Novel Insights into Sports History: Croatian–Australian Ultras in Australian Football

Abstract

This article reports the findings of an ethnographic and historical study into an ultras group called Melbourne Croatia Fans (MCF), a group of mostly Croatian–Australian young men in their twenties who support Melbourne Knights (formerly known as Melbourne Croatia) in the second-tier Victorian Premier League competition. The aim is to explore identity formation and negotiation, and how identity formation informs relations with outsider groups. The interviews with the football club president, football club secretary, two MCF leaders, and the participant observation date back to the 2010–12 period. The supporters perceive that the club has fallen on hard times for reasons not of their own making. They participated in the former National Soccer League (NSL) (1977–2004) from 1984 to 2004, which was the first-ever national competition in Australia to involve club rather than state teams. However, the club was effectively banned from the new A-League (2005–present), which began based on a private-equity ownership model and a one-team-one-city concept. Despite this, the club can play in the annual knockout competition, the Australia Cup (formerly the FFA Cup), that features both A-League and lower-league teams. We observe here a group of young Croatian–Australian men, part of the Diaspora of Croatians that left the country, mostly in the communist era and afterwards, who aim to construct workable hybrid identities for themselves in an Anglo-majority nation on the other side of the world. They fight on two fronts—against an Anglo, corporate-style administration that effectively bans their club for reasons of ethnicity from the new national league, and against the Serbian youth who often live in the who live in adjacent or nearby suburbs and follow Serbian-origin clubs.

1. Introduction

We observe here a group of Croatian–Australian young men, part of the Diaspora of Croatians that left the country, mostly in the communist era and afterwards, who aim to construct workable hybrid identities for themselves in an Anglo-majority nation on the other side of the world. I draw especially upon a handful of past articles and book chapters that managed to illuminate contexts within sport that ultimately transcend it in certain ways. John Hughson (1997a, 1997b, 1999, 2000, 2002) published five articles/chapters on the Bad Blue Boys ultras that followed a club called Sydney Croatia in Australia’s now-defunct National Soccer League (NSL). The present author wrote several articles about the MCF (Melbourne Croatia Fans), the ultras at the sister club of Sydney Croatia known as Melbourne Knights (originally Melbourne Croatia) (James et al. 2011, 2012; James and Walsh 2018; James 2023). My study findings can be summarized as follows: Loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church and the Croatian football clubs is the inherited wisdom of the Old World that is romantically and self-consciously adopted and honored against all detractors (Hughson 1997b, p. 255; Hay 1998, p. 55). Nationalistic Croatian identity takes on a reified, heavily romanticized form that partially forgets the events after Croatian independence, a willful forgetting, a little bit like Glasgow Celtic fans who increasingly sing songs in support of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) of the Troubles era, pre-the triumph of the Peace Process. The Peace Process, and the reversion to democracy after the Balkan wars of the 1990s, both seem to give license to old dreams and enmities, now conducted largely in symbolic forms as acts of symbolic resistance to whatever forces may be threatening to oppress in any particular case. As Hodges (2024, p. 124) says about some younger ultras at NK Istra 1961 FC (Croatia): “Because they had not experienced the war directly, they took the ideas to new extremes.” The safer modern situations put some distance between us and the past, but, in the Croatian–Australian case, magnified by geographic distance as well as by time, the ritualized search for meaning and rebellion seems to ignore modern developments (and certain past developments too) in the search for the more visceral and unsettling.

This case is an example of where this type of sports history or sport sociology goes way beyond sport. This is contrary to the prevailing trend where the sports academics from the business schools have increasingly begun to challenge the sociology and cultural studies researchers for control of the storyline. The business school approach tends to define the supporters as consumers and as part of the club’s business model, and, in the English Premier League (EPL), some supporters are beginning to use the terms of the business world among themselves in fan discourse. My work on the Croatian supporters in Melbourne highlights the life struggles of the ultras, mostly lads in their late teens and twenties, and, as mentioned, the sports stadium is simply one place where they tend to congregate on certain days of the week. Their struggles there tend to be symptomatic of their wider struggles in an Anglo-dominated society on the other side of the world, where, when the Croatians first arrived, they were already cast into the “subject position” (Gordon 1980, pp. 244–45; Foucault [1994] 1998, p. 222; [1994] 2000, pp. 331, 336; Weeks 2003, pp. 56, 65) of strange interlopers. They were seen as non-Anglo, and hence as irredeemably foreign and European, with all the cultural baggage and ideological misconceptions that came with that.1

Initially, the new immigrants from the Baltic states and Eastern Europe had to work for two years on large-scale government projects such as the Snowy Hydro Scheme (McHugh 1995; Hollinsworth 1998, p. 234). Between 1947 and 1954, 170,000 displaced persons arrived in Australia and took up employment in construction and manufacturing (Appleyard 1964, p. 46; Hollinsworth 1998, p. 234), and many, if not the majority, held anticommunist views (Hollinsworth 1998, p. 234).2 Especially in the early years of the community, the Croatian Diaspora had very little influence and very little ability to speak and be listened to as they had limited English-language skills (Hay 1998, p. 57) and worked in manufacturing jobs in the western suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney (Hollinsworth 1998, p. 225). They were vulnerable to exploitation and abuse from both mainstream and small employers. This is what Foucault means by a “subject position” with little or no authority to speak according to the dominant discourses and practices of the time. Only at the Croatian football clubs could men find welcome and community as well as jobs and marriage partners (Hay 1998, p. 55). Although the situation has changed somewhat, at least in terms of the ultras’ ability to speak English and operate within mainstream society, their location in the working-class areas of the major cities and their social classification as Croatian and Eastern European still limit their ability to influence events, including the ability to be heard and seen on important issues such as national-league entry (Hughson 1997a, pp. 168, 171). Then, as now, they are perceived as secretive, clannish, quasi-criminal, overly religious, volatile, and passionate (Hughson 1997a, p. 171, 2000, p. 20), and these raw and strange passions were seen and perceived to be fully displayed and unleashed at “their” football stadiums.

