ABSTRACT
Currently there are 35 diasporic Croatian soccer clubs in Australia and the Croatian Football Association of Australia has been organizing national tournaments annually since 1975. This chapter traces the long history, and the broader social and cultural consequences, of the engagement of diasporic Croatians with soccer in Australia. Drawing on public and private archival sources, the chapter presents a case for how the creation, nurturing, and sustaining of viable soccer clubs that competed at the highest levels locally and nationally enabled the Croatian diaspora in Australia to make profound contributions to civil society. More generally, the chapter illustrates the role of the sport in the evolving identity formation of immigrants and the role of immigrants in creating a new sporting culture in post-1945 Australia. As such, the chapter moves beyond previous, limited treatments of Croatian and other ethnic soccer clubs in Australia that merely emphasized inter-ethnic rivalries and tensions.
