Sea-Level Playing Fields: an Exploration of the Histories of Beach Soccer and Its Practices Within One Specific Context, the Australian Beach

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McGowan, Lee, Ellison, Liz, & Lastella, Michele (2020) Sea-level playing ﬁelds: an exploration of the histories of beach soccer and its practices within one speciﬁc context, the Australian beach. Soccer and Society, 21(3), pp. 289-298.

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Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identiﬁed by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2019.1620212 Lee McGowana*, E. Ellisonb and M. Lastellac aLee McGowan; School of Creative Practice, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, [email protected]; bElizabeth Ellison, School of Education and the Arts, Central Queensland University, School of Education and the Arts, Noosa, Australia; cMichele Lastella, Appleton Institute for Behavioural Science, School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences, Central Queensland University, Adelaide, Australia.

Sea-level Playing Fields: an exploration of the histories of beach soccer and its practices within one specific context, the Australian beach.

Football, or soccer, is a simple game. It requires very little in the way of practical resources. Markers for a goal, a ball-shaped object. This simplicity enables the sport to be undertaken almost anywhere. Yet the beach is one place the game requires a substantial rethink in approach and participation. The best players do not necessarily make the best beach soccer players. For many Australians, the coastal edge of their continent is more than a key location for leisure and pleasure. The beach is an integral part of their culture, a symbol of their egalitarian nature, with a history of iconic sporting competitions, including the Sydney 2000 Olympics beach volleyball. Where beach soccer draws on notions of literal and figurative level-playing fields, this paper examines histories, practices, and myths and offers the first academic insight and discussion of Australian beach soccer.

Keywords: beach football, beach soccer, Australian beach, football history, football culture

Sea-level Playing Fields 1 Introduction

It would seem that everything we need to know about beach soccer is contained within its name. It is possible to ascertain insight as to its mode and site of play. Beach soccer is indeed a derivative of football, or soccer, the world’s most popular sport1. It is played for fun and at internationally governed professional levels by the world football’s governing body, FIFA. Two teams consisting of five players, on the pitch, across three

12 minute periods, juggle and propel a ball at one another and into a net to score goals using their feet – for the most part – but players frequently use every part of their body, with the exception of their hands. The game is played on sand, mostly beach. It features on television, albeit non-mainstream cable sports channels, and continues to gather a growing international following through its biennial FIFA branded World Cup tournament, involving as many as 83 different countries. Yet, it does, and will, arguably, only ever, exist at the periphery of its paternal code. Indeed, were football a continent, beach soccer’s claim would be limited to mere stretches of its coastline. At a time when football, or soccer, is Australia’s most popular participation sport2, and enjoying a great deal of publicity (for a variety of reasons3) Australian beach soccer’s fortunes run counter to expectation and to the narratives of the sports’ expansive growth in other, beach-loving, countries.

Academic research on beach soccer to date relates most commonly to the health, fitness4 and planning for medical care of its participants5. Otherwise the broader game including the cultural aspects of its play, particularly in an Australian context, have undergone very little academic scrutiny. This paper marks out rich terrain for further examination, particularly where the Australian beach has such a complex relationship with the activities that take place upon it. Besides associations with pleasure, relaxation, and frivolity6, the Australian beach is seen as being separated from day-to-day life,

Sea-level Playing Fields 2 where status can be ignored7 a reward to be shared equally, where differences in gender, age, class, ethnicity or otherwise are disregarded8. These views run parallel to beliefs held by most every football fan, and there is an abundance of statistical evidence to support them, ‘that on any given day the worst team can win’, and the ‘favourites are more vulnerable than in any other sport…’9. Yet, this concept – the myth of inherent egalitarianism – is problematic. Unlike its colonial motherland, Australia has been considered a country without class distinctions10. A view that is continued to the beach as equaliser, in that it is something no one can own11, a type of ‘democracy of the body’12. Practically, of course, these concepts are idealistic and challenged by lived experience.