The better-educated, middle-class Croatian émigrés created a new dynamic and sense of identity, but they tended to be more assimilable into the Anglo world. Hughson (1997b, pp. 242, 257) talked of the “old Cro builder” as a kind of cultural icon for the Bad Blue Boys (BBB) lads, a working-class figure that never could or wanted to assimilate. This discourse led to a certain tension emerging between the middle-class Croatians who took over Sydney Croatia in the 1990s and the ultras (Hughson 1997b, pp. 253–54). When the new managers changed the club name to Sydney United, the ultras “kept ethnicity in on the sly” (that could really read “sectarianism”) (Hughson 1997a, p. 175; 1997b, p. 255) by interpreting the U in United to be a reference to the Ustaše. The middle-class Croatians lacked the nationalistic edge that was both symbolic and practical, valued by the working-class Croatian lads who used it for rallying purposes.

The research articles and book chapters of this type are also interesting and important, beyond the realms of sport and sport history, because they illustrate types of Diaspora masculinity that are freely chosen and acted out (R. W. Connell 1995; R. Connell 2000, 2007; Butler [1990] 1999, 2002, 2024), but which are incomprehensible or seriously off-putting (if not offensive) for some Anglo-Australians and others. It is not just the brash assertion of a non-Anglo identity but the willed acting out of this identity, with the clear implication that it is important and vital, if not primary (for them). There is no apparent desire or willingness to grow out of it, to put it to one side, or to repent of it in favor of adopting Anglo-Australian values and behavioral norms.

The next section will briefly outline background factors and following this is a Methods section (Section 3). Then, in the Results section (Section 4), I look first at the day the Serbian club, Springvale White Eagles, visited Somers Street stadium (Section 4.1), followed by a subsection utilizing Michel Foucault’s theory on power-knowledge (Section 4.2). Section 4.3 and Section 4.4 within Results look at the MCF’s views relating to Europe and Australian mainstream organizations, respectively.

2. Background

While the Scots in Australia and elsewhere were seen as clannish and the Irish as emotional and passionate followers of an emotional and passionate religion, in Australia, they were integrated into the mainstream at various stages, the Scots first and the Irish second. By the 1950s, when the mainland Europeans arrived in larger numbers, this was a further spur to work towards the integration of the Irish. The British and Irish immigrants, by and large, and especially in the second half of the twentieth century, had marshalled together under the banner of being Australians (of “Anglo-Celtic stock”). The assumption and normative expectation were that hostilities and enmities from the Old World, whether they be religious or political or both, were to be put to one side and forgotten in the interests of nation-building (Hughson 1997a, p. 173; Hay 1998, pp. 53, 56). By and large, with a few exceptions here and there, these dictates, somewhat surprisingly perhaps in hindsight, were adhered to, and the white Australians now saw themselves primarily as Australians rather than as British, Irish, English, Welsh, or Scottish. The Italians had no “natural” “ethnic” rival in Australia, and hence they were largely left alone, although generally still regarded as Other. By contrast, the Croatians, Serbians, and Macedonians (there were also some who self-identified as Yugoslavs) tended to keep their identities as primary, and this perspective was anathema to many Anglo-Australians (Hay 1998, p. 53). The Greek Macedonian teams, such as Heidelberg United Alexander in Melbourne, had a further conflict with the teams associated with what is now, in Europe, North Macedonia (Hughson 1997a, p. 174).

The Croatians at the BBB and MCF took on Australian identity only instrumentally at the times and places of their own choosing (Hughson 1999, p. 22). They maintained a largely rights-based discourse on the basis of their Australian citizenship (Hughson 1997a, pp. 168, 169, 179). While they did make claims upon, and to some extent valued, their Australian citizenship, culturally they saw themselves as distinct from the Anglos. In actual fact, their Croatian identity was generally more meaningful to them and they saw it as highly culturally significant and relevant (Hughson 1999, p. 22). They self-identified with the political and ethnic struggles in the Balkans and in no way did the majority ever accept the Anglo-Australian concept that Old World struggles should be put to one side, or put to bed, once in Australia.

3. Materials and Methods

The researcher wanted to investigate the reactions of traditional “ethnic”-based former National Soccer League (NSL) clubs to the current situation in the sport, as well as their opinions on the future of the sport and their own club’s future. The research questions for the broader project were as follows (James and Walsh 2018, p. 432): (a) How did Football Federation Australia (FFA) [now Football Australia] utilize the new A-League and the associated scorched earth or ground zero ideology in 2004–2005 to institute exclusion upon the ethnic NSL clubs?3 (b) What have been the consequences of the A-League restructuring upon Australian football’s stakeholders including the ethnic clubs and their fans? (c) What sources and forms of resistance have emerged to challenge the A-League model?

The foundation clubs of the first NSL season 1977 were as follows (in order of finishing the season), with each club’s prime or presumed “ethnic” identity listed in brackets: Eastern Suburbs (Jewish), Marconi Fairfield (Italian), Fitzroy United (Greek/Greek Macedonian), Adelaide City (Italian), Western Suburbs (Anglo-Australian), St George-Budapest (Hungarian), West Adelaide (Greek), Footscray JUST (Yugoslav procommunist), Brisbane Lions (Dutch), Brisbane City (Italian), South Melbourne (Greek), Sydney Olympic (Greek), Canberra City (non-ethnic), and Mooroolbark (English). Although I find the terms “ethnic” and “non-ethnic” problematic, if not offensive, and “non-ethnic” is a ludicrous description, I keep the terms here as they are so entrenched within both sporting and academic circles in Australia that our very understanding of events tends to be inseparable from the terms themselves, regardless of our personal views. Hughson (1999, p. 25; 2002, p. 47) has pointed out that, in Australian discourses, the English have never been classified or viewed as an “ethnic” group, with “mainstream” and “ethnic” being seen as mutually exclusive opposites. Canberra City was set up specifically in 1977 to be non-aligned with any particular existing ethnic group (Gorman 2017, pp. 68–70, 73–76, 78–82). Other “non-ethnic” or “mainstream” clubs to have featured in the NSL include Newcastle KB United, Newcastle United Jets, Northern Spirit, Perth Glory, and Adelaide United.

