The exogenous cultural incorporation of football into the Australian mainstream: A case of polyglot multiculturalism

This paper explains soccer’s entrance into the Australian mainstream in consequence of the Australian Football Federation (FFA) exercising symbolic violence, a modus operandi with the goal of re-writing the game’s cultural history. The claim is that the FFA attempts to hide the game’s historic foundations of ethnic diversity, with a multitude of ethnic-minority clubs (Greek, Italian, Hungarian, Maltese etc.) as well as its own actions which led to their eventual elimination and to create a perception that the game is Anglo-Australian. These attempts, it is claimed here, are similar to the theoretical model of polyglot multiculturalism; the dominant majority group will allow ethnic minorities to practise their own cultures so long as certain cultural boundaries, which may threaten the dominant culture, are not crossed.This paper contributes to the literature of multiculturalism in that it uses the empirical case of soccer in Australia to describe the imaginary boundary which a dominant culture will not allow ethnicminority cultures to cross.