This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: 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. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/129538/ c Consult author(s) regarding copyright matters This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] 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.