You can say, without fear of contradiction, that Andrew Howe is a nerd. A senior demographer at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, he has spent his adult life voluntarily collecting and organising Australia’s football statistics. “I grew up on stats,” he says. “I’m a population statistician by day and I’m the football statistician by night.”



Since 1999, Howe’s statistics have been treated as the official record by football’s governing body. Each year he completes a season guide, which is mailed out to the media. During Adelaide United games, he sits in the commentary box and collates the match events – goals, time in possession, shots on target, corners – for the Fox Sports stats department.

Over the past few seasons, on Twitter he’s provided a running statistical commentary during A-League matches as well as an array of data visualisations, which have earned him a loyal following among football fans. Like when ex-Sydney FC striker Mark Janko scored six consecutive goals last season, Howe announced that he had equalled Besart Berisha’s A-League record from 2012, and was one game away from equalling the national league record, set by Damian Mori in 1994-95 for Adelaide City. Or during the 2015 Asian Cup, when the first 20 games were won by the country with the highest population. “This is getting scary,” tweeted Howe, as he witnessed his two loves, football and population statistics, merge.

Fox Sports commentator Simon Hill, like many football journalists, consults Howe for fact-checks and statistical quirks. Last season, when Wellington Phoenix’s Fijian striker Roy Krishna went on a goal-scoring spree, Hill wondered if he was on track to become the highest scoring Pacific Islander in the national league. He sent Howe a message, and within the hour was emailed a complete breakdown of the 14 Pacific Islander players, from Esala Masi (202 games, 43 goals, Fijian) to Benoit Michelena (one game, zero goals, Tahitian). There was also a note of qualification: “There were a couple of PNG [Papua New Guinea] players as well,” wrote Howe. “PNGers are sometimes regarded as Pacific Islanders – they are part of Melanesia.” Howe is nothing if not a perfectionist.

To truly understand Howe’s obsession, you need to visit his home in Adelaide. His collection of Australian football newspapers, magazines, photographs and other memorabilia is staggering. The entire back catalogue of the defunct Soccer Action newspaper is bound and organised into cardboard boxes, annual reports and yearbooks are arranged in plastic sleeves, while hundreds of match programs are kept in manila folders.

Then there is the more far-out stuff. Howe, a little embarrassed, shows me his The Many Faces of Frank Arok photo album, which consists entirely of photographs of the former Socceroos coach. He also treasures, for reasons that can only be understood by a few people, the entire collection of the anarchic and outlandishly offensive Inside Soccer fanzine from the mid-1990s (think Mad magazine meets South Park, but with Australian football as the focus – the authors of the fanzine were apparently under police surveillance for years).

There’s an impressive array of rare kits, from the 1989 St. George-Budapest to the 1993 Morwell Falcons, as well as his prized 21st birthday present: a Sydney Croatia championship ball signed by Vedran Rozic, Graham Arnold, Robbie Slater, Craig Foster and Ned Zelic. The NSL cassettes and records are a collectors dream, including Macedonian folk singer Goce Nikolovski’s ode to Preston Makedonia, and the LP of APIA Leichhardt’s stirring 1987 championship song (“The APIA team is but a big family/They’re the champions of Australia/with a touch of ethnic flavour/Yes they are, the greatest soccer team!”).

The most important part of the collection, however, is Howe’s folders of stats. The complete statistical history of the NSL/A-League – over 7,000 matches, with around 40 match events documented for each one – is scrawled on hundreds of old pieces of paper and arranged lovingly in folders and filing cabinets. And that doesn’t include the Socceroos or Matildas stats, the women’s league, the youth leagues, the various Cup competitions since 1962, or the encyclopaedia of Australian players that he’s slowly building. All up, he reckons he’s statted over 10,000 Australian matches at all levels. It’s all been digitised now, of course, but to this day Howe maintains a hand-written record.