It is important to explain how the interviews came about, who the interviews were with, where the locations were, and what the moods were like as these things are vital for understanding what was said and the style and manner of the conversations. The interview with the ultras leaders, aged in their twenties, in the social club was very different from the more formal and organized interviews with the club president and secretary. In the Abstract and Methodology, I explain the aim of the article and the aims of the broader project. The aim of the present article is to explore identity formation and negotiation and how identity formation informs relations with outsider groups, including the football club, parents, the regulatory body, fans of other clubs, and the media. In other words, I was interested in the practices, ideology, and culture of the ultras. The interviews could be termed semi-structured, although this term is defined somewhat differently by different sources (Barriball and While 1994; Parahoo 2006, pp. 329–31, 473; Sparkes and Smith 2014, p. 84). Parahoo (2006, p. 329) regards semi-structured interviews as those where the same questions are asked of all participants but further probing questions can be asked or questions requiring clarification. As Purdy (2014, p. 162) explains, “semi-structured interviews include pre-determined questions but also possess the flexibility for you to explore additional areas which may emerge throughout the discussion.” Purdy (2014, p. 162) argues that with semi-structured interviews, the phrasing of questions and the order of questions can be modified as circumstances dictate. Note that it was a last-minute idea to try to interview the ultras and questions were not prepared in advance. Hence this could be viewed as an unstructured interview or simply as a qualitative rather than quantitative interview (Parahoo 2006).

Firstly, in late 2009 or early 2010, I sent an email out to the full set of former NSL clubs that had a known or presumed non-Anglo-Australian ethnic identity, inviting them to participate in the research. I used as an initial list those ethnic clubs which participated in the last NSL season, 2003–04. Only Melbourne Knights responded and so I journeyed to Melbourne from Queensland in February 2010 to interview the then-president of Melbourne Knights, Ange Cimera. I took detailed shorthand notes. However, this 16 February 2010 interview was not audio- or video-recorded. It was a quiet weekday out of season, and hence a long and detailed discussion was possible. The interview length was 1 h, 40 min. Because only Melbourne Knights responded, I chose to change the topic so as to focus only on the Knights.

After this trip, I decided that I needed more primary data and began to talk online with Ange’s daughter, Melinda Cimera, the club’s secretary. In January 2011, I revisited Somers Street stadium to interview Melinda. As her regular day job was as a school teacher, I had to wait until the school holidays. On that day, I interviewed Melinda in the boardroom of the club. Also seated around the table was a young man who said nothing and looked taciturn. As I was on the club premises and grateful for the opportunity to interview people from the club, I made no comment. At the end of the interview, I asked Melinda whether I could interview members of the MCF ultras. Then the same young man who had been present for the first half of the interview, Pave Jusup, was brought back into the room!

Pave and I were joined by Kova and we toured the club, including the dressing room, before conducting a group interview at the empty Batcave Social Club located under the grandstand. I was offered a bottle of Croatian beer from the fridge and the atmosphere became jovial as the ultras culture began to take hold. Despite the humor, sarcasm, and irony of the interview discourse, many serious points were made, often buried somewhat within the humor. At this interview, I also made detailed shorthand notes and made a consistent effort to attribute the right comments to the right person. I had to write quickly, as the interaction and banter often came at a fast and furious pace, and a chain of conversation would appear incoherent later if a relevant line or phrase was left out.

Pave, then aged 22, chose to use his real name, while Kova, then aged 26, chose to be referred to only via his nickname, Kova. In later years, Pave would become vice-president and then-president of the football club.4 At the end of the interview, Kova drove me back the considerable distance to my hotel accommodation in Broadmeadows in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, and the car conversation centered on football topics.

In terms of participant observation, I attended three or four Knights home games at Somers Street in the seasons 2010, 2011, and 2012. I stood with the MCF on the terraces on the eastern side of the stadium underneath the small bar, which was sometimes manned by Pave and/or Kova. I was able to interact with and ask a few questions of Pave and Kova, although their main attention was devoted to serving customers.

Now I move on to talk about participant observation, my second data-collection method. Participant observation can range in practice from nearly 100% participation to close to 100% observation (Parahoo 2006, p. 364). Observation is the oldest research method known to humanity (Adler and Adler 1994, p. 377; Parahoo 2006, p. 347) and still can be extremely valuable to researchers. It is especially suitable in conjunction with a Foucauldian framework, where observation can allow dominant discourses and materialized practices to be accessed and observed. It is not only the extraordinary and unusual events that are of interest, but also the regular discourses and practices, including common-sense practices that become internalized and possibly subconscious, such as serving drinks in a pub. These discourses and practices reveal intentions, goals, priorities, and values, and those initiated and supported by the dominant group reproduce themselves as power-knowledge is created, maintained, reproduced, and extended within an institution and a physical space. We see in our case Croatian–Australian power-knowledge being dominant within the stadium confines, while Anglo-Australian dominant discourses and practices (or at least “Melbourne mainstream” liberal-democratic discourses and practices) prevail outside of it. However, while observation as a method can reveal what and how actions take place within a space, the why question is better answered via conversations, interviews, and questionnaires (Morgan et al. 2014, p. 124).

To summarize, I conducted an interview with the club president in February 2010. I conducted a personal interview with the club secretary in January 2011. I conducted a group interview with two MCF ultras leaders, Pave and Kova, in January 2011. There was another ultra present, but he said nothing. I attended several home games between 2010 and 2012 as a participant-observer. I studied news media and online fan discussions from 2010 onwards.

