What the Footy Fence Reveals About Us

Someone posted on the Melbourne subreddit recently about their experience travelling to suburban footy grounds every weekend, watching their kids umpire junior games. It was the kind of post that gets shared around because everyone recognises it. The observations were sharp and specific: wealthier suburbs have food trucks and entitled spectators, outer suburbs have dodgy canteens and genuinely good people, the middle-class suburbs produce the loudest coaching from the fence. Good coaches focus their players inward. Bad coaches blame the kid in the hi-vis.

The whole thing rang true in a way that made me a little uncomfortable.

There’s something about the suburban footy ground that strips away the performance people put on at work and in traffic and at the school gate. You get people at their least edited. A man who considers himself reasonable sits in a nice car in the car park and then spends ninety minutes yelling corrections at a fourteen-year-old who is just trying to get the geometry right and go home. He would be mortified if you played it back to him. Probably.

What stuck with me most was the stuff about female umpires. People in the comments noted that spectators seem to register their mistakes more readily than they do for male umpires. This isn’t even a controversial observation at this point, it’s just a documented thing that happens. One commenter mentioned their daughter was fourteen when she was abused on the field, to the point where a crowd of adults followed the lead of an angry kid captain and piled on. That’s not heat of the moment. That’s a choice, repeated by multiple adults, in front of children.

A few people shared stories that go further back. One comment described playing in a suburban league in the nineties where the same woman, year after year, would shriek genuinely horrible class-based abuse at the visiting team, and the adults around her would laugh. The commenter said it still happens today with kids in the same competition. I don’t know what to do with that except to say that it confirms something I suspect: the problem isn’t just a few bad individuals. It’s a culture that tolerates it, which is a different and harder thing to fix.

On a lighter note: the dog and small child observations in the original post are completely accurate and I will die on this hill. The assumption that your dog’s interest in a stranger is a gift being offered, not an imposition being made, is one of the minor social irritants of suburban life. It clusters, for reasons I can’t fully explain, around footy grounds and off-lead areas on sunny days.

There’s a version of this post that ends with something hopeful about community sport being the glue that holds neighbourhoods together, and I believe that, genuinely. The volunteers running the canteen at some ground in Narre Warren on a freezing Saturday morning are doing something real. The kid who stops a game because a fellow umpire has been physically shunted, and immediately goes for his phone to call officials, is doing something admirable and mature beyond his years.

It’s just that the fence, the parents on the wrong side of it, the adults who should know better and mostly do know better and choose this anyway, are also part of the picture. The question of what makes someone decide that a teenager in a yellow vest is a fair target is genuinely interesting to me. It’s not about footy. It never really is.