Novel Insights into Sports History: Croatian-Australian Ultras in Australian Football

The aim of this article is to explore particular dynamics of a handful of past articles and book chapters that managed to illuminate contexts within sport that ultimately transcend it in certain ways. John Hughson published five articles/chapters on the Bad Blue Boys ultras that followed a club called Sydney Croatia in Australia’s now defunct National Soccer League. The present author wrote several articles about the MCF (Melbourne Croatia Fans), the ultras of the sister club of Sydney Croatia known as Melbourne Knights (originally Melbourne Croatia). We observe here two groups of young Croatian-Australian men, part of the Diaspora of Croatians that left the country, mostly in the communist era and afterwards, that aim to construct workable hybrid identities for themselves in an Anglo-majority nation on the other side of the globe. They fight on two fronts--against an Anglo, corporate-style administration that effectively bans their clubs for reasons of ethnicity from the new national-league; and against the Serbian youth that often live in the adjacent or nearby suburbs and follow Serbian-origin clubs.