Soccer is just one of four beautiful football codes in Australia

On 24 June 2026, SBS aired a show titled "Wogball: Australia's Beautiful Game" that highlighted how soccer had become an important part of Australia's sporting culture despite earlier decades when the sport was seen as a foreign threat to local sporting interests as immigrants from Southern Europe and the Balkans embraced various soccer clubs attached to their ethnicity.

But while I too embrace soccer and recognise that the World Cup is the biggest global sporting event by far, I argue that it is a bit petty to describe soccer as "the" beautiful game in Australia given that so many Australians passionately follow a number of football codes that may also include several codes including Australian Rules, Rugby League and Rugby Union.

The simple truth is that all four football codes in Australia today are popular for very different reasons which reflects our love of many sports and helps explain why each code has proven superior with regard to different measures.

In terms of club crowds, the A-League reached a peak of around 15,348 in 2007-08 before declining to 8,539 during the 2025-26 season for the ten Australian teams, well behind the 2025 averages for the AFL (38,214) and NRL (21,211).

There are many reasons why the A-League crowds are much smaller than the AFL and NRL.

First, club soccer in Australia is competing with sports that have strong cultural connections within each state since the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the various football codes were just emerging and competing with each other.

For NSW and Queensland, though rugby league only emerged in 1908 after a split with rugby union over professionalism, rugby was the most popular sport in both of these states from the late 19th century.

Likewise, by the late 19th century, Australian Rules had become the most popular sport in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.

Second, unlike the AFL and NRL which has little overseas interest or rival international competition, with England the only country with a comparable professional rugby league competition, the A-League competes for the attention of soccer fans who also have pay-to-view television access to the biggest national leagues in the world, especially the most popular Premier League.

Enormous Australian interest in leading foreign club competitions is why matches between international clubs get very large crowds in Australia, as was the case when 99,382 attended the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) in 2015 to watch Manchester City play Real Madrid.

Third, while the A-League plays in the warmer months to avoid competition with the AFL and NRL, it is highly likely that fewer people will attend soccer matches on days of extreme heat.

Fourth, it may well be that many Australians prefer the physical nature of AFL and NRL in terms of live viewing, albeit that important A-League games with crowds above 30,000 have become much rarer in recent seasons.