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Often described as a minority sport, the creation of the first national football league was ambitious.
Forty years on from the birth of the league, its achievement lives on, for the most part, only in people's memories.
1977 season titles:
- Champions: Eastern Suburbs
- Player of the year: Jim Rooney (Marconi Fairfield)
- Under 21 player of the year: John Kosmina (West Adelaide)
- Top scorer: Dixie Deans (Adelaide City — 16 goals)
- Coach of the year: Rale Rasic (Marconi Fairfield)
In front of 1,700 people at Canberra's Manuka Oval, the first game of the inaugural season was held on April 2, 1977 between Canberra City and West Adelaide but no photographs are in the National Archives of Australia, nor in any digitised newspaper from the time.
Even the television broadcaster, Channel 10, is struggling to find any footage in its archives.
The Football Federation of Australia wants to mark the anniversary but has encountered similar difficulties with so many gaps in the story because of a lack of record.
Football historians have toiled to describe the magnitude of the invention of the National Soccer League (NSL), but apart from a couple of newspaper articles, it seems it was a bit of a non-event.
Author Roy Hay, who sits on the panel of Historians of Football Federation Australia, said the league was not in the centre of people's minds in 1977.
"I suspect for a lot of people in Australia who were still much more concerned on state concerns, the national league was in many ways 'unAustralian' in the sense that there was no immediate model for it and secondly because it was ahead of its time," he said.
"The one thing we can say is that probably out there in the hands of many of the people who were around at the time will be little bits and pieces of memorabilia which if put together would give us a sense of what it was like at the time.
"If we could get it all together in a national museum — whether electronic or bricks and mortar — we'd be able to fill gaps in the story much better than we've been able to do up until now."
The federation has acknowledged in its Whole of Football Plan that the game's history must be celebrated to drive its future.
One of its targets is to establish a Football Museum. So far resourcing has prevented any form of museum from being formed but Hay said that should not detract from the achievement of the national competition.
"The impact of soccer was to make some of the other sports wake up to what they needed to do to develop themselves," he said.
It was 'make or break' for the game
Those at the helm of the then Australian Soccer Federation (ASF) admitted the game was at a "crossroads".
"The Phillips League, made possible by large-scale sponsorship from Phillips Industries, the Channel 0/10 Network, and the many individual club sponsors, will either make or break soccer in Australia," wrote ASF president Sir Arthur George in the official program from that first match.
"I firmly believe that this league will push soccer into being the foremost football code in this country, and will greatly enhance our spectator following, our playing skills, and our coaching and refereeing standards."
In terms of the match itself, two Canberra City players were sent off and West Adelaide won 3-1.
The goals were scored by John Kosmina, David Jones and captain Neil McGaghey for the visitors with the home side registering a consolation goal from Ivan Gruicic in the 78th minute.
Chris Kunz was a 19-year-old journalist in Canberra at the time and remembers a sense of excitement surrounding City's debut on the national stage.
"Canberra had always had a reasonably viable local league but when it was first mooted that we wanted to have a national league, people mobilised and tried to put a bid in," Kunz recalled.
"It was on the 9th of July 1976 that the bid was accepted and there were a lot of enthusiastic people.
"The key was to create the first club in Australia that was a community club, it wasn't anchored on any one ethnic group, it was broad enough that everyone could feel that they were part of the enterprise."
City warmed up for its first official hit-out with trial games against other NSL teams and a visiting German team.
No-one knew how it would pan out
Adelaide's Kosmina scored in just seven minutes and went on to score a record number of goals in the National Soccer League.
Kosmina recalls scoring in that game, although he admits not realising the significance of his feat.
"It didn't even occur to me until afterwards that we kicked off half an hour earlier than the other games in the eastern states," recalled the former Socceroo.
"I remember the goal though, the ball sat up nicely right in the middle of the six-yard box and I just finished it."
It capped a big week for Kosmina, who had played two World Cup qualification matches for Australia against New Zealand, scoring in one, and then a cup final for Adelaide side Polonia.
That season, Kosmina won the league's under 21 player of the year award and he credits the creation of the new league for his eventual move to English powerhouse club Arsenal in 1978.
"It was really new and it was really innovative at the time. I was only 20 years old when the whole thing started and it was really exciting to travel interstate and to be a part of the only football code played at a national level," he recalled.
"It was a big step into the unknown because nobody knew how it was going to pan out."
Early efforts at going national
The league was to last for 28 seasons until its demise in 2004 before it was eventually replaced with the modern-day equivalent, the A-League.
But while it only kicked off in 1977, Hay's research suggests moves were underway to nationalise the competition years earlier.
"The game resumed after the war in the late 40s and by the 50s they were beginning to think about the possibility and there were proposals floated around in 1965 for example," he said.
"You've got to remember that at that time virtually all the sporting codes were organised very much on state lines. The concept of a national competition was not really on the radar for anybody.
"And apart from the Sheffield Shield, there wasn't one.
"In soccer there would be round robin carnivals played irregularly but this only happened infrequently so the idea of a national competition was a bit foreign like the game was."
The competition emerged following Australia's qualification for the first time for the World Cup Finals in Germany in 1974.
"It got the Socceroos on the national stage and made them a household name but it wouldn't result directly in a proposal for a national game," he said.
"After the Socceroos performance in Germany there was a little bit of a letdown in state competitions and crowds were actually dropping so the performance wasn't, as some have suggested, the catalyst for the formation of a national league.
"It was as much that it looked like the game was going to go backwards unless they tried something new."
National league almost derailed by Victoria
The state-based clubs drove the change they desired with Alex Pongrass and Les Bordacs of the Budapest club in Sydney and Frank Lowy of Hakoah initiating discussions with other clubs and forcing the hand of the Australian Soccer Federation.
The Victorian clubs decided not to join the national league but an ambitious Tom Bailey, from the Moorylback club in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, put his hand up and South Melbourne followed.
And while it claims to be the first truly national competition of any of the football codes, technically, Hay says, that is not quite true.
"It never became a truly national league in a sense that not every state or territory was represented, and even to this day Tasmania, the ACT and Northern Territory aren't represented," he said.
Topics: soccer, sport, adelaide-5000, sa, canberra-2600, act, australia