By Brent McDonald and Jorge Knijnik
In 2005, Football Federation Australia (FFA) launched its latest attempt to create a professional men’s soccer football league in Australia, the A-League. The new competition aimed to distance itself from the old National Soccer League, which was based around ethnically affiliated clubs and in doing so appeal to a bigger, more mainstream, market. The formation of the A-League also coincided with Australia’s alignment with the Asian Football Confederation for World Cup qualification and related championship play. Ambitious thinkers within FFA envisaged soccer football providing a vehicle to facilitate economic, cultural and political linkages into Asia in what has been termed the ‘Asian Century’. However, while teams boosted their rosters with international players, there was a noticeable lack of players from Asia. In this paper we focus on Japanese international Shinji Ono, a marquee signing for the Western Sydney Wanderers (WSW) in 2012, who arguably became the first ‘Asian’ sporting celebrity in Australia. Hs impact on the A-League is considered both for fans of the WSW and in the marketing of the league more generally. Affectionately known as tensai (genius), Ono embodied characteristics that marked him as uniquely Japanese and captured the imagination of Australian football fans as few other players have.