This paper therefore considers this imagined egalitarianism’s role in the fate and

(missed) fortunes, or, at the very least, the evolution of beach soccer in the contemporary Australian beach landscape. It seeks to examine the impact the beach has on the way football, or soccer, is played, the sport’s seemingly haphazard, arbitrary success within the Australian context. One with a complex past and present, seen at once as singular and peripheral, and situated at the physical border and figurative edges of cultural overlap. To do this, the paper will first examine the origins of beach soccer, including consideration of nomenclature (beyond localised polarising debates on the use of the terms soccer and football) and its modern history – from Rio de Janeiro to the most recent international tournament, the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup Bahamas

2017. It will offer examination of the Australian beach as a multi-layered, contentious cultural locality for sand-based sports and draw on frameworks, for mythology, specifically in this case, notions of egalitarianism. The sport will then be located in this complex cultural landscape, where the beach13 and sport are dominant factors.

Following a brief history and contextual perspective of beach soccer, the paper

Sea-level Playing Fields 3 considers the complexities of the Australian beach landscape. It will then situate the nation’s adoption of the sport and offer insight into the national team’s successes and the failures of governance which have marred the relationship between Australia, a country that loves beach sports, and beach soccer.

Soccer on Sand

Like the beach, football’s popularity is grounded in its simplicity. It requires very little in the way of practical resources, space or rules. Markers for a goal – clothing, cans, stones or sticks will do – and a ball-shaped object and one or two players, who cannot touch the ball with their hands. This simplicity in its make-up, game play, and participation enables football to be undertaken almost anywhere; on mountainsides –

Bhutan have a national team14 – in fields, parks, streets and car parks. The ball, which has its own long history, can be substituted, a rolled-up bundle of plastic bags would and has sufficed. Yet the beach is one place the game requires a substantial rethink. The ball bounces strangely or not at all. Sand does not support ease of movement of participants. High-intensity running is restricted. Team work is difficult to implement due to irregular rebounds. Movement of the ball, passing and shooting, must be even more precise than in the larger format15. It must also account for a shifting uneven surface, which forces much of the play to occur off the ground, ‘above’ the pitch surface. While the core skills of the footballer remain, the differentiating and additional skill sets the beach soccer player requires are more acrobatic and focused on juggling the ball.

There are now two major bodies governing beach soccer, as it is most commonly, and in some quarters officially, known. FIFA act as one authoritative body, while their partner, the sport’s ‘founding’ organisation, Beach Soccer World Wide

Sea-level Playing Fields 4 (BSWW) oversee operations, competitions and administration. BSWW maintain their organisation initiated the sport in 1992 and that its codification for a pilot tournament held in Los Angeles by a founding partner (the Beach Soccer Company) led to the first official tournament in the same year16. A follow-up tournament occurred in Miami in

199317. At the same time the North American Sand Soccer Championship (NASSC) were developing and officiating their game in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The first official tournament of the US version of the sport, known as Sand Soccer, took place in

May 1994 at a purpose-built facility18. 1,075 teams and an estimated 200,000 spectators took in the 2015 NASSC tournament19. While the tournament was still in its relative infancy in the US, the sport was replicated by a Brazilian marketing agency in partnership with a US sports agency in order to initiate the first international tournament in Rio De Janeiro in 1994.

These authorities questionably distance their sports from Praia de Futebol

(Portuguese trans: football on sand), the game that originated on the beaches of Rio De

Janeiro 70 years earlier. It must be noted that they do not actively deny their sports’ origins, rather neglect it through a lack of acknowledgement. There is little difference between beach soccer and sand soccer and arguably little more between their games and the football on sand played in the 1920s.

The emergence of beach soccer is likely to have come about as a result of living conditions, perennial good weather, lack of open ground elsewhere, and population density in Rio De Janeiro, the game’s spiritual home. The beach offered free space, in terms of availability and expense, for exercise and social and community participation.

