Chapters (8)
So in one sense The Club is about Melbourne, an otherwise dour and inward-turning city, which has this one grand public passion. For all I know, it may be about Liverpool and Milan and Notre Dame as well. ‘The game of the people for the people’ is the official motto of Melbourne football. The clubs exist to serve the football followers—that’s the theory. The Club explores the quality of the service, and the motives of those who supply it.
Modern football is part of the popular entertainment industry. It has its performers, its managers, its promoters and plenty of hype. There isn’t as much money in the game (at least in Australia) as there is in, say, pop music or the movies. But the rewards—money, fame, prestige, power and the fringe benefits which go with them—are big enough to make them worth fighting for. Football is about all those things, but there is more to it than that. It is also about loyalty to people, to an institution and a tradition, and about pride in craftsmanship. And, like all games, it is about winning and losing. British (and Australian) ‘sportsmanship’ is not an ethic of indifference to the result of the game; it is a code of conduct which regulates the competition. Melbourne football coaches demand of their players that they ‘contest fiercely’; there is a tribunal to ensure that they contest within the rules.
The entertainment industry has its own internal contradictions—if we wanted to be pretentious, we could call them structural polarities. Suppliers and consumers do not necessarily agree about what constitutes good entertainment; hype reinforces rather than creates the response. Buying and selling performers, in an endeavour to maximise the chance of winning, cuts across established patterns of identification and loyalty. Managers and promoters have their own idea of what constitutes success, and their own axes to grind; they often tramp heavy-footed over the professional pride of the performers whom they seek to manipulate. The Club is about those contradictions; with the necessary changes in detail, it could probably be taken out of the club’s committee room and dropped into the back rooms of Hollywood, Wardour Street or Tin Pan Alley.
Football is, in formal terms, a game—a rule-governed contest. But the players/performers are not ‘playing’; the game is far too serious for that. Football is no fun for the big league footballers. For them, it may be about social mobility and financial gain, and whatever kicks a charismatic hero gets out of dominating his audience. But there is almost always in it, for the players, the craftsman’s satisfaction in a job well done. The Club is about that too.
So The Club is a play for many seasons—but above all a play for one season: Melbourne, in the long winter months.
‘Tiger-territory’
Melbourne, 1977
Ian Turner