Fink: Time to hail the "football people"

Alessandro Del Piero didn't come to Australia to be a football missionary. Unlike most European missionaries to Asia - and my ancestor, John Christopher Fink, was one of them, setting up a mission near Akyab (now Sittwe) in Burma in the 1800s - his work isn't dedicated to the selfless service of his God and Creator.

There are four million very good reasons why the Juventus and Italy star decided to go to Australia and join Sydney FC.

But now that he has arrived Down Under the task facing the 37-year-old World Cup winner has assumed almost evangelical dimensions: convert the unconvinced masses of this great brown land of Australian Rules and rugby league adherents that the A-League, battered and bruised by years of corporate incompetence, is here to stay. 

And already the signs are encouraging. The fans are excited. There's buzz is in the air and on the back pages. Memberships and replica shirts are selling fast. New sponsorships are being nutted out. Broadcasting rights have suddenly got more attractive. 

Football Federation Australia hasn't been shy in stealing some of the glow of the Italian's signing, outgoing chief executive Ben Buckley predicting Del Piero "will have an immediate impact on attendances, membership, TV ratings and corporate support for the club and the A-League". 

Or, to put it another way, Sydney FC has made Buckley look better than he should. 

And who could blame him using Del Piero as a bargaining chip in negotiations for a new TV deal?

"New football" as the FFA likes to call soccer post-2003, has never had it so good. 

The irony, though, is that it took three men with very "old soccer" sounding names to deliver Del Piero into Buckley's lap. 

Three Italians - Walter Bugno, Lou Sticca and Tony Pignata. 

The first, the inaugural chairman of Sydney FC. The second, a player agent with ties to the old National Soccer League. The third, the former chief executive of Wellington Phoenix. 

A trio of men steeped in European sport culture with ethnic backgrounds that Australian soccer fans would call dyed-in-the-wool "football people". That is, people who live and breathe soccer. 

Yet on the current board of the FFA there are no Greeks. No Italians. No Serbs. No Croats. No Macedonians. No representatives of the main ethnic groups that are the lifeblood of the Australian game. 

It's because the FFA still, to all intents and purposes, regards the game's past and its attendant associations with fear and prejudice. Unpalatable for the mainstream. Unacceptable for those unconvinced masses.

And it's a load of rot. It's the "ethnics" who make the game what it is. It's the "ethnics" who loaded up Socceroos teams with talented players for decades. It's the "ethnics" who brought Del Piero to Australia and possessed the big-picture vision that the FFA has not in ten years of running the game. 

The sooner this fear and prejudice goes away and the neglected tribes of "old soccer" are fully embraced again at the high table at the FFA, the future of the game will be in safe hands. 

With or without the man they call "Pinturicchio" lacing up his boots.