Indeed, Rio’s beaches were seen as grounds for play and activity before they were seen as a reserve for the purposes of relaxation20. Following its introduction by the English,

Brazilian interest in football grew exponentially during the 1920s. Small, barely

Sea-level Playing Fields 5 organised neighbourhood teams began competing for honours on southern reaches of

Rio De Janeiros’ 54 miles of beach. Anecdotal evidence (available to English readers) demonstrates the game maintained its popularity through the 1930s and 40s. This evidence includes Thomas Farkas’ collection of black and white photographs of players and empty goalposts taken in the mid to late 1946-4921. By the 1950s, local inter- neighbourhood competitions developed degrees of formalisation. Several long-running clubs, Pracinha, Ouro Petro and Juventus, among others, had been established for the exclusive purpose of practising and competing in the Praia de Futebol tournaments.

While it is possible to assume that substantial codification of the game took place in this period, the Federation of Beach Sports of the State of Rio de Janeiro, established in

1960, unified the officiation and governance of the numerous leagues and competitions which had emerged. By the 1980s, pitch marker ribbons regularly lined the sands from the Botafogo to Leblon. In the 1990s, coinciding with the efforts to professionalise the

‘California styled’ game, a municipal drive to make beach life more peaceful in Rio De

Janeiro saw football on sand and opportunities to play become restrictive in terms of cost, ability and limited to specific sites - in many cases prohibited altogether22. During this period, under the auspices of the BSWW, the game was introduced to Europe through exhibitions and in 1998, a league format (2016). The international tournament, established in 1995 as the ‘Beach Soccer World Championship’23, held annually in Rio

De Janeiro thereafter, attracted TV interests, which facilitated rapid growth in audiences, and of course, commercial sponsorship. Its popularity soon gained the attention and support of FIFA, football’s governing body. FIFA partnered with Beach

Soccer Worldwide in 2005, before taking control of oversight, rebranding and reshaping the tournament’s organisation to expand the sport’s reach. Growing global popularity saw FIFA move the World Cup from (its native home) Brazil to other countries to

Sea-level Playing Fields 6 capitalise on and continue to ‘stimulate’ global interest24. The first tournament outside

Brazil took place in Marseille, France, in 2008. Since 2009 under the purview of

BSWW’s management and FIFA’s branding, the Beach Soccer World Cup takes place every two years. It continues to grow in popularity and reach, with a steady increase in teams participating in FIFA Beach Soccer World Cups and related Confederation tournaments. In 2016, FIFA and BSWW established a European women’s tournament and noted it as a marker for growing demand and participation numbers, though as has been speculated of the grass-based equivalent25, it could just as equally have been driven by the less than altruistic desire of FIFA to expand revenue streams. Today26, beach soccer regularly appears on cable networks. Even before a host is announced for the 2019 event, Moscow have tendered a bid to host the 2021 tournament and have proposed to fill Red Square with sand to accommodate the game27.

Despite its entrenchment in Brazilian beach culture28, the impact of these events also effectively led to an appropriation or negation of beach football’s history and its original intentions as a means of free exercise and self-expression. In 2016, however, a bill of rights declaration, Draft Law No. 2102/201629, went some way to ensuring the sport’s inclusion in Brazilian cultural heritage as an activity invented and maintained by the Carioca, residents of Rio De Janeiro, the Brazilian beach soccer community, those whose forebears invented the game and were instrumental in its evolution. It was, after all, invented on their beaches.

The Australian Beach

In the Australian context, the beach represents an integral part of culture, life and a sense of belonging30. The beach has long been argued as an egalitarian space31, although this assertion has been challenged32. The beach is a familiar and recognisable

Sea-level Playing Fields 7 landscape for many Australians living along the coastal edge of the continent and continues to be considered a key location for holidays. This association of the beach landscape with leisure and pleasure33 rather than with a strong work identity undoubtedly shapes the role it plays in Australian national identity. However, the beach does have a strong history within iconic sporting competitions: consider, for instance, the internationally renowned ironman competitions, or the Sydney 2000

Olympics beach volleyball competition that took place on Bondi Beach.