I studied the interview transcripts and identified key themes. In Section 4, I only explore those themes that relate primarily to the MCF, rather than to the football club or the regulatory body. (Other themes emerging from the primary data are explored in other papers by the author.) Section 4.1 discusses the day the Serbian club Springvale White Eagles visited Somers Street; Section 4.2 applies Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge to dominant discourses and practices at the stadium; Section 4.3 explores the MCF’s views on Europe and European communities, while Section 4.4 looks at the MCF’s views towards mainstream Australian organizations. I assume that the views of the two MCF leaders are a fair approximation of the group’s views and it is a limitation of the study that more members of the group were not interviewed. I supplemented the interview data with a study of online supporter discussions.

4. Results

4.1. The Day the Serbian Club Springvale White Eagles Visited Somers Street

A certain kind of ironic detachment was sometimes visible, as when, for example, Pave Jusup (a key MCF leader) told me at a match at Melbourne Knights’ Somers Street stadium in 2011 or 2012 that the Serbian supporters of the Serbian club (Springvale White Eagles) were not in attendance in the capacity or subject position of ultras, but were seated quietly with their parents in the grandstand. Whether that was a literally true comment or not on the day in question, Pave had a clearly apparent glee as he felt that the Serbians had admitted publicly to a lack of bravery in not arriving in the capacity of ultras. They were there, but they were incognito, as it were, almost in hiding, so as to avoid troubles at the home ground of their rivals. But there was also a sense that Pave was admiring their dedication as fans and their family loyalties. In the presence of their parents, they were expected to engage in good behavior and this was seen as a cultural trait and expectation that the Croatians shared.

Sports historian Roy Hay (1998, 2001) has claimed that the Croatian clubs in Melbourne and Sydney have done all that they could have done over the years to calm down the more extreme elements in their support. Hay (2001, p. 79) quotes Mosely (1994, pp. 35–36) approvingly when he writes that the Ustaše did not control Sydney Croatia. Ustaše elements existed within the supporter base but never dictated club direction or policy, and, as Mosely says, they were only “tolerated on match day”. For Hay (1998, p. 61), to view the Croatian football clubs as primarily political in the 1950s risks reading the post-1970s situation onto an earlier, simpler time. Furthermore, Hay (2001, pp. 88, 90) argues that crowd violence at matches has usually been due to personality-based or regional tensions rather than being a simple playing out or acting out of animosities exported from the Balkans (James 2023). This is an important point that has not been emphasized enough.

By the 1990s, the Australian football administrators had taken a dislike to the two Croatian clubs and they were not made welcome when invitations were opened to participate in the new A-League that was to replace the NSL in 2005. Hughson (1997b, p. 247) has expressed concern about fascist tendencies within the clubs’ supporter bases including within the BBB during the early and mid-1990s. Backed by the influx of fresh immigrants fleeing the wars in the Balkans, the 1990s were a time of success on and off the field for both Croatian clubs, as crowds soared and teams became more ethnically Croat. At the same time, the dedicated fan bases of the Italian and Greek clubs were shrinking in size in the wake of both declining immigration rates and integration.

The newfound achievements and successes of the two Croatian clubs added to the jealousies and anxieties surrounding them. Their Croatian nationalism increased in strength and abrasiveness as new immigrants blended in with second- and third-generation people. An important event in this regard occurred in the 2000–01 NSL season when Perth Glory’s striker of Serbian descent, Slobodan “Bobby” Despotovski, gave a three-fingered Serbian salute to the Croatian fans behind the goal at Somers Street. In retaliation, Croatian fans angrily assembled around the Perth Glory team bus after the game.

Despotovski avoided substantial criticism for the incident, as the new club, Perth Glory, not aligned to any particular ethnicity, was drawing big crowds and was seen as a team of the future. By contrast, Melbourne Knights was painted as a team of the past, displaying outdated and “foreign” sectarian attitudes and unacceptable “European-style” violence. The abrasive approach of the then-president, Harry Mrksa, must have been seen as an own goal in hindsight. This event contributed to a general hardening of attitudes from regulators and some Anglo-Australians towards the “ethnic clubs” in general and the two Croatian clubs in particular.

Whilst Despotovski largely escaped blame, wrongly perhaps, the Anglo-Australian regulators and general public were able to portray the incident as reflecting the Eastern Europeans’ unwillingness to let go of “foreign identifications and enmities” once they got to Australia. This narrative was important to the right-wing, including people such as Prime Minister John Howard, but those who might have otherwise been supportive, such as the local left-wing, were alarmed by scenes from Europe of Nazi salutes and ethnic war. While I argue that any right-wing MCF fan culture is more an expression of opposition to the communist regime in Yugoslavia than anything more general, it was easier for people to seize upon signs to the contrary, and this then got wrapped up in more general anti-immigration discourses. There is opposition and fear presently in Australia surrounding African and Middle Eastern immigration.

In the 1990s, the club officially adopted the “Knights” name, which is an acronym for Klub Nogometa i Gdje Hrvati Takmice Srcem (meaning: football club and where Croatians battle with their heart) (Gorman 2014). This acronym shows the amazing skill and ingenuity of the Croatians in bringing ethnicity into the league on the sly during a period when names of foreign countries were not permitted to be inserted into club names (Hughson 1997a, p. 170; 2000, p. 8).

4.2. Foucault and Power-Knowledge

Based on Michel Foucault’s ([1975] 1977, 1980, [1994] 2000) idea of power-knowledge, we can look at the power and meaning evident within discourses and practices, and their location within physical space, at Somers Street stadium and the broader society. The average Melbourne Knights home crowd now might be one thousand people or fewer, increasing for derby matches or special games. Back in the NSL era (1984–2004), home crowds were four to eight thousand.

