On a drizzly Tuesday morning at Sydney Harbour, I am doing something that would make me the envy of a great many football-fevered Australians: quizzing Craig Foster on his World Cup opinions.
Foster is, as ever, being a good sport about it. As we huddle under the Harbour Bridge for shelter, the beloved Socceroo turned commentator is telling me rapid fire who he thinks should win the 2026 trophy now that Australia’s out (Spain or France), the best match so far (that shock Belgium v Senegal twister) and his take on penalty shootouts (“I don’t agree with people who say they’re just a lottery – they are the best test of nerve in all of world sport”). Then there’s the players he roots for, and the ones he doesn’t.
“I don’t like Messi as much as Maradona, because he never opens his mouth. He’s like Beckham or Ronaldo – they’re the modern athletes who don’t say anything about anything. It’s as if the world outside of football doesn’t exist,” Foster says. He prefers the players prepared to speak up against injustice, like 18-year-old Spain player Lamine Yamal, who has made headlines for waving the Palestinian flag at games and hitting back at “ignorant and racist” anti-Muslim chants from the stands at a match.
“I would like [Yamal] to be a big star of the World Cup, and to win numerous World Cups, because I think he’s the type of athlete that the world needs,” he says.
As Foster sees it, the sport is one you can’t divorce from politics: “Football is the largest game in the world, and therefore it always reflects the world.”
Foster is full of pithy lines like this. He is all professional polish, great at staying on-message and game to answer any question with the graceful ease of a tennis player returning a serve. There’s no moment in our 45-minute stroll where he ever feels off-duty.
I have met Foster today at the First Fleet Memorial, a sculpture uncomfortably marking the arrival of British settlers to Australian shores, for a meandering loop around the sites of first contact that dot Sydney Harbour. He has chosen here to make a point: “The Socceroos have become, over the last month, a vitally important face of Australian multiculturalism, and it’s good to contrast that with the beginnings of post-colonial Australia”. Football, he says, has been there through every tortured step in our relationship with immigration since, “representing what Australia always was at that particular point in time, in a way that no other sport has done”.
When Foster started playing professionally as a midfielder for Sydney Croatia in the late 80s, local football clubs were divided among ethnic lines and the game was derided by wider Australia as the domain of post-second world war European migrants. That didn’t stop Lismore-born Foster, a “Skippy”, becoming a Socceroo in 1996, scoring nine international goals for the squad and eventually wearing the captain’s armband. Unlike the Beckhams and Messis of the world, Foster was never afraid to speak up, long an outspoken critic of the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers. His retirement from professional football in 2003 gave way to his next, perhaps higher profile career as beloved commentator “Fozz”, who, alongside Les Murray and Johnny Warren, became the faces of SBS World Cup coverage. He considered that job to be about much more than just calling the score.
“It was about showing different cultures of the world to Australians. It was very much about teaching Australia about ourselves,” Foster says – the Greeks, Croats, Italians and Macedonians who built football here. “And it was about evangelising the game.”
Foster arrives to our interview in work mode, quick to dispense the pleasantries and get down to the business of talking football, despite battling the beginnings of a cold that’s brewed in a big week of rain and nonstop World Cup chaos. I’m not the only one keen for his opinions right now. In a feat of multitasking, he will pause our interview halfway through to take a call from ABC Radio and acerbically describe Trump’s red card interference – the hot issue of the day – as “flat-out cheating” and “corruption”.
2026 has still been a very different World Cup for the professional talking head than he is used to. For the first time in 24 years, he is not part of the SBS commentary panel. He is, however, on SBS right now for something else – as an interviewee in Wog Ball, a new documentary that tracks how soccer went from a sport on the margins to the code that unites Australians like no other.
When he was a Socceroo, Foster was well aware of how the game was perceived – it really was called “wog ball”, he says, and sat far lower down the sporting totem pole than cricket, NRL or AFL. Perhaps the biggest inflection point was that glorious Australia v Uruguay World Cup qualifier in 2005, in which the Socceroos toppled the South Americans to make it into our first World Cup in 32 years. More recently came the 2023 Women’s World Cup, when record numbers of Australians tuned in to cheer on the Matildas.
So while Foster is “devastated, obviously” that Australia were eliminated in the round of 32, he sees the bigger picture.
“I am pleased to see that all of Australia cares about the result and the performance,” he says, as we walk past a young man who noticeably double takes at the sporting hero unwrapping a lozenge in front of him. “That used to not be the case, and that’s one of the key indicators of the growth, support and love for the game.”
One bugbear, however, remains: “Support for the World Cup and then support for the domestic game are very different things.
“There are millions of Australians who watch the [English Premiere League] who don’t go into the stadium to watch Sydney FC or Melbourne Victory,” he says. “If you want more success in the World Cup, we need you in the stadiums. We need you to buy the jersey, and we need you to understand that this level of the game here is critical to that long-term success.”
We’ve just about run out of time, and we take a seat under some trees overlooking Bennelong Point, so I can squeeze in one last big question. With Australian eyes now fixed firmly on football, could the Socceroos win a World Cup in our lifetimes?
“Yes, but we need to invest now,” Foster says without missing a beat – this is a topic he’s clearly given prior thought to. “What we need is a national, government-funded [football] program in primary schools, ages six to 12. This is what France did, this is what Spain did, and without that, we’re not going to win World Cups.”
Winning the World Cup would be the last great sporting challenge for one of the best sporting nations on earth, he feels. But it’s about something bigger than the game itself. On the day before we meet, current Socceroo Awer Mabil landed back in Australia and called out the claim that Australia was not a successful multicultural society as “bullshit”. Asked for his response to senator Pauline Hanson’s claim the Socceroos were her ideal “vision” of an Australian monoculture he shot back – “we represent Australia on the biggest stage,” he said. “If anyone is trying to divide that, then they’re probably not Australian themselves in a sense, respectfully.”
In his time, in a nation that still struggles with welcoming its migrants, Foster has seen the way football brings cultures together.
“We shouldn’t only invest in football just to win World Cups, but to win the World Cups to the benefit of Australian society,” he says, his voice straining with emphasis. “It’s an investment in Australian social cohesion, in Australian multiculturalism, and in our sense of national identity.”
In perfectly Sydney fashion, a man in high vis and wet weather gear has begun blasting a leaf blower in our direction, aimlessly pushing a stray couple of soggy fallen fronds around in the rain. It feels like our cue to wrap things up and let Foster answer the other interview request that’s lit up his phone while we’ve been walking, then dart off to the airport, where he’s flying to Adelaide for his next commitment. Raising his voice to beat the leaf blower – ever the skilled media man – he leaves with some parting words he wants to get on the record.
“Australians collectively support the Socceroos and Matildas in a way that doesn’t happen with any other sport, and that’s vital for the country at a time when there’s so many forces trying to divide us,” he says. “It brings us together in a way that we need now – and we’ll need in 25 years maybe even more.”
-
Wogball: Australia’s Beautiful Game is streaming now on SBS
