Dr. Brett Hutchins
Professor of Media and Communications at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He has published extensively over many years on sport media, digital technologies, and environmental communication. He is the co-editor of his latest volume: Sport and the Environment: Communication, Politics and Culture in the Age of Climate Crisis (forthcoming, Routledge, with Libby Lester and Toby Miller).
Email: brett.hutchins@monash.edu
The behavior and unpredictability of crowds in urban life have occupied the minds of politicians, authorities and police since at the least the French Revolution and the First Republic of the late 19th century. The shared frisson of the crowd expressing its excitement mobilizes the power of sociality and democratic expression, while also representing a potential threat to social order and authority if it descends into mob behavior and violence.
The longstanding power and fear of the crowd became apparent in Australia during the lead up to the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup. The Chief Executive responsible for the arts, culture and public event precinct located in the center of Melbourne, Federation Square, announced that live broadcasts of the Australian team’s matches on the “big screen” in the Square were being cancelled. The reason given was fear of anti-social and dangerous behavior by attendees. This fear centered on the potential behavior of young male fans and the lighting of flares during games.
The decision was overturned quickly by the Victorian State Premier, Jacinta Allan. Leading an unpopular Labor government in an election year, Allan released an official statement that strained for “relatability” by invoking a crude colloquialism: “There’s always a risk of bad behaviour from a few dickheads at every public gathering, but police and security will be on site, and there’ll be zero tolerance of it. The World Cup should bring us together, not keep us apart.” The Premier’s statement is a rare example of fulsome political support for association football in a state and country where the game struggles for consistent popular attention outside of World Cup tournaments and, to a lesser extent, Asian Cups.
Federation Square as a live site attracted national and international attention during the 2022 men’s World Cup in Qatar and the 2023 women’s World Cup hosted by Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Fixtures featuring the Australian Socceroos and Matildas drew energetic 7,500 capacity crowds who gathered to watch games on the Square’s big screen. Crowd celebrations hit raucous crescendos during nighttime games when goals were scored by Australia, including the lighting of flares. As videos uploaded to YouTube show, intense celebrations followed the goal-scoring heroics of Matthew Leckie (vs Denmark in the 2022 group stage), Courtney Vine (the 10th penalty taker in a nerve-wracking shootout between Australia and France in a 2023 quarter-final) and Sam Kerr (vs England in a 2023 semi-final). The popularity and media coverage of Federation Square grew with each game and goal, triggering a multiplication of World Cup lives sites in other areas of Melbourne and capital cities across the country.
The affective intensity witnessed in Federation Square is reinforced by a recursive mode of mediatization. A global media sport mega-event – the World Cup – is transmitted live to the screen in a public square and watched by a large crowd of Australian fans. Those watching in the Square are then folded into the overall experience of the mega-event for audiences as their reactions are live-streamed, recorded, broadcast and replayed via smartphones, social media networks and news media. The crowd becomes a mediatized public spectacle enacted by a mediatized sporting spectacle, in which people watch and respond to other people watching and reacting. The catalyst for both is the visceral tension-release and emotion expressed by fans when their national football team scores.
The crowds in Federation Square this year were mostly well-behaved. They were also noticeably male dominated when compared to the 2023 women’s World Cup. Fears of an aggressive masculine threat were given substance across Australia’s four games by reports of an alleged sexual assault of a woman by a 16-year-old male, a small brawl breaking out in the viewing area, and mounted police intervening to prevent fans rushing the security barriers. A police officer suffered a minor injury after being pinned against a barrier and a small number of arrests were made for the possession or lighting of flares and fireworks.
These offences aligned, to a degree, with kick-off times in Melbourne and the results of the Socceroos. A festival atmosphere (a 2-0 victory over Turkey following a 2pm kick-off on a Sunday afternoon) gave way to discontent (a 2-0 defeat to a conceited USA team commencing at 4am on a Saturday morning). These results were followed by muted satisfaction (a scoreless draw against Paraguay at midday on a Friday, which saw Australia qualify for the group stage) and stinging disappointment (another 4am Saturday morning start for a round of 32 loss against Egypt in a penalty shootout).
World Cup live sites make visible football’s capacity as a potent outlet for publicly expressed emotion. Perched on the edge of order and momentary disorder, the assembled crowd experiences and expresses a range of unpredictable emotions – joy, excitement, pride, disbelief, frustration, anger – that are then shared and represented across innumerable mobile, digital and television screens to wider audiences. This signals a short-lived but sociologically significant convergence of public, media and sporting spectacle, even with a few dickheads present.