In the Australian context, the beach is an integral part of culture, life and a sense of belonging34. It has the unique ability to blur borders between traditionally discrete

Outback and urban landscapes and just as keenly highlight the nation’s geographic isolation. This is illustrated in a comparison between tourist heavy Surfers Paradise,

Queensland, lined with high-rise buildings, to the one road in one road out picturesque

Pottsville beach, New South Wales, which is without lifesavers, amenities or boardwalks. Despite such sharp contrasts, the Sydney 2000 Olympics opening ceremony’s perpetuation of the dream of sand and sea, the beach, as symbolic monolith, has become representative of modern Australia35. Central to the landscape, it has significantly contributed to shaping national identity36, and generated understandably difficult, though refuted myths of Australian egalitarianism37. It is seen as a through- way to a continent, access route to oceans, and a barrier to intrusion38. While regarded as a source of pleasure, a location for sport and holiday relaxation39, it has a deep and troubled history that includes multiple sites of bloodshed through violence and invasion.

The most recent example of the former being the 2005 Cronulla riots40. In terms of the latter, examples begin with predominantly white Europeans claiming the whole for their own, and continue to be presented to this day, such as the deaths and ongoing demonisation of those attempting to find security here via the sea. Outside of this there

Sea-level Playing Fields 8 are the dangers associated with both the beach and its related sports activities. Reports of international surfing successes are as numerous as reports of shark attacks. Jet-ski, paragliding and fishing accidents and fatalities regularly make the news.

It is clear to see the Australian beach is a location embroiled in a multiplicity of meanings. While frequently positioned as a singular conceptual site of cultural significance through tourist imagery and academic theorisation, there is a startling diversity of individual beaches in Australia. They range from the tropical shores of northern Queensland to the much cooler beaches on the southern coast of Victoria; the contrast of empty, isolated beaches on the West Australian coastline and the crowded esplanade and carpark filled resort towns of South East Queensland. Where 89 per cent of the nation’s population reside in coastal regions, unlike the iconic Outback or Bush, the beach is physically familiar to a majority of Australians. Many of the country’s largest metropolitan centres are within easy reach of beaches maintained by state governments offering free access throughout the year. It is this accessibility that threads

Australian beaches into one seemingly amorphous whole. While there may be cultural distinctions – many beaches are linked to the socio-economic suburbs they are closest to

– accessibility is mostly open. And yet, representations of beach culture in Australian popular culture is frequently gendered41. Arguably, sometimes empty notions of security are literally and figuratively reinforced as the Navy patrols our northern borders by sea, while medically trained volunteer or paid lifesavers, patrol our beaches from the shore. Despite, or at least in ignorance of, its blood-stained topography, the Australian beach is seen at once as a family friendly location for activity and rest and a site for marginalisation.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the beach can also be considered a location for key Australian sporting events. This is one of the few occasions when beaches are

Sea-level Playing Fields 9 partitioned and entry or use is refused or requires payment. The tournament grandstand presents a striking image on some Australian beaches; however, these structures are usually temporary as in the case of surfing or triathlon competitions. Although they might be annual events, beaches remain foremost a place of leisure rather than activity.

There are some major sporting events that utilise beach locations. For instance, one of the long running ironman events in Queensland, the Coolangatta Gold, is an international drawcard. The 2018 Commonwealth Games will utilise Coolangatta beach in the Beach Volleyball competition. This of course mirrors the iconic Bondi Beach, partitioned for use during the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. There was some pushback about this use of Bondi, with locals concerned about the impact of the event on local businesses as well as environmental concerns for the space. Waverly Council, the local governing body, negotiated funding and significant recognition for the location in their agreement with the Olympic Committee42; however, it is clear that there are ramifications of this urbanisation of beach locations for formal sporting events.

