Confessions of a soccer dad: Investigating the dark goings-on at Eastern Suburbs

Comforting or provoking? Are parents the problem with kids' soccer? Photo / Getty

OPINION

In June this year, Eastern Suburbs soccer club hit the headlines after parents of children at the club were found to be interfering in their kids’ games. An article published on this very website told a dark story of feral parents “taking to the field to make up numbers, leaning against goalposts and blocking shots with their feet, and taking the ball off a child and giving it to the other team”.

Any reporter worth his salt could smell the clicks a mile away. It would take commitment and persistence, but I knew that if I could get myself down to Eastern Suburbs regularly enough, I would reap the rewards. I pictured a series of stories showing the very worst of humanity: accounts of parents slide-tackling 6-year-olds, stopping goals, ruining kids’ fun, leaning on their goalposts and making them cry. These stories, I knew, would deliver to me the reader attention I both crave and need.

It was quite hurtful then, when, within weeks, another journalist at this very publication beat me to the punch – publishing a sport-gone-bad story that did exactly what I had been hoping to do, but better. Not content to settle for trifling anecdotes like adults tackling kids, “Confessions of a Netball Dad” told a series of salacious, outrageous stories about a sport its author described as “utterly toxic and rotten to its core” – a phrase I only wish I could have written first.

If you missed Confessions of a Netball Dad, I recommend seeking it out only if you have a strong stomach. It involves children being praised for breaking other children’s bones, selective editing of video to humiliate 10-year-olds, and able-bodied adults parking Range Rovers in disabled spaces.

When that story was first published, generating massive audience engagement, I immediately realised that if I wanted my own article to get similar cut-through in an increasingly fractured attention economy, I would have to up my game. But if there’s one thing I’m not afraid of, it’s hard work, and so it was that I decided to spend every Saturday morning until the end of the season on the sidelines at Madills Farm, pretending to watch kids’ soccer while actually on the lookout for adults gone wild.

I would arrive at the ground, without fail, just before 8am and would stay until 11am, ploughing on through rain, mud, fatigue and freezing cold. There were times it felt like it would never end and then yesterday, finally, it did. Now, after one of the most extensive journalistic/anthropological crossover events in this country’s recent history, I can present to you my findings, and what I found will shock you.

On my first Saturday morning at the ground, I watched, agape, through four games: two featuring 6/7-year-olds and another two featuring 8/9-year-olds. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. At first, I assumed somebody must have rumbled me because, in spite of the hundreds of parents on the sidelines, not a single one took to the field. I didn’t see any adult stop a goal, take the ball off a kid or lean on a goalpost. Instead, they all stood around, talking to each other about the weather and commiserating about how hard it was to get their kids out of the house in the morning. I experienced a frisson of excitement when some of them began shouting, but my hopes were quickly dashed when their words turned out to be boilerplate terms of praise and encouragement for their kids.

Nevertheless, I’ve been working as a journalist for more than 20 years, and if I know anything about journalism, it’s that it’s a waiting game. You hang around long enough not doing anything and eventually something will happen, and one thing I’m good at doing is nothing. There were many Saturdays and much soccer still to come, I knew. Something would happen, I knew. So what happened next will shock you, or at least shock me. What happened next was… nothing.

If I know something about journalism, it’s that it’s about something. You can’t report on an absence. No one wants to read about that time you didn’t see anything.

While nothing is more sacrosanct in journalism than the truth, audience engagement comes close. To give you just one example, I could have mentioned earlier in this article that my incredible persistence in going to Madills Farm for three hours every winter Saturday morning was less about my devotion to my job and more about my devotion to watching two of my children play soccer. The fact I chose not to, like every choice I’ve made in this story, has been about maximising its chances of gaining and retaining readers.

Any good talkback caller or person with a newspaper column will tell you our country is in a parlous state: when we’re not dodging red tape, road cones and government tax grabs, we’re being ram-raided by delinquent teens, hounded by the homeless and misled by media drongoes. But, as someone whose family’s ongoing financial security depends on my ability to exploit people’s disproportionate interest in bad news, I am here to tell you there’s not nearly enough of it. Unfortunately for my kids, most of the time most people are good.