Where to now, Melbourne Croatia?

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to review the cancellation of Australia's National Soccer League (NSL) competition and its replacement in 2004 with the corporatist A-League which is based on the North American model of "one team one city", no promotion and relegation, and private-equity clubs. The authors believe that one of the aims of the A-League and its "ground-zero" ideology was to institute exclusion of the ethnic clubs that had formed the backbone of the NSL for 30 years. Design/methodology/approach -Extensive literature search, participant-observation, one personal interview and two group interviews were employed. People interviewed were the President of the Croatian community's Melbourne Knights Football Club, the Club Secretary of Melbourne Knights, and three leaders of Melbourne Knights' MCF hooligan firm. Findings -The authors observe the Football Federation Australia hiding behind the perceived scientific nature and technical veracity of budgeted accounting numbers to set the financial bar too high for the ethnic clubs to find a place in the brave new world that has been called "Modern Football". However, capitalism creates its own discontents. Online forums and homemade fence banners are the new vehicles for dissent for the supporters of "Old Soccer". Originality/value -There is still only a small academic literature on Australian football and most of this has been written by humanities lecturers. The paper offers a business school perspective.

Gender construction and the invisibility of women’s accounting activities: the All Nations’ Fair of 1895

“…They offer opportunities for sporting participation and help communities build social capital (Atherley, 2006; Frost et al ., 2013; Tonts, 2005). They can also exclude and marginalise those who are not permitted membership (James and Nadan, 2020; James et al ., 2011; Tonts and Atherley, 2010). Hess (1996) states that the othering of women by Australian sporting organisations is an historiographical blind spot requiring investigation.…”

“…Accounting researchers have examined sport as a business (Amir and Livne, 2005; Andon and Free, 2019; Evans et al ., 2019; Halabi et al ., 2016; Irvine and Fortune, 2016; Morrow, 2013; Pavlović et al. , 2014; Rowbottom, 2002), accounting for professional athletes (Morrow, 1996, 1997; Risaliti and Verona, 2013; Shareef and Davey, 2005), accounting for sporting events (Andon and Free, 2012, 2014; Baxter et al ., 2019a, b; Horne and Manzenreiter, 2004), accounting as a mechanism of control within sporting organisations (Clune et al ., 2019; James and Nadan, 2020; James et al ., 2011; Rika et al ., 2016) and the nexus between accounting and emotionality in sport (Baxter et al ., 2019a, b). Yet it is outside accounting that researchers have identified that women continue to be the main providers of sports philanthropy (Coghlan, 2012; Palmer, 2016, 2020a, b; Palmer and Dwyer, 2019; Won et al ., 2010), which raises feminist questions beyond the scope of this research about whether the ongoing subjugation of women explains why they are primary providers of philanthropic support to an activity that has traditionally been, and often remains, male-dominated.…”