I have long envied people with a football team. I don’t mean people who actually play football (that looks exhausting), but people committed to chasing the fortunes of a particular team. I crave that kind of religious fervour, while remaining a staunch sports atheist. Indeed, I somehow lived in Melbourne for the best part of 20 years without ever producing a good answer to that holiest of questions: “So, which team do you support?”
The arrival of the Fifa Women’s World Cup in Australia has made that question more urgent. More specifically, being the parent of two young, football-curious girls has made that question urgent. The rise of women’s football has been an inspiration to them.
If I’m honest, a strange transformation has come over this atheist in recent years. I have become one of those parents. The shouting-from-the-sidelines parents. The parents who talk about strategy and technique and who willingly spend Saturday mornings standing on muddy fields in the rain. In short, I now understand the appeal of sport. From a safe distance, obviously.
But the World Cup has brought a new dilemma – how are you supposed to choose a team? I was raised in a team-free household. Other people seemed to have been assigned teams like star signs or passports – an accident of birth or an inheritance.
At heart, choosing a team seems a question of identity. Maybe when you’re younger, and the stakes are lower, you can experiment with different team colours. Different state or city teams. When I moved to London at 22, I toyed with backing Arsenal for no better reason than I’d read Fever Pitch.
A World Cup feels more significant. When winning and losing is everything, nobody wants to back Switzerland (except, possibly, the Swiss).
The obvious answer is to back the home team. But I suspect for many Australians, given our diverse demographics, that choice is far from obvious. At our local school, expat families are fretting over whether their kids should maintain loyalties to Ireland, Italy, Japan or South Africa.
Both my parents were born overseas (almost half of Australians have at least one parent born abroad), with our immediate family having cultural ties to England, Germany and Hungary (who didn’t qualify). During last year’s Euro championships, we rooted for the Lionesses – partly out of some genetic obligation, partly because the idea of England winning anything felt so novel.
Our household was happy to try backing the Lionesses in the World Cup, up until the exact moment the Matildas obliterated them in April’s friendly. The kids, being ruthless in their taste for victory, switched allegiances with brutal haste.
Are we now a Matildas household? To me, this switch feels anything but permanent. If and when the rematch comes, our favoured team will probably depend on the half-time score. Frankly, this fair-weather barracking feels somewhat unsatisfactory, if not outright treasonous.
In the Matildas’ favour, we had been tracking home town girl Sam Kerr’s career for Chelsea FC. Kerr was born two suburbs south of our place, so she brings a tantalising sense of proximity and possibility. She offers proof that growing up at the wrong end of the world – and being a girl on what still often is a boy’s field – needn’t be a fatal blow to dreams of global sporting stardom.
Australians are somewhat suspicious of jingoism. At extremes, this reticence expresses itself as the cultural cringe that sees us shun local talent for imported success. But maybe sport can provide us with a safer brand of nationalism, imbued with a sense of fair play.
In her new documentary, Australia’s Open (showing at the Melbourne international film festival), director Ili Baré examines how a major sporting event can shape a nation’s view of itself. When I interviewed Baré recently, she said that moments of national victory – such as Ash Barty’s Australian Open triumph in 2022 – can bring about a rare, precious sense of communal euphoria.
“It’s absolute euphoria for much of the community, even if different sections of the community would have felt that euphoria [of Barty’s win] for different reasons,” Baré told me. “These are moments when briefly, we become one, because it allows us to forget a whole lot of other contexts.”
In a partisan age, it’s comforting to think that something as simple as a tennis or football match can help a country or a community transcend its differences. Sport can provide an example of the sort of super group that Amy Chua talks about in her book Political Tribes – an antidote to the kind of tribalism that threatens to divide nations.
We like to see ourselves winning on an international stage. Surely some of the outrage over Daniel Andrews canning the Commonwealth Games isn’t pining for a lost empire, but the loss of a tournament in which Australia usually does pretty well?
Still, tribalism is a key part – and, I suspect, a key appeal – of choosing a team. Your reading of the latest Ashes controversy had possibly less to do with what was or wasn’t cricket and more to do with the colour of your passport. Likewise, the Australian Open questions whether the infamously larrikin behaviour of the Aussie crowd is an international embarrassment or a true blue democratisation of an elitist sport. Sport divides us even as it unites us.
Maybe the answer to enjoying the World Cup is not to pick a team. Do you really need to cheer for a single side? I may be one of those parents shouting from the sidelines, but I’ve also found it easy to cheer for the sportsmanship of the opposing team – to applaud the skills of the opposing foes even as I commiserate with my defeated offspring.
We have a month ahead in which news headlines are about to be dominated by some of the world’s best female athletes. Our girls are over the moon. Surely we’re all winners here.
• Myke Bartlett is a writer and critic