The older, more respectable fans sit in the grandstand, the Mark Viduka Stand, on the western side of the stadium. Based on my participant observation, the other three sides are concrete terracing and the 60 or 70 MCF members stand on the terraces on the outer wing in front of the refreshment stand/bar. The MCF members are carefully positioned in space, with the 10 or 12 younger teenagers on lower steps and the older ones higher up near the bar. They are of drinking age and so their position higher up the terrace signifies higher status (which the right to drink symbolizes and reinforces) and grants them the spatial location to control the teenagers via the regulatory gaze. A clear two or three unoccupied concrete steps is a no-man’s land between the territories occupied by the groups. The remainder of the terracing is largely empty, although some older fans stand at the back in the center of the outer wing, including a minority (possibly 10%) of Anglo-origin fans who are leftovers from the NSL era. In Driver’s (1985, p. 428) words:

The disciplines become techniques for use in power relationships of various kinds. For example, [Foucault] identifies a new architectural discourse concentrating not on display but on control. Hospitals become machines to ensure better observation, treatment, and ventilation. Furthermore, this “observation” was at the root of a “normalizing” judgment which distributed individuals according to their aptitudes and conduct, pressuring them to conform. The medical or educational examination becomes a technique for placing individuals along a whole range of degrees of normality.

The regulatory gaze also extends across the field from the grandstand. At one home game, probably the game against Springvale White Eagles, I observed the teenagers singing political chants relating to homeland conflicts, and the then club president, Ange Cimera, walked over to them and stood next to them in the second half—his manner was friendly and benevolently paternal, but there was also a clear aspect of surveillance and control and the wish to minimize “deviancy”. Pave’s positioning in the boardroom at my Melinda Cimera interview may also represent Croatian power-knowledge at work. As Driver (1985, p. 429) goes on to explain, based on his understanding of Foucault’s ([1975] 1977) most famous book, Discipline and Punish:

A complete panoply of disciplinary techniques was employed in Bentham’s Panopticon scheme—a plan for a model prison institution proposed at the end of the eighteenth century—and Foucault designates the discourse from which it emerges as “panopticism”. In ideal form, this represents a segmented space-time, supervised continuously and at every point, in which power is exercised without division and in which each individual is constantly distributed, located, and examined—all this in place of a haunting memory of “contagions”—plague, crime, vagabondage, rebellion, and disorder. At the heart of the Panopticon is the optical-mechanical technique whereby the inmates, in their cells at the periphery of a circular building, can be observed by an observer they cannot see; they are always, potentially, under the gaze of the prison governor.

In our case, the football stadium stands in for the prison, but the general points of the analysis continue to apply. In terms of “policing”, any violence or disruptive behavior at games featuring Central or Eastern European clubs tends to be highlighted in the media as examples of Central/Eastern European politics and passion, neither of which is seen as desirable, and both of which are feared. As Driver (1985, p. 429) explains, “The carceral discourse, for Foucault, describes both the penitentiary technique and the production of the delinquent.” In fact, “The disciplines themselves are described as ‘small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion’ (DP, page 139)” (Driver 1985, p. 430).

So the Anglo-Australian mainstream also “polices” events within the stadium but from a distance, both in space and time. That distance does not reduce its power, but instead, the Anglo figures take on spectral form, haunting the inhabitants of the stadium with the threats of future condemnation ringing in their ears. Hence “policing” within the stadium is largely based on Croatian cultural hegemony while outside it comes mostly from Anglo-Australian regulators, journalists, football fans, and assorted others, including Members of Parliament trying to spread moral panic. The difference between the situation in the Balkans and Australia is that any moral panic in the Balkans centers on “disruptive ultras” whereas in Australia it centers on “disruptive Eastern European ultras”, so the stigmatization based on class is augmented by stigmatization based on race/ethnicity, although most or nearly all of the MCF are Australian citizens.

Despite this, in other social and institutional contexts, MCF members may function as part of a “mainstream”, and their adaptability and strategic ability to stand out or fit in, as they so wish, points to a kind of rival power based on both collectivist cultural and religious values from Croatia and exposure to Western European human rights discourses. These two things, mixed with an eternal sense of grievance, have proved to be quite powerful, as the case of Glasgow Celtic in Glasgow indicates, where, arguably, the Unionist/British discourse of Rangers fans has been eclipsed by the rebel, anti-Unionist, and Republican (in both the Irish and Scottish senses) discourse of Celtic fans as a source of social power, even in elite realms of society, in the twenty-first century. The MCF, for its part, also has a good relationship with the club, with Pave going on to become club president, which allows for its power-knowledge to be extended somewhat throughout stadium space, online space, and beyond those confines. However, their immigrant status, race/ethnicity, and location mostly in Melbourne’s working-class western suburbs and the satellite city of Geelong, put limitations upon that power (Hughson 1997a, p. 168). The club and its administrators are affected by most of these factors, too.

4.3. The MCF and Their Views on Europe and European Communities

We shall now return to the last week of the 1989 NSL season and to an obscure ground in the Melbourne suburbs. The match in question was Melbourne Croatia versus Footscray JUST (Jugoslav United Soccer Team). Footscray JUST, during this particular season known as Melbourne City JUST, was the club widely understood as being supported by the Yugoslav government and those émigrés who saw themselves primarily as Yugoslav. Their official sponsor was the national airline of Yugoslavia. Their archrival was Melbourne Croatia, the club that drew its support primarily from the local community of anticommunist, Croatian nationalist émigrés. They would freely fly the red-and-white checkered Croatian coat of arms and proudly use the club name Croatia (the Melbourne Knights name came later).5 Hence, the tension in the Balkans was being literally played out in a nondescript Melbourne stadium thousands of kilometers away from Europe.

At this game, JUST, if they lost, would be relegated from the NSL into the Victorian Premier League (Hay 2001, p. 88). The YouTube highlights video shows a crowd of five thousand witness Melbourne Croatia score two goals to win the game 2-0 (Straza41 n.d.). The game was played as a doubleheader at Middle Park, the home of South Melbourne. The scorers were Željko Adžić in the 52nd minute and Joe Ćaleta in the 77th minute (Stock et al. 2023). In the lead-up to the second goal, the flamboyant dreadlocked black striker Francis Awaritefe skillfully tapped the ball over to his left, at close to a ninety-degree angle, for Ćaleta to score, right in front of the Croatia fans (Straza41 n.d.). JUST dropped down into the bottom two, was relegated, and never recovered from the blow, disbanding a year later. It is interesting how this game and even the result mirrored political events in the Balkans, with Croatia declaring its independence in 1991.