Examining the context of the Australian beach offers rich analogy to the social participation, pleasure, turbulence and marginalisation which characterises the country’s own relationship with its coastline. Its relationship with beach soccer is no different.

Beach soccer in Australia

In terms of the Australian context, Football or soccer as it is increasingly less well known here, enjoys a greater spread in terms of demographics. On paper at least, it should be a national past-time, yet it offers what Joe Gorman describes as “an incongruous proposition”43. Despite its longevity as an organised sport, football is regarded as a minority interest. Australian Football, (AFL, or Football by Australian

Sea-level Playing Fields 10 Rules, or Aussie Rules), arguably the most popular football code in Australia, is largely seen as a Victorian sport, though it is very popular in South Australia and Tasmania too; the National Rugby League (NRL), finds its largest fan base in New South Wales and

Queensland; and Rugby Union, now the least popular of Australia’s four football codes, is most warmly embraced by more specific, notably affluent school-based, sectors of the sporting community. Football, or soccer, has greater number of participants than

Australian Football and Rugby League44, yet its professional competition attendances fall short of AFL and NRL figures. In terms of age, gender (it was the first code to have a national women’s league) and cultural diversity, it has at once been the most democratic and most despised of Antipodean football codes45. It is significant here that unlike the codes it competes with, football, soccer in Australia is, and always has been, enmeshed with concerns of assimilation, citizenship, ethnicity and identity.

While initially crossing the same colonialist, intercontinental boundaries as other football codes, and having made a similarly sound footing in the 1880s46, as Rugby

Union and Rugby League – the contested origins of AFL, while widely credited to Tom

Wills47, are too complex to note here – football has perennially failed to capitalise on its popularity. This is mostly due to political in-fighting, poor administration, and inflated expectation in public perception in terms of international success48. Post-war immigration and resultant community-building have seen it earn equal and opposite levels of prejudicial resistance in Australia where it has been, and to a great degree, is still positioned as the immigrant’s game49. This marginalisation or positioning, itself contested50, is contrary to how the sport is seen internationally, particularly where it has, since the early 1990s been embraced across the class structure51 and more recently through substantial investment in by large companies, the super-rich and, in China, state sanctions52.

Sea-level Playing Fields 11 Australian beach soccer began in earnest in 2005, when a national team, the

Beach Socceroos, are invited to participate in the earliest FIFA partnered international tournament. Australia played and lost two matches and have not qualified for the Beach

Soccer World Cup since. The Football Federation of Australia (FFA), responsible for

Australian Beach Soccer’s governance, switched Confederation in 2006, which means qualification for the World Cup must be achieved through the respective Asian Football

Confederation (AFC) Beach Soccer Championships. In 2009, Australia failed to progress through the group stage, after losing to both Iran and Oman. The FFA withheld funding, so no team entered the 2011 tournament. In 2013 the Australian team attending the AFC Beach Soccer Championship, in Qatar, included a number of former A-league players, notably two former Socceroos, Ante Juric and David Zdrilic. They finished top of their group53, earning one of two opportunities to qualify for the FIFA Beach Soccer

World Cup in Tahiti in 2014. Following defeat to Japan (2-1) in the first qualifier, the

Beach Socceroos faced the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for the third and final World

Cup spot. Having won the AFC Beach Soccer Championship on two previous occasions, the UAE is one of the most successful Asian beach soccer teams. Losing 3-2,

Australia scored an equaliser as the siren signalled the game’s end. The Beach

Socceroos thought they had earned extra-time to score a winner, the UAE team believed they had won outright. The goal was disallowed and the UAE qualified for the Tahiti tournament. It was controversial, and tournament rules have since undergone some scrutiny. As a consolation, the FIFA 2014 Beach Soccer World Cup hosts invited the

Beach Socceroos to participate in an exhibition match in the tournament’s opening ceremony. It would be the Beach Socceroos last match. 2013 was their most successful period. They finished fourth at the AFC Championship, received an invitation for the prestigious Asian Beach Cup in Haiyang, China, and won the 2013 Australian Beach

Sea-level Playing Fields 12 Soccer Cup in Wollongong, Australia. The FFA withdrew their support in the same year.

