THE 25TH OF MAY, LIKE EVERY day of the year, is globally themed. It ranges from the celebratory (Africa Day) to the tragic (International Missing Children’s Day) to the whimsical (Towel Day, in honour of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams).
It is also by a 2024 United Nations resolution World Football Day, marking the anniversary “of the first international football tournament in history with the representation of all regions as part of the 1924 Summer Olympic Games, held in Paris”. The resolution neglected to recognise that, while all regions were involved, not all genders were. Women, unlike in the ‘gender equal’ 2024 Olympics also held in Paris, were not allowed to participate in any contact sport like football, or even in track and field.
So, while there has been undoubted – albeit uneven – gender equity progress in football, how should we assess the success of World Football Day?
Sport: what’s in a name?
In the ever-widening world of sport, there is considerable pressure to make a big descriptor stick. Association football – its official name, though conventionally called soccer in Australia, the USA and other places where it’s not the dominant football code – is the world’s largest and most popular sport. Like other sports, it often prefers the more universal term ‘game’. The most positive is ‘the beautiful game’, but the more prosaic – albeit less subjective – ‘world’ or ‘global’ game is often used.
Rugby union football favours the ‘game they play in heaven’. Anointed a “hooligan’s game played by gentlemen” distinguished from the “gentleman’s game played by hooligans” (association football) in the late 19th-century by a University of Cambridge Chancellor, rugby union’s positioning in the social class hierarchy neatly matches its suitably high ranking in the afterlife.
Rugby league football seceded from union in the early 20th century because, unlike the amateur ‘toffs’, its proletarian players needed some compensation and even remuneration. It has long preferred to proclaim itself the ‘working man’s game’. The erosion of blue-collar masculinity in Australia weakened that identity, as signalled by the establishment in 2018 of the National Women’s Rugby League. Australian Rules Football, by contrast, has historically handled class and gender in smoother fashion.
As eminent French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu observed, cultural capital value varies by sport. Football has long been devalued because of its working-class associations. In Australia it was also mocked as alien when football-loving migrants from southern Europe arrived in numbers after World War II. The title of footballer Johnny Warren’s book on the subject indelicately reproduced the abusive monikers – Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters.
Fevered pitch
Politicians, journalists, business leaders and other prominent people are fond of deploying sports metaphors and symbols, and make audacious claims on its behalf. The much-revered Nelson Mandela – from a country where football is the main sport among fellow black South Africans – is compulsively quoted in declaring that, “Sport has the power to change the world … It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does”.
The recently departed Argentinian Pope Francis was also a big supporter of sport, especially football, seeing it as “the most beautiful game”. Does football plausibly merit such plaudits?
Self-disclosure: I follow football and stubbornly support my unglamorous hometown club, Plymouth Argyle. Formed in 1886, it is a ‘roots’ British football club like Wrexham, the Australasia-bound team owned by Hollywood celebrities Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.
One unanticipated effect of enforced Covid-19 pandemic home confinement was the embrace by international audiences of streamed documentaries like Welcome to Wrexham and Sunderland ‘Til I Die (a gift shared with Formula 1: Drive to Survive). Such gritty tales of football romanticised the terraced houses and local pubs that most would never know or want to frequent.
Three decades earlier, Nick Hornby’s novel and film Fever Pitch, about the twin miseries of embattled masculinity and Arsenal Football Club fandom, helped open the path for Wall Street and other U.S. interests to invest in the English Premier League and the more modest clubs in the footballing equivalent of the Pound Shop. Australian investors have now entered this market.
This love affair between football and capital(ism) demands some critically reflective comment on what lies beneath World Football Day. My aim is not to spoil the party, but to remind us that popular culture as global industry is never entirely innocent.
Global football: a brief retrospective
Fashioned out of folk physical culture, England’s Football Association (FA) created the rules in 1863 for matches against its home nations. British isolationism and sense of superiority meant that diplomacy specialists France formed the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) in 1904 to make regular international games possible. The ‘home of football’ reluctantly joined in 1906, although the British teams withdrew from the first three World Cups after a dispute over broken time payments to amateur players.
Like virtually all professional sport, football is a European imperial and colonial export. Spain and Portugal were particularly successful at installing the game in South America. It helps that football is a simple sport demanding only a ball and some space, be that a favela or patch of waste ground.
FIFA accumulated a greater membership than the United Nations, largely because there are more footballing nations than nation-states.
As noted, football was overwhelmingly run, played and watched by men, and excluded women until as late as the 1970s even in Western liberal democracies. But female footballers took the initiative, defiantly organising their own ‘guerrilla’ games, before the authorities relented. This was not just a matter of social progress. The commercial advantages of recruiting women as fans, consumers and participants could no longer be denied.
After many years of struggle, elite women’s football has mutated into global sporting spectacle, as was vividly demonstrated by the success of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup hosted by Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The Matildas is now the most valuable national sporting ‘brand’ in Australia. However, the distance still to be travelled was dramatically illuminated at the tournament’s final in Sydney, when Spanish Football Federation President Luis Rubiales forced a kiss on player Jenni Hermoso in an incident that became a global scandal.
There is still a lot wrong with the football world. A veritable shopping list of criticisms can be cited, including:
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- continuing cases of racial abuse of players of colour
- world football’s vast environmental footprint
- the exploitation of young, poor African aspirants to the European leagues
- prejudice and discrimination against players on grounds of sexuality and sexual identity.
Football is also a ready vehicle for sportswashing. Hosting the FIFA Men’s World Cup by illiberal societies like Russia (2018), Qatar (2022), Trump’s America (2026 – ironically hosted with punching bags Canada and Mexico), and Saudi Arabia (2034) disguises and distracts from a range of repressions. As does their purchase of leading football clubs like Manchester City, Newcastle United, and Paris St-Germain.
So, World Football Day has a bitter-sweet taste. It embraces the ugliness of such images as Australian superstar footballer Sam Kerr in a London police station being charged (and later acquitted) of racially aggravated harassment. But also the beauty (savoured even by this rival international football fan) of her brilliant run and shot against England in the semi-finals of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. A goal and a day to remember.
This piece was originally published by the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Copyright © David Rowe 2025
Email: d.rowe@westernsydney.edu.au
Twitter: @rowe_david
Website: https://westernsydney.edu.au/ics/people/researchers/david_rowe