“It just gives me more feel,” he says. “It’s hard to explain. I’m always looking for ways to cross-check, and if I do a hard copy version I can always tally up. That’s a statistician’s life. If you do things the old-fashioned way it’s easier to retain stuff in the head.”

Andrew Howe’s filing cabinets contain the complete statistical history of Australian football. Photograph: Joe Gorman for Guardian Australia

Ten years since the start of the A-League, Howe’s statistics have become more important than ever. In 2005 the A-League replaced the National Soccer League, which ran from 1977 to 2004, making it the first national football competition of any code, and also the first to collapse.



The NSL was a very different competition to the A-League – the popularity, TV ratings and crowd figures of the latter have thoroughly eclipsed the former, and the game is now considered a mainstream Australian sport. The NSL clubs were far more diverse than the current crop – over the 28 seasons, there were at various times clubs representing Italian, Hungarian, Croatian, Yugoslav, Maltese, Greek, Macedonian, Dutch and Jewish communities. There were also non-ethnic clubs, like Newcastle KB United and Blacktown City, as well as privately owned franchises, like Perth Glory and the now defunct Parramatta Power.

2005 was Year Zero. Diversity gave way for homogeneity as clubs were mandated to represent an entire city. The “old soccer, new football” slogan was a deliberate ploy to differentiate one competition from the other, and all the ethnic-backed clubs were banished to their respective state leagues, with no possibility of promotion back to the top flight.

There remain heated debates about the ethics and merits of this decision, but there is no denying that it worked. Football seemed to completely re-orient itself in the mind of the Australian sports fan. The average crowd figure for the first season in 2005-06 was 11,627 – a record season attendance since the NSL began in 1977, and a whopping 161% increase on the average attendance in the final season of the NSL in 2004. One report suggested that 41% of first season A-League fans had never been to an NSL game, an incredible figure considering the growth in numbers. A new legion of fans appeared to materialise overnight.

Howe’s annual season guides were suddenly expunged of their history. The first A-League season guide is particularly unusual – Howe says he was instructed to treat the A-League as an entirely new entity, and so there is literally no history. It was as if Australia’s national football competition began in 2005.

Perhaps because of the rapid boom of the last 10 years, there are no good old days in Australian football. Australian rules or rugby league both trade on nostalgia – think ‘kick-to-kick’ and the Fitzroy Lions in the AFL, or ‘Bring Back the Biff’ and Newtown Jets in the NRL. But under this administration, for 10 years football has wanted little to do with its past. Nobody, it seems, cares what happened to Brunswick Juventus or Sydney Olympic.

But this is changing. The FFA Cup, which kicks off for a second time this week, was a roaring success in 2014, allowing grassroots clubs and some of the former NSL clubs to come up against A-League clubs. When Adelaide City beat Western Sydney Wanderers in the round of 32, it was predictably cast as a David and Goliath scenario. Yet Western Sydney Wanderers have never won a national championship. Adelaide City have won three.

The opportunity for all clubs to again compete on a national level has been cathartic. For the first time in a decade, there has been a real and tangible connection between the grassroots and top level of the game in Australia, and while there have naturally been teething issues, the FFA Cup has provided the old clubs a necessary glimmer of hope and ambition.

There is also a push to treat the A-League and the NSL as one. Privately, there is support from journalists and commentators, as well as amongst many fans. Rather than perpetuate the notion that football has two separate competitions, there is a desire to merge the statistical history into one continuous entity. The resistance, where there is any, will be at FFA, but it feels as if it’s a matter of when, not if. Howe and his stats are at the centre of this movement.

The mighty Miranda Croatia of the Southern Sydney Churches League. Their record loss was 19-0. Andrew Howe is fourth from the right, back row. Photograph: Picasa

Howe began collecting stats in 1989 as a university student and a football convert. Growing up in the Sutherland Shire, in May 1988, as a curious 19 year-old, he decided to venture into the city with his brother to watch APIA Leichhardt play Marconi at Lambert Park. The “Italian derby”, featuring the famous Italian striker Francesco Graziani, who was playing the first of two games in his guest stint for APIA, was Howe’s introduction to the Australian game. He was hooked.