The ideology of the MCF was resolutely anticommunist, but this should be seen as a particular historical position relative to the Yugoslav communist party. It does not mean, by inference, that the members were right-wing in their everyday lives outside of football contexts. I have seen members wearing merchandise of the left-wing Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and, due to the Mark Viduka connection at the time, Celtic Football Club merchandise. Celtic is known worldwide as a left-wing club and one of the most left-wing in the world, alongside St Pauli and several others. This would seem to indicate that the members have a variety of attitudes that tend to include both left-wing and right-wing aspects.

The Torcida ultras at Hajduk Split in Croatia are also nationalist but with some left-wing aspects, such as being against excessive commodification in Modern Football; liberal-democratic politicians in cahoots with crony capitalism; and repressive laws/police brutality (Perasović and Mustapić 2018). This concurs with the complex mix of right-wing and left-wing aspects observed at Melbourne Knights. Interestingly, only lower-league Croatian club NK Zagreb 041 is known to have predominantly left-wing ultras, the White Angels (Hodges 2024). Hodges (2024, p. 111) claims that the Demons ultras (NK Istra 1961 FC, Croatia) group’s “no politics” positioning is “(i) a strategy for managing diversity, (ii) a rejection of party politics, and (iii) a foil that has facilitated a Croatian nationalist position among younger group members.”6

While Ante Pavelić (1889–1959) was something of an iconic figure for the MCF and the club supporters in general (Hughson 1997b, p. 247, 2000, p. 12), Pave Jusup declares that his appeal was that he was the last leader of an independent Croatia prior to the 1990s rather than fascism. While some might view this position as disingenuous, Pavelić was the most obvious person who could be used as a symbolic and ideological counterweight to Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), whose framed picture to this day still allegedly hangs behind the bar at Perth procommunist club Spearwood Dalmatinac (which merged with Cockburn United to form Cockburn City).

Pave and others tended to have an ideology that was essentialized and somewhat frozen in time, at points in the 1950s and the 1990s. They did not believe or acknowledge that there were people who were sincere communists or sincere Yugoslavs—they saw these people as “Serbians in disguise” and hence dishonest. Hence, they saw the supporters of JUST as Serbians by another name, and, after the fall of communism in the Balkans, they switched their rivalry over to Serbian clubs such as Springvale White Eagles and Bonnyrigg White Eagles. They even preferred these clubs’ supporters over JUST supporters, as “at least they were honest in terms of who they were” (this quote belongs to either Pave or Kova; it emerged in conversation).

The MCF’s ideological system did not try to comprehend that the Tito regime in Yugoslavia had support, and that that support varied in multiple, often contradictory ways during the period 1950–90. It is hard to ascertain the support it received at any particular moment due to the absence of opinion polls (Goldstein 1999, p. 162) but presumably support was highest in the late 1940s through to the 1950s and then experienced transitory rises and falls (Goldstein 1999, p. 162). With the influx of emigrants into Australia in the 1980s and 1990s, the ideology and historical knowledge were updated through contacts with these people and reading of the news media. Links to the homeland were rarely broken and there are historic links between BBB and the original Bad Blue Boys of Dinamo Zagreb (Hughson 1997b, p. 246). As MCF leader Kova told me, “I think that there were more Masseys [Macedonians] than Croatians at JUST.”7 The MCF leaders seemed convinced that support for JUST was distributed, in their way of thinking, as 85% Serbians, 10% Macedonians, and 5% Croatians. The MCF refused to acknowledge Yugoslav identification.

Historically, in Europe, we had a situation that was not as clear-cut as the storyline portrayed by the MCF, although there are clear points of similarity, as occurs with all myths and their relations to complex reality.8 While the Communist Party had a reservoir of goodwill in the 1940s and 1950s due to its role in defeating fascism and its ability to plot a somewhat independent course vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the notion of Yugoslavia and Yugoslav was never willingly adopted by most residents of Croatia. Judah ([1997] 2000, p. 143) connects waning Communist Party strength and popularity after 1966 with the removal in that year of Aleksandar Ranković (1909–1983), who had been Tito’s heir apparent and a Serb centralist.

The Croatian renaissance of 1967–71, aka the Croatian Spring, led by the intellectuals at Matica Hrvatska and later by young communists, Savka Dabčević-Kučar (1923–2009) and Ante “Miko” Tripalo (1926–1995), was another important period in Croatian history (Judah [1997] 2000, p. 146). A key development indicative of the mood of the times was the reinstatement of Stjepan Radić (1871–1928), the assassinated leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, as a Croatian hero, despite the fact that he had, as Tito well knew, despised communists (Judah [1997] 2000, p. 146). Judah ([1997] 2000, p. 146) perceptively remarks that “the debates of the period 1970-1 in Croatia were simply a dress rehearsal for those of the late 1980s”. He then added the insightful observation that “without Tito to draw everyone back from the brink, the second time around the national questions were pushed relentlessly to their bloody conclusions”.9

In terms of unwillingness to identify as Yugoslav, we can see a marked decline in the percentage of people living in Croatia who self-identified as Yugoslav between 1981 and 1991. The 1991 Census reveals that self-identifying Serbs were 12.2% of the Croatian resident population, while those who self-identified as Yugoslav were only 2.2% (Goldstein 1999, pp. 180, 193–94; Judah [1997] 2000, pp. 340–44). These people tended to be left-wing Croats, government workers, and children of mixed marriages (Goldstein 1999, pp. 193–94). By contrast, as at the 1981 Census, Serbs were 11.6% of the Croatian resident population, while those who self-identified as Yugoslav were 8.2%. The unpopularity of Yugoslav identification was to become one reason for the historic victory, in Australia and Europe, of the MCF’s worldview. For his part, historian Ivo Goldstein (1999, pp. 212, 260) notes that the émigrés who were expected to return to the home country after 1991 never did so in big numbers, and those who did so often allegedly held regressive views that focused on old enmities.

