Football's Growing Popularity In Private Schools Is Sign Game Is Breaking Down Barriers

Adam D'Apuzzo and Matt McKay didn't figure among the votes for the best player in the A-League grand final, but they must have been mighty close. And while they started on opposing sides, they did have something in a common: both are private school graduates. And as football basks in the afterglow of a memorable grand final, and looks with a mixture of fear and excitement towards the World Cup, here is another indicator of just how well the game is going right now – arguably the best it's ever been in a chequered history dating back at least 134 years.
The match that some historians argue started it all in 1880 did, of course, involve a private school, the King's School, at Parramatta in Sydney. But it's been unconquered territory ever since as the Anglo-Saxon establishment favoured cricket and Australian football in the southern states, and rugby in the eastern states.
Football was banished to the fringes – at best ignored, at worst actively discouraged. It says much about the game's buoyancy that after more than a century of disenfranchisement, football is now not simply breaking down those barriers, it's smashing them down.