“It was different,” he says. “Basically every week for the previous five years I’d been to a rugby league game, and there was the occasional Sharks chant, but there wasn’t the buzz that I was getting from this packed inner city ground, in a completely different sport that was far more tense.”

Howe was an eager learner and a geography junkie. He loved studying atlases, maps and national flags, and the NSL scratched that itch. “It taught me so much about the world,” he says. After witnessing the diverse culture of Australian football, with teams like Sydney Croatia, Preston Makedonia and South Melbourne Hellas, Cronulla Sharks seemed anodyne. Howe started watching more SBS television, and he would buy the foreign language newspapers that covered the games – the Italian La Fiamma and the Yugoslav Novosti were his favourites. His parents thought he’d lost the plot as he’d sit up late at night, listening to foreign language SBS radio broadcasts from matches in Italy or Greece.

Although there was some brief NSL stats in the magazines and newspapers, Howe decided to start from scratch and build his own database. “It took years,” he admits. He would spent his weekdays cross-referencing every single fixture since 1977 from the match reports of at least three different publications, noting down scores, crowd figures, goal-scorers, substitutions: the works. It was a labour of love.

When he wasn’t collecting stats, Howe would venture out to Lambert Park to watch APIA, or to the Croatian Sports Centre in Sydney’s western suburbs to watch Sydney Croatia, or St George Stadium to watch St. George-Budapest and Sydney Olympic. He quickly developed a love of Balkan music, particularly Lepa Brena, who he saw in concert at a Yugoslav club in Canberra in 1990. But he loved the Croats in particular. He joined the Macquarie University Croatian Society, and by 1989 he and a group of mates from the Shire – none of whom had any Croatian heritage – had established a team in the church leagues named ‘Miranda Croatia’. Howe would change the opposition team names in an attempt to ethnicise the Southern Sydney Churches competition – in Howe’s imagination, at least, St Phillips became ‘Filipino’, St. Giles became ‘Macedonia’, Fairfield LDS became ‘Latvia’ and Mortdale Baptist were re-named ‘Turkish’.

Howe’s first true love, however, is the Socceroos. Coincidentally, his first match in 1990 was a friendly against the Croatian club Hajduk Split. “It was just as independence was really hotting up over there,” he says. As the Hajduk players ran onto the field, he remembers them tearing the red star symbol, always associated with the Yugoslav government, off their shirts. “There was this symbolic thing – Socceroos versus Hajduk Split, 90% were Hajduk Split fans, and the team ripping off their emblem before the game. I loved it!”

He began to seek an audience for his stats in 1992. With a new, six-team finals series approaching, Howe sent the Soccer Australia magazine all the possible variations, noting: “it may be more probable for a first v fourth, rather than a first v second… come grand final next May.” Sensing a maths nerd, the editor Greg Blake asked Howe to do his niece’s homework. Howe agreed, and soon after a double page spread was published with his finals series variations. He still has the note that came with his pay packet from Blake: “Although you may be tempted to retire to Bermuda on the strength of your earnings, please resist the urge as we may call on your services again.”

He soon became a regular contributor to the football press. His feature on the coming of the internet, in the Soccer Australia magazine of March 1996, is a classic, with references to “cyberspace” and the “information superhighway” helping promote the game and connect fans around the country. “I was a soccer person, a stats person, an information person,” remembers Howe, “the internet started helping me do more things and connect more with people and so this network was forming through message boards.”

There is certainly a touch of the Nick Hornby about Andrew Howe. But while Hornby’s famed autobiographical novel Fever Pitch is about a man singularly obsessed with Arsenal, a great club in one of the world’s biggest leagues, Howe has devoted his adult life to an entire competition which few people in Australia even bothered with.

