Hmm..well Australia doesn't have a class system so I wouldn't use "middle class" in regards to sport there.
Not like England we don't, but you're kidding yourself if you don't think there's a significant issue with income inequality and that people from different socio-economic backgrounds don't have different tastes. We have a much lower PDI (Power Distance Index) than a lot of countries, but its pretty well the same as the UK in reality.
Rugby and cricket are the two middle class British colonial games that are played among the same 5 or 6 nations (the anomaly being France as they adopted it willingly)..and both sports originate among upper class gentry, the genteel, polite, well mannered folk..."jolly good shot old boy". This tradition of good etiquette has been maintained in both sports.
This also just isn't true. If you go to New Zealand, Wales or pretty well anywhere in the Pacific Rugby is anything but the "jolly good shot old boy" sport you're talking about. In fact in NZ they used to talk about how they loved playing England because they took pleasure from dirtying up the stuck up-pommy private school boys nice white jumpers.
Football on the other hand is rooted in the working class; tribalism, passionate, it's the everyman game. This is reflected in the chants, the songs, the flags, the banners, the constant cheering for your own team and booing of the opposition (if Wayne Rooney is taking a penalty he would receive dogs abuse as he's preparing, in Rugby there would be a respectful silence). Also in football the fans are segregated (home fans, away fans)..you don't get that in most other sports (in the US you don't get any away fans).
Again, there's nothing in this statement that shouldn't have occurred in Australia with the AFL or Rugby League. Both are everyman games and both involve significant cross-town rivalries with lots of home and away fans. Watch a game with 95,000 Essenden and Collingwood fans at the MCG and tell me that AFL isn't every bit as passion filled an everyman game with loads of tradition. AFL fans are just as involved; they make the banners their teams run through and hold up plenty flags and other things in the crowds themselves. The fact that the game doesn't generate the kind of sociopathic and misanthropic behaviour soccer does, doesn't make it less passionate, it makes it less stupid.
In this sense, soccer fans needing to be segregated isn't a reflection of class or tradition, but something the much slower, lower contact and lower scoring nature of the game generates. It's also a game in which the referee has the most indelible and decisive impact on the result. In no other form of football is the referee's decision making more likely to decide a result (a lot of others have video review), and I also think this adds to the tension, as you get a lot more blatantly unjust decisions costing teams games.
If there ain't any of this in Rugby league or AFL I would say its because neither have the tradition of football. Certainly rugby league in England...it's similarly working class, but there ain't the banners, the songs, chants, flags...and while there is rivalry it's a parochial game played amongst themselves so it doesnt have the varying regional hatred. Similarly AFL is predominantly a state of Victoria game, always playing the neighbours.
What you mean to say is they don't have the tradition of thuggery and idiocy of soccer; they both have plenty of their own tradition however. Australian Football in fact predates soccer, being officially codified 4 years before soccer in 1859, and it's not mainly a victorian game. A trip to Western Australia, Adelaide and even Sydney now, and you'll see the game is hardly just a victorian game. And even if it was, "playing the neighbours" is precisely what is supposed to generate the need for crowd segregation according to you.
This is why I just don't buy your argument. People try and trawl out this crap about it being working class and having more tradition, but it's all BS; plenty of other sports have just as much tradition and levels of popularity at home, but they just don't have soccers problems.
- but these are the type of pretentious middle class white people who like to pretend that they're more cultured and sophisticated than your average joe, purely because they watch the highlights of the EPL on FoxSports once a month. What annoys me about that is that they're exhibiting a serious cultural cringe about their own country without even realising it; Australia isn't a soccer nation and it's as simple as that. It's like they're embarrassed that we should have sporting tastes that are genuinely unique, rather than just buying into the same homogenous boredom that much of Europe, Asia and South America obsess themselves with.