At a domestic level, there is evidence of a number of short-lived tournaments and one-off events taking place in Australia: on the various beaches on Gold Coast,

Queensland (Kirra, 2009, Coolangatta 2011-2013), Coogee Beach Sydney (2015), and

Melbourne (2017). FIFA and Beach Soccer Worldwide considered delivering their international tournament in front of the Sydney Opera House. It never materialised, but it marks a sense of the traction the Australian game was generating during its most popular period. Former Socceroo, football coach54 and media personality, David Zrilic, undertook promotion and development of Gol, a three versus three hybridised version of beach soccer, with some limited success55, before demands on his time overtook his interest. Outside of these disparate anecdotes, lost promise and suggestion, the most sustained and continuing competition is the Wollongong-based Australian Beach Soccer

Cup, the tournament the Beach Socceroos won in 2013, which has been running annually with only one interruption (2016). Since its establishment in 2011, this independent competition attracts relatively large audiences, regular corporate sponsorship, and local and national attention. It has at times attracted the support of the

New South Wales and the FFA governing bodies.

The ‘one kick away from World Cup qualification’ controversy and the exhibition match that followed symbolise the peak and fall of the Beach Socceroos, and with it the resultant fate and misfortune of Australian beach soccer and its position in the contemporaneous landscape. The Wollongong tournament may not have sparked the hoped-for surge in interest, but, for Australian beach soccer’s small, mostly immigrant community, it remains an aberrant, if exotic showpiece of football’s potential and growth. As an independent competition, it continues to be successful, almost in spite of

Sea-level Playing Fields 13 the beach soccer’s wider problematic context. Within this tension, there are parallels reflected within the organisation and administration of the paternal code’s troubled national body, including a lack of certainty in the roles of those involved. For beach soccer to regain national recognition and profile, it would take substantial rethinking at the levels governing the game.

Conclusion

The Australian beach is a complex, uncertain and potentially unforgiving territory; a place where anything might happen, where lots does, and things which should work (on paper at least: see beach cricket) do not. This paper, the first to offer a significant analysis of beach soccer’s history and locate it within a specific national context, highlights the notion that beach soccer takes its strength and distinctive identity from the places it is played, but it is lessened as a competitive sport, where it is seen as a leisure activity. Australian beach soccer’s story vibrantly enacts and echoes the position of the beach in Australian culture and the turbulent development, position and relationships its paternal code has within the Australian landscape. In the context of the cultural topography which underpins its play on Australian sand, it is not unexpected that beach soccer’s Australian story is one of fleeting success, disruption, division and breakdown. Many of the concerns that have afflicted football here, have affected beach soccer. In the face of the sports continuing international success - annual competitions and FIFA support – it has been weighed down by negative cultural associations and expectation, and its perceived lack of success have pushed it beyond the periphery.

While football on sand can be seen as an anathema to the media-driven environs of football on grass where money now most commonly equals success – the best footballers do not necessarily make the best beach soccer players – in the Australian

Sea-level Playing Fields 14 context, the coastal kick-about has tried and failed to draw on romanticised notions of the level playing field, has been unable to tap into the spirit of Australian beach culture and its mythical loss of focus around class distinction. Its relationship to its site of practice, and its history and sporting paternity and the context of the Australian beach offers rich analogy to the social participation, pleasure, turbulence and marginalisation which characterises the country’s own relationship with its coastline.

