So just to answer Sam's direct points to me:
@Strong Latte
- We do not have an "indigenous sports culture"; all our main sports were imported from the UK in the case of cricket and RL/RU, or Ireland in the case of Aussie Rules.
- Your depiction of football as being like McDonald's with minimal/token cultural variation is highly ignorant. In fact the sport acts as a medium through which different national cultures are strongly expressed. To give you some brief examples of this:
In what sense is our sports culture not "indigenous"? Was RU/RL imported from the UK? Sure. Was Australian Football influenced by the Irish? Sure. But in all three cases, and in particular with the Australian Football, Australians have been key in how the very rules and fundamental structure of the game has evolved.
I almost don't even want bother with the point on Australian Football, because the history of the game is well documented and the sport is known to have had Aborigianal influences as well as Irish immigrant ones, but if you think a sport with Aboriginal, Australian settler and Irish immigrant influences isn't a product of the Australian experiment, then you're being ridiculous (particularly given you then go on to argue that f**king diving is a cultural expression).
As for Rugby League, the sport may have originated in the UK, but it started out as an offshoot of Union and while the early changes were instigated up north, the majority of the modern era changes to the game have come from Australia. Those changes have fundamentally altered the nature of the game, and given it an increasingly Australian flavour, and that is quite different to a simple difference in style of play, and makes the game a genuinely Australian sport in a way that soccer can't be intrinsically German" for Germany (for instance) no matter how obsessed they get with it.
To take a linguistic analogy, Rugby League has become an Australian dialect of Rugby in effect - the base structure is there, but the language itself is actually quite different to where it began. Think of it as Portuguese is to Spanish; related but the differences are real and born out of a genuine and lengthy isolation and partial reinvention of the language.
By comparison, soccer in Italy is more like an accent of the English language; it has its own superficial characteristics that make it stand out, but there's nothing other than a few slang words and idioms that a speaker from another part of the Anglosphere wouldn't understand because it's grammatical architecture is almost entirely the same.
You could make similar points with Rugby Union, but not to the same degree as with League. All the same, Australia was a key pusher in the adopting the ELVs, rules that do alter the structure, and pace of the game.
The key point here is that in all cases to varying degrees Australians have altered the fundamental DNA of the other three codes of Football, and that is something you simply cannot say with soccer with any country other than England.
@Strong Latte
-> The genesis of Total Football in the 1970s came from a nation (the Netherlands) that was going through an intellectual revolution which saw a rejection of norms and constraints imposed by the mainstream.
-> Even diving is a representation of national culture. It was started, and is today most prevalent in, cultures where hoodwinking officialdom/authority is revered.
(There are far more examples of how football acts as a conduit for national [and regional] cultural expression. Countless books have been written on this subject.)
- Conversely, there is no discernible difference in the style of play between Aust/NZ RL and English RL that can be put down to culture, and it is laughable to think as such. The SL is only faster in play because they don't wrestle and there's just one referee; nothing to do with culture. In the past in Union, you could say that there was a split in style (e.g. UK "10 man rugby" vs Aust/NZ "running rugby") between the hemispheres owing to culture but now they have converged to result in a terribly conservative game, probably due to its professional status.
For all these I'll defer to RoosTah, as he's adequately debunked your failure to appreciate the tactical differences in Rugby League and Union. In particular, I'd argue that the concept of "Total Rugby" is just as valid a cultural expression of that sport as "total soccer" is for soccer and I don't get how you can just wash over that.
