Some of the coverage of this year’s A-League Men Grand Final felt like a throwback to the days when mainstream media in Australia loved to fearmonger about the sport and its fans.

Football, once the total pariah of Australian sport, now seems to exist in the twilight zone. The Matildas, Socceroos and Ange Postecoglou all pretty much receive positive coverage – as they should. The domestic league and its fans, however, are still used as conduits through which migrant communities can be subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) vilified, as well as an opportunity to trick people who are unfamiliar with football culture into thinking they’re witnessing something dystopian, dangerous and degenerate.

As of now, if you go on Channel 9’s YouTube channel, you’ll find four stories covering the A-League Grand Final. Here are the words in the thumbnail for each video: Security bolstered, A-League chaos, Fans run riot and Football fans riot.

Hysterical, dishonest and embarrassing.

In a couple of the videos, Channel 9 sent their crime reporter to cover the pre-match march to the stadium. Not a sports reporter, a crime reporter. One can’t help but suspect that Channel 9 already knew the sort of story they wanted to tell long before the reporter, who carried on as if she were reporting from the West Bank, even got there.

Football in Australia is already associated with the country’s multicultural community, so it doesn’t take a genius to see what labelling its fans as “troublemakers” and “wild”, as Channel 9 did, is getting at. But I don’t think it’s entirely related to xenophobia. A lot of it also speaks to a subsection of Australian society that is suspicious of and hostile to anything loud in public (occurring outside a stadium) and people who aren’t emotionally repressed. Soccer, therefore, is the perfect bogyman. Two birds with one wogball.

As a loosely related aside, I’ve always felt that, in the Australian context, the word soccer functions as a determinate negation - something that is defined, in part, by what it is not. Soccer, therefore, is not football. Football is native, it belongs, it’s civilised. Soccer is alien, dangerous and associated with foreigners (yuck). This point doesn’t deserve its own article, so I’ve crammed it in here.

Anyway, did we really need a riot squad for what is in practice just a carols by candlelight on steroids? This over policing at best gives bad faith media outlets the perfect imagery to conjure their scary story and, at worst, provokes some of the hostility it purports to avert.

Having said all that, it was pleasing to see much of the reaction to the media’s ridiculous coverage was met with derision in the various comments sections on social media.

But if most people see through it, who is this content actually for?

It’s sort of obvious and will be revelatory to no one, but I think content making folk devils out of A-League supporters is nothing more than conservative boomer slop; it’s a cheap and easy way to make this demographic clutch their pearls, tut at the television and drive up online engagement.

Those who create this sort of content should be ashamed of themselves, but so too those who fall for it.