How a Pink Paper Shaped the Game
In Melbourne’s golden era of newspaper wars, amidst lead presses and rising footy crowds, one peculiar invention helped shape how we see the game: a pink newspaper, sold on Saturday nights, called The Sporting Globe.
The Sporting Globe and the Making of Modern Footy
Launched in 1922 as part of Keith Murdoch’s strategy to fend off new rivals, the Globe didn’t just report football but it helped define how Australians consumed it. Before television, before radio took hold, the Sporting Globe was the closest thing fans had to a replay. It was ritual: you left the game, grabbed the pink paper from the newsagent, and relived it all again through tightly written in breathless reports.
It was a newspaper built for the working-class football public; The one-eyed Collingwood fan, suburban battlers, and front bar selectors. When Collingwood won, newsagents near Victoria Park stayed open late. When they lost, shutters came down early. Football’s mood had a physical presence in the streets, and The Globe was its barometer.
But this was more than nostalgia; The Globe was a bold innovation. It gave us player plebiscites and crowd-driven storytelling. It covered both VFL and VFA with serious weight. It pulled in journalists from all corners of the newsroom and even hired former players to pen columns, years before “special comments” became a TV thing.
Importantly, it didn’t flinch from the politics of the game. Rule changes (as I've mentioned before) stirred controversy. The paper covered them with urgency, humour, and detail. It helped shape public opinion and, in doing so, became an unlikely stakeholder in the game’s evolution.
For those of us at Fisher Classics, the Sporting Globe is a key cultural artefact. It’s proof that sport isn’t just played, it’s retold, argued over, reconstructed. Our own sports art leans on that idea: that memory and ritual are part of the game’s design. What the Globe did with pink newsprint, we now try to do with print and paper of a different kind.
Today, footy still rides the same waves of winter gloom, rule angst and finals anticipation. The media platforms have changed, but the rhythm is familiar. And the Globe was there first. It seemed to give a voice to the crowd long before microphones were clasped by the networks.
Fisher Classics celebrates the artefacts, atmospheres and unsung design stories of sport. Browse our open edition prints inspired by footy folklore and Melbourne’s visual history.