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1 Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, 45; Stølen, et al, ‘Physiology of Sport’, 504. 2 Australian Sports Commission, Ausplay participation data, 4. 3 At the time of writing the FFA are negotiating significant challenges across membership, organization and intervention by FIFA in terms of governance, at the same time the Women’s national team, the Matildas, are favourites to win the 2019 World Cup and the player, Sam Kerr has just received the Asian Federation player of the year. 4 Shimakawa et al, ‘Beach Soccer Injuries’; Scarfone et al, ‘Match analysis heart-rate’; Marques et al, ‘Environmental heat stress’. 5 Brito et al, ‘Planning medical care delivery’. 6 Matthews, ‘Nation needs new myths’, 15. 7 Fiske, Hodge, and Turner, Myths of Oz, 62. 8 Huntsman, Sand in our souls. 9 Goldblatt, Futebol Nation, 17. 10 See note 7 above. 11 Game, ‘Nation and Identity: Bondi’, 115. 12 Dutton, Sun, sea, surf and sand, 20. 13 See notes 7 and 8 above. 14 FIFA, ‘Beach Soccer History’. 15 See note 5 above. 16 Beach Soccer World Wide, ‘Beach Soccer: More than a Decade’. 17 Ibid. 18 Sand Soccer.com, History, National American Sand Soccer Championships. 19 Ibid. 20 Goldblatt, Futebol Nation, 17-22. 21 Poynor, ‘Exposure’, para 3. 22 Downie, Brazil bans football, paras 1-3. 23 The current tournament format lasts over approximately 10 days and involves 16 teams initially competing in four groups of four teams. The group winners and runners-up advance to a series of knock-out stages until the champion is crowned. The losing semi-finalists play each other in a play-off match to determine the third and fourth-placed teams. 24 FIFA, Beach Soccer History. 25 Tate, Girls With Balls, 25. 26 Most recent in Nassau, Bahamas, Brazil beat Tahiti 6 nil in the final to be 14 time champions (five under FIFA). 27 Butler, ‘2021 in Moscow’s Red Square’, paras 1-3. 28 In the 1920s organiser of horse racing events and rowing regattas would ask football governing bodies not to arrange games on the same days, due to the sport’s emerging popularity, (See Goldblatt, Futebol Nation, 2014). 29 Vereadora, Draft Law No. 2102/2016. 30 Bonner et al, On the Beach, 269. 31 Booth, Australian Beach Cultures, 113. 32 Ellison, ‘On the Beach’, 221. 33 White, On Holidays, 22. 34 Bonner et al, ‘On the Beach’, 270; Game, ‘Nation and Identity: Bondi’, 113. 35 See note 30 above. 36 Turner, National fictions, 28; Rickard, Australia: a cultural history, 41. 37 Ellison, ‘Badland beach’, 117; Ellison, ‘On the Beach’, 222. 38 Ellison, ‘Badland beach’, 119.

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39 White 2009, ‘A short history’, 3. 40 Taylor, ‘Australian bodies, Australian sands’, 111. 41 On male surf culture on the Gold Coast See, Evers, ‘The Point’. 42 Owen, ‘The Sydney 2000 Olympics’, 323. 43 Gorman, Death and Life, 5-9. 44 Australian Sports Commission, Ausplay participation data, 4-6. 45 See note 43. 46 See Hay ‘British Football, Wogball’; ‘“Our Wicked Foreign Game”’; and ‘Ethnicity, Structure and Globalization’; Williams, A Game for Rough Girls; Syson, ‘Shadow of a Game’. 47 Flanagan, The Call. 48 Hallinan and Hughson, The containment of soccer. 49 Gorman, Death and Life; Hallinan and Hughson, ‘The Beautiful Game’; Warren, Sheilas, Wogs, and Poofters. 50 Georgakis and Molloy, ‘Old soccer to new football?’, 72. 51 See Redhead 1997; Kuper 1997; DJ Taylor 1997; 52 Price, ‘Why Chinese Clubs’. 53 With victories over Oman (6-4), hosts Qatar (4-3, penalties), and Afghanistan (6-4). 54 Zrilic, took on a coaching role with German Club, RB Leipzig. 55 Hassett, ‘Ex-Socceroo David Zrilic’, paras 1-3.

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