I never promised you a rose garden

Things got to the stage where people would expect South of the Border to post on all sorts of matters regarding Australian soccer, however tenuous the connection may have been to South. People also expected a certain degree of promptness, and usually I delivered, in great quantity, even if the latter was not quite as welcome in a time-poor reading environment. Sometimes that approach worked for the best, other times not so much.

Things are different now, and so there are fewer people clamouring to demand that I talk about the "latest big news", whatever that might be. Someone wants me to discuss this "A-League grand final in Sydney for three years" deal, and I'm like, pfft, nothing to do with us. Better off making a few pithy comments on Twitter while that site is still a going concern, while waiting for our own season to start.

But then this odd thing started happening, and I guess I just couldn't let it pass without at least some comment. That "thing" being the quite emotional reaction by some A-League fans to the A-League ownership's decision to fund its way out of some money problems; and the suggestion made by some of these disgruntled fans of coming down to NPL and grassroots levels to clubs like ours. 

Hey! Clubs like us! We're a club like us!

Some people were smoother and more subtle than others in trying to make a move on these sheep newly separated from their flock. That includes overselling, I hope more by accident than design, the actual experience of watching a team like South at a level like this.

And overselling means a higher chance of under-delivery. Following NPL Victoria and South Melbourne (for example) is a lot of things, and often enough a lot of good things, but it's also not a like-for-like replacement of what people conditioned to following the A-League are used to. The standard of play is worse. The grounds, in general, are worse. The weather is worse. The media coverage is much smaller. The feeling that you're part of something bigger, that's much worse. Oh, and the perks of having voting rights are, generally speaking, overstated.

(but yes, there are also good things, and you will come across them if you give it a chance; and I'm also at pretty much every AGM, so take that into consideration, too, when reading my downplaying of voting)

Of more importance is the fact that as a newbie fan, you're going into something that has existed for much longer than what the A-League and its teams have. The chance to move into an environment either on the ground floor, where every fan is at least nominally culturally equal, or at least within an environment where you can be anonymous among thousands? That's gone.

Unless you are a returning apostate or lapsed believer - which has its own issues - you will stick out. You will feel out of place. The crowds are low enough that even if regular fans don't know everyone by name, they know most people by face. Back when clubs like South had a lot more fans, it'd be a little easier to blend in. Still, clubs like South were always a bit insular - it was an ethnic thing, and a soccer thing - and in the post-NSL era, insularity becomes more instinctive.

But to be fair, we're not the worst, and the long-term existence of our outward looking social media efforts means that we have not regressed completely into our own shell. (and we still, remarkably, have our own independent fan forum) But people coming to South, knowing little about South other than what they've read from perhaps more dubious online sources, and knowing nothing of what it is like to follow a team at this level... it's just not that easy.

And the thing is, it's also very difficult, and actually counter-productive, to discard one set of long-standing ideologies regarding following soccer in Australia, without only gradually replacing them with another. A-League refugees coming across to a club like South might be keen for the first little bit, but then if they get lonely, or feel isolated, or feel like outsiders - or if it just doesn't match the hype they've been sold - they probably won't come back. 

Then they might come up with things like it was "too ethnic" or some other reason, when just as likely the reason was that they did not get the chance to build a social connection to the club. Their friends or family that they went to A-League games with didn't come along with them. They had no one to discuss the team or the league with, in a way that they would with a more popular competition. 

So, to those contemplating coming across (or back) to a club like South I would say: absolutely, yes, we'd love to have you join us. But also: temper your expectations of a revelatory experience, especially an immediate one. Don't force it if you don't feel it; but also, give yourself time to feel it. And come have a chat with me - I'm happy to initiate people into supporting what I think is a pretty OK club, one that's much less bad than others. 

And for South folk encountering new fans, focus on talking about South. Don't worry about running down the A-League. These people likely had a lot of good times at the A-League. In time, you want people to learn to love being with us, and then becoming one of us, on their own terms. Few as they are in the post-NSL era, we still have enough examples of people who came in tentatively, and are now all in.