Like in Fever Pitch, Howe’s life events are often remembered in reference to what was happening in football at the time. His engagement in April 1993, for example, is recalled in the context of the afternoon match between Melita Eagles and Heidelberg. He and Vaniece were engaged at sunrise on Cronulla Beach, and by afternoon they were at Melita Stadium in the industrial suburbs of Sydney’s south-west with 2,000 other hardy souls for a forgettable 1-1 draw. Melita and Heidelberg were both relegated from the NSL soon after, but the marriage survived, they settled in Adelaide with their two kids, Oliver and Reuben (Olyroo?). Howe remains an avid Adelaide United fan.

Andrew Howe supporting Australia against Colombia at the World Youth Cup, 1993. Photograph: Picasa

It was fitting that Melbourne Victory won the grand final in 2014-15. The best-run club in the competition with the biggest supporter base now have three titles to their name, and Kevin Muscat, Victory’s inaugural captain, became the first person to win an A-League title as a captain and a coach.

As Michael Lynch wrote in the Age grand final preview: “It has been widely reported that Kevin Muscat… can set a record if he leads Melbourne Victory to grand final triumph by becoming the first man to captain and then coach a club to a championship. Well, he will be – but only in the A-League era… It’s an anomaly that should be corrected.”

Current Socceroos coach Ange Postecoglou did it as well in the NSL, back when people called him Angie and he had a David Brent goatee. In 1991, under the guidance of Ferenc Puskas, Postecoglou captained South Melbourne to the championship, and then repeated the feat as coach in 1998 and 1999.

Some will say it doesn’t matter, or that it’s a minor issue in the great scheme of things. They are, of course, correct. But why count the current A-League statistics if it’s all so trivial? Why even play at all if these records will mean nothing to future generations? Sport, perhaps more than any other activity, requires history to make it whole and to give it meaning. Football, wrote British author David Winner, “is a living symbol of stability and heritage.” Yet no other sport treats its history so poorly as Australian football. That there are no official and readily available records, apart from Howe’s voluntary database, is illustrative.

Think of it this way. If Melbourne Victory win the grand final again next season, they’ll become the most successful club in A-League history. There’s no doubt that Victory, their fans and the media will latch on to such an important milestone. But in truth, they’ll only be equal to South Melbourne, Hakoah Sydney City and Marconi Stallions. These three clubs have each won four championships, and for now at least, are the benchmark in the Australian game. Just as Postecoglou’s achievements in the 1990s were as important as Kevin Muscat’s in the current era, the achievements of South Melbourne, Hakoah and Marconi hold no less importance than those of A-League clubs.

There is an argument that combining the statistics will further whitewash the achievements of the NSL clubs, most of whom no longer compete due to their expulsion in 2004. It is true that it’s not a fair competition if South Melbourne, for example, are not allowed to build upon their past success, but Melbourne Victory are. But the composition of the A-League is a question for another day – perhaps re-including them in the records is the first step to re-including them in the competition?

The statistics are not just the domain of clubs, they’re also a tribute to personal achievement. Think Damian Mori, who stands way out in front as Australia’s greatest ever goalscorer with 240 goals, most of which were scored for Adelaide City in the NSL. In the last season guide of the NSL in 2003-04, Mori is listed as having scored 209 national league goals. In 2006-07, the second season of the A-League, the slate is wiped clean and his tally is listed as just seven, all scored in the first season of the A-League. And what of his closest challenger, Rod Brown, who scored 137 goals between 1983 and 1997, but is no longer listed anywhere in national league records? Are some goals more important than others? An official record that recognises the contributions of these men is long overdue.

Then, of course, there’s Andrew Howe, the only person who has the requisite information for all this to be possible, and for whom the NSL isn’t just a distant memory but a life’s work. “I just tell the stats,” he says, “other people can tell the stories.”