Perasović and Mustapić (2018) provide an ethnographic study of the Torcida ultras at Hajduk Split, Croatia. They note that the “biggest Croatian derby” (70) is between Hajduk Split and Dinamo Zagreb. At Melbourne Knights, every effort was made to maintain a pan-Croatian nationalist identity where fans of both Hajduk Split and Dinamo Zagreb were and are made welcome. The biggest enmity is with Springvale White Eagles (Serbian) (now) and JUST (in the past), suggesting that these attitudes are somewhat frozen in time compared to the attitude in Split. However, Dinamo Zagreb fans may still perceive today that Red Star Belgrade is their biggest rival, albeit rarely playing each other. Split ultras are excluded from this rivalry.

4.4. The MCF and Their Views Towards Mainstream Australian Organizations

Pave Jusup has defended his club from its detractors by stating, very reasonably, that meetings are conducted in English rather than Croatian, and “we also never check at the gate if you are Croatian or not”. In defense of the second proposition, he refers to an MCF member known as “West Ham” because he wears a West Ham United shirt. The point in relation to this person was that everybody simply assumed he was Croatian and a couple of years passed before it was realized he was of Anglo origin. This story is not as far-fetched as it may sound, given that most or nearly all of the second- and third-generation MCF have Australian accents. Croatian power-knowledge may operate within the confines of the stadium but there are gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions within it, and it is not necessarily seen as oppressive.

The MCF, as well as Melbourne Knights club president, Ange Cimera, and secretary, Melinda Cimera, were very critical of Football Federation Australia (FFA) effectively banning ethnic-origin clubs from the A-League, although in recent years they have qualified for the FFA Cup (now Australia Cup) competition. Sydney United, formerly Sydney Croatia, came 10th out of 13 in the final season of the NSL and were certainly treated unfairly in terms of not being welcome into the A-League. The club Western United, based not far from Melbourne Knights, in the Melbourne western suburbs, was admitted to the A-League only a few seasons ago and has struggled to attract crowds.

Pave argues that “the Poms”, meaning the English or Anglo-Australians, “have taken over the game”.10 He and Kova do not attribute any extra legitimacy to the Anglo-Australians—they regard each ethnic group, including the Anglos, as being in competition for their moment in the Australian sun, with only the Indigenous Aboriginal people having a special status. Therefore, Pave and Kova dispute that the FFA was or is acting in the best interests of the game or in the best interests of all ethnic groups. As Hughson points out, the problem with the Australian concept of multiculturalism was that it was never made clear whether the Anglos were just one ethnic group among many or whether they had special status as the inner wheel in the circle around which were located the other groups in some kind of outer ring. As mentioned earlier, the English were never regarded as an “ethnic group” (Hughson 1999, p. 25; 2002, p. 47).

The following somewhat humorous and politically incorrect exchange between Pave and Kova took place at our interview at the Batcave Social Club in 2011:

Kova: For a multicultural country it [Australia] is still very racist.

Pave: It is an undercurrent; you have to understand what the double-speak is to understand what they are really doing. When the Socceroos play there are [Anglo-Australian] people behind it but there is tension. There is still an “us-and-them” mentality but it’s not out in the open. We never said [at Knights] that “everyone’s welcome” but we also never check at the gate if you are Croatian or not. We are not holding meetings here in Croatian are we?

Kova: It comes back to the White Australia Policy; they are white, we are olive.

Pave: But we came in under the White Australia Policy.

Kova: They wanted people with the big t**s really [laughs]. It’s like David and Goliath but we don’t have a Jewish name [all laugh].11

The last three comments are especially illuminating here, with serious commentary being wrapped up in banter, consistent with the way that these ultras talked throughout the interview. We may need to infer the meaning of some comments, and interpretations might differ. At the beginning, Pave and Kova maintain that Australia has a racism problem, and even when the Australian national football team, the Socceroos, plays, there is tension and an us-and-them mentality—the accepted mainstream discourses and their hostile underside amount to what they call “doublespeak”—two sets of meaning existing at the same time. Pave talks about inclusivity at Melbourne Knights, contrary to the strong opinion existing in the mainstream world, as evidenced by speaking in English and not checking ethnicity at the gate. This has to be balanced, in his view, by the club never saying “everyone’s welcome”, which reflects a refreshing honesty about the importance of Croatian identity and culture at the club.

Kova moves on to mention the White Australia Policy, which forbade non-white immigration into Australia between 1901 and 1973, with the initial core pieces of legislation being the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (Cth), the Pacific Island Laborers Act 1901, and the Naturalization Act 1903 (Willard [1923] 1967; Palfreeman 1967; Markus 1994; Hollinsworth 1998, pp. 103–4, 109, 237–39, 244–45; Jayasuriya et al. 2003a, 2003b). Here Kova makes a distinction based on skin color—“they are white, we are olive”—in order to assert that whiteness is the criterion for social acceptance in Australia. But it seems likely that they rejoice in the distinction too, as it is a mark of difference. By this time, the conversation picked up speed and the lads were enjoying the wordplay and banter. But they managed to be humorous and serious at the same time, with the humor perhaps being used to smooth any anger that might have emerged in relation to the topics being discussed.

Pave interjects to say, “but we came in under the White Australia Policy”, referring to the relaxation of the policy in practice so as to admit Southern and Eastern Europeans into the country after World War II. Kova ends the sequence here with an out-of-place Jewish joke and the reference to the Australian authorities wanting “big t**s”, more humor here being used to make a sly dig at the authorities while praising the alleged characteristics of Eastern European women. Kova and Pave control the discourse here while we share Croatian beer in the empty Batcave Social Club on a quiet weekday afternoon out of season—they deconstruct the Australian authorities’ motives and jokingly refer to repressed sexual preferences as a way to take the moral high ground away from the Australian authorities. While the usual primary motive for relaxing the application of the White Australia Policy is assumed to be the need for extra manual laborers to assist in the task of post-war reconstruction and nation-building, neither the mainstream understanding nor Pave and Kova’s Freudian take allows the authorities to keep the high moral ground, or at least not in discourse. Kova’s biblical reference to David and Goliath reveals the underdog mentality that the group at times revels in, while also being frustrated by it when things go against them. Pave boldly asks the rhetorical question: “Why should we not be in the top division? We are the club of Mark Viduka.”12

