given importance. Unlike team […]
Fighting for Players’ Rights
*Robbie Gaspar, from Fremantle, played professional football in Indonesia from 2005 to 2012. Throughout this time he became a fan-favourite for the manner in which he played the game and engaged with the fans. He speaks Indonesian fluently, and, has a lazy 95,000 followers on Twitter. He has worked for FIFPro and for APPI – […]
Footy Places
How a Stadium Looks So many of the suburban stadia of South Australia and Victoria have since passed into occasional use or have become training facilities for big clubs which play their home games elsewhere. Their amenities are diminished; the paint is peeling and they are marked by a relative emptiness and silence. Gone are […]
Football, Violence and Politics
*Recently published in Inside Indonesia (7 March, 2016) Football is the most popular spectator sport in Indonesia with second division games regularly attracting crowds of 30,000 spectators. Massive dance choreography and chanting are usually performed for the full duration of games, creating enormous spectacles. Yet, the passionate and creative fan culture also has an ugly […]
Bicycle Activism in Pontianak
*Tim Flicker, recently returned from Pontianak (a city of 600,000 residents in West Kalimantan), writes on the intersection of promoting healthy leisure activities with promoting greener cities. Car Free Day in Indonesia was originally established in 2002 in Jakarta. The main objective of Car Free Day is to socialise communities and reduce their dependence on […]
Ultras in Indonesia
Indonesia occupies a curious place in global football culture. Football is everywhere in Indonesia: in the streets, in bars, in narrow alleys, in grand and packed stadiums, and in the shabby empty lots of urban decay. The game is a cultural product open to endless varieties of meanings, uses and articulations. Football, as the world’s […]
The Comfort of Stadia
*What role do football clubs play in promoting healthy lifestyles? Can identification with a football club encourage participation in sport and being more critical about what one eats? Can stadia be places in which we find comfort? Football is an integral part of communal life in The Netherlands. The country has the world’s highest participation […]
Hello, Dutch Football
Oh Holland: home of wonderful splendid Total Football. Johann Cruyff architect of the beautiful game at Barcelona. And now, Holland: struggling against lesser ranked nations, and well, not qualifying for Euro 2016. Holland’s most famous football figure is currently not a Bergkamp, Cruyff, van Bronckhorst or a van Persie (at his volleying, heading best), but […]
I Went to the Football Today
& about a 4.4km x4 race /1/ I went to the football today. In Katwijk. A queue of some 40 people before buying our tickets, 8euros standing. Staan. It rained. The wind blew it horizontally. Katwijk, top of the table, playing Rijnsburgse Boys, some way down the table, but not quite at the bottom. Katwijk […]