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Socceroos flag (Australia)

image by Marc Pasquin, 26 June 2006

Flag competition
Flag used during World Cup 2006 qualifiers

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Flag competition

Soccer Australia [now called Football Federation Australia] recently (less then 3 months ago) organised 2 contests to find symbols for the Socceroos [the Australian national soccer team]: an anthem and a flag.

The first resulted in a series of "popstar/idol" type shows where songs are dropped every week according to votes from the public.

The flag contest on the other hand was more traditional as it ran through newspapers, notably The Sydney Morning Herald/Sun Herald (same one but on different days).

The winner (an entry by Joseph Sgambellone of Surry Hills) was this one, reported in this article.
Marc Pasquin, 20 May 2006

Winning Entry

image by Marc Pasquin, 27 Jun 2006

This is an scan from the newspaper Sun-Herald from a few months back. It is the winning entry for the socceroos (Australian FIFA team) offical flag design contest. If you compare it with the version of the flag that was actualy printed, you can see that its quite different. First they replaced all the white and the gradient shading with block colours (either yellow or green), the ball "movement swoosh" was replaced by 3 lines, "Australia" was made to go all through the bottom bar (and the font was changed from some sans-serif "Arial" type to "copperplate") and finaly the logo of the Australian soccer federation [Footbal Federation Australia] was added to the bottom fly.

Most of the changes are more then probably made in a bid to make the design simpler to reproduce but address the fact that the australian team's main uniform colour is yellow (according to the rules of the contest, entries were supposed to have yellow as its dominant colour).
Marc Pasquin, 27 June 2006

The image at the top of the page is a variant of the official socceroos flag which is quite a common sight in Sydney these (although after the match this morning, probably no more). It is identical to the one you can buy except for the presence of "Sun-Herald" in red at the upper hoist (logotype of a newspaper that sold one for $2 with their edition). Normaly, it's the kind of variant I wouldn't bother about but in all honnesty, I have seen a only a handfull of the regular larger ones compared to hundreds of the the newspaper one making it almost the de facto "real deal".

Probably one reason for its popularity is the fact that the pole end in a clip that fit over a vehicle's side window instead of being just a stick. Good piece of PR really.
Marc Pasquin, 26 June 2006

Flag used during World Cup 2006 qualifiers

image by Juan Manuel Gabino Villascán, 14 Jun 2006

Flags flown by Australia's football fans during the FIFA World Cup qualifyings, especially during the definitive match vs Uruguay, include a version of the green and gold national flag variant and a diagonal triband in green/white/green, the white stripe wider than the green ones, the new Australian Football emblem and a footballer silhouette, the whole on the white stripe.
Juan Manuel Gabino Villascán, 14 June 2006