5. Discussion: Novel Insights into Sports History

The power of the data in this case overpowers and overflows conventional binary understandings of social life—western/eastern, north/south, rational/emotional, pure/hybrid, immigrant/local, and marginalized/mainstream. We see nothing but hybridity and diaspora; their fixed ideological position fixes them in space and time, but their real lives, attitudes, and actions overflow the simple narrative storyline—they articulate resistance against everybody at every juncture for any and every reason—they judge others while they are also judged, but their judgments, due to their marginalized and interesting social position, seem more powerful, more cunning. Their homeland has returned in Europe, just as they said it would, while they waited in Australia wearing their red-and-white checked football shirts and Dinamo Zagreb tops. They flout conventions of one type or another—local and foreign, labeled Croatian and self-identifying as such—while, strategically and on occasion, speaking a rights-based discourse with an Australian accent from their suburban location in western Melbourne. They speak a variety of truths to a variety of powers, and their self-positioning is ironic, always ahead of the game, unabashedly Croatian to the nth degree.

These people overwhelm sport sociology and even more so the conventions of sport history—they transcend sport and they catch history out by rushing ahead of it—their Croatianness was both a past relic and a present and future reality, and their émigré national consciousness predated the creation of the nation-state in Europe—Viduka welcomed Tudjman rather than the other way around on Tudjman’s tour of Australia in 1995. They should not have been excluded from the A-League, and they know it—as Pave says, “We are the club of Mark Viduka.”13 Kova adds, “We are just like Liverpool--they are living on their former glories just like us.”14 Both European and Australian, but not in any simple kind of easily constructed or deconstructed hybrid, the MCF remains at Somers Street, a challenge to behold. I hope that this article too will be part-Croatian and part-Australian, but not as a simple addition of parts—more like a snake that can appear anywhere and be very hard to pin down or catch, alternately grinning and striking. The MCF hands out a challenge to the FFA and the Australian mainstream, laughing at the categories to which they are assigned, reinventing those categories from negative to positive creations, and repositing them yet again in defiant uprising.

Meanwhile, the Serbians sit in the grandstand next to their parents, both more family-oriented and conservative, while also being laughed at for being allegedly less brave. And the hierarchies of the Balkans are allegedly discursively overturned, at least for one day. The hierarchies of Australia are discursively challenged, on their own terms, but these oppressive power structures are still remote and strong, beyond and outside the western suburbs, beyond ultras culture, beyond family and hearth, annoying and oppressive, but historically non-Croatian, and that is what counts (as they turn the tables). Despotovski was wrong and the A-League sucks. Preston Lions, formerly Makedonia, and South Melbourne, formerly Hellas, drew a crowd of nine thousand people to an ordinary match this season. The NSL (spirit) lives on. You cannot defeat “the ethnics”. Because the Anglos tend to prefer Australian Rules football and rugby, the “ethnic” base in football will always be formidable even when beaten and defrauded by regulatory power.

We have something here like ideological time, rather than linear time, where ideology pushes down its weight. “Thirty or forty years later we will still be the Knights backed by the Croatian community”, says former club president Ange Cimera, “but second, third or fourth generation”.15 The self-identity, and here we begin to depart from Foucault, who did not want to talk in terms of ideology (only discourse), stands as something of an eternal truth, battered from all sides, but not defeated, as long as the club continues to hold on to loyalties and serves as a vehicle for hopes and dreams, in the midst of challenges, difficulties, and disappointments.

An independent Croatia exists in Europe now, says Ange Cimera.16 Now we (the Knights) mirror them but before, they, deprived of their independence, could only look to us on the other side of the world as their true anchor and identity, or moral compass even, holding out against the odds, the red-and-white of Somers Street. We have here Croatian time, not linear time. With the club now using the “Knights” name, the word “Croatia” takes on a different kind of power as an unspoken, but nearly universally understood, signified,17 and functions as an unbreakable mental connection to a new and yet very old country in the heartlands of Eastern Europe.

6. Conclusions

In Natalie Araujo’s (2018) research, two Colombian women arrive in London in order to explore its democracy and alleged sophisticated cosmopolitanism, where gender roles are not so rigidly prescribed as in their home country. While they encounter numerous frustrations and disappointments in London, including noting that all of their friends are Latin Americans, they remain torn between the unresolved binary of an imagined Colombia and an imagined London. This may well be true for the MCF, but I want to reach a more optimistic conclusion where their numbers, their cunning shifts between aspects of identity, and their brash self-confidence in asserting their rights with flair and irony allow them to, if not become the victors, then at least enjoy the moment while avoiding obvious defeats. The high moral ground is seized, in an ironic way, as they morally assert their club’s right to join the A-League and their own right to maintain Croatian identity as primary. The Australian citizenship obviously comes in useful at times too, by giving them a subject position from which to speak, while their accent allows them to focus their disgust at times and fade into the background as and when required. The creation of the homeland in Europe proves, in their own eyes, that the émigrés were right all along.

We see complex issues of globalization and multiculturalism exposed in our case, with sport almost being relegated to the lens through which we view the MCF and the arena that brings the lads together, although they exist as individuals, at the very least, outside of sporting contexts. They struggle against two targets, as mentioned—a new one and an ancient one, i.e., an Anglo, corporate-style FFA administration that effectively bans their club for reasons of ethnicity from the new national league; and the Serbian youth that often live in the adjacent or nearby suburbs and follow Serbian-origin teams. Beyond this, there are innumerable other targets or points of struggle—against the historic concept of Yugoslavia; against communism, now turned into a struggle against “woke” liberal democracy (as Nosal et al. (2021) report for Polish ultras); against the pull to force them into becoming assimilated Anglo-Australians; against the various youth supporting mainstream and assorted ethnic-origin football clubs; and against the forces of Australian law and order and social control.