“Grade five was the worst year of my childhood because it was the year I first heard the word ‘wog’,” George Megalogenis writes in his new book The Football Solution: How Richmond’s Premiership Can Save Australia.

It’s 1974 and Megalogenis, a die-hard Richmond supporter, should be celebrating his team’s Grand Final win over North Melbourne. But instead, the ten-year-old is a ball of anxiety as he prepares himself for school the next Monday.

“The stone of worthlessness returned to my stomach soon after the final siren,” he recalls in the book. “I knew that a schoolyard kicking awaited me, win or lose. I endured some terrible beatings. My parents pleaded with the school to look after me, but my grade five teacher was out of his depth. I suspect that I annoyed him.”

For some, the realisation that they want to be a writer is formed within the pages of a good book. But Megalogenis tells Neos Kosmos that his writing awakening occurred via the full force of the beatings he endured in the schoolyard.

“I have only mentioned it a couple of times in my career, but that was a formative experience for my writing as an adult,” he says. “The bullies in the classroom had found me and I reacted the wrong way and they piled on and I didn’t know how to deal with it. It is quite a bewildering thing.”

Now 54, Megalogenis wishes he could time travel just once and talk to that 10-year-old to tell him that life will not be as bad as it is in that moment. Eventually, the bullying stopped and Megalogenis formed a career that saw him become one of the leading political journalists in the country. It’s why he included the tough experience growing up as a youngster in Australia – to highlight to any marginalised kids out there that there is a way out.

“A lot of kids of migrants from the working class, underclass, a lot of Indigenous kids especially, that is their reality for a fair whack of time,” he says.

“I keep reminding myself that there are a whole bunch of other people that can’t stand up for themselves the way we could stand up for ourselves after a while. Us Greeks didn’t have to belt people to do it, we just made them laugh. We went to university and made it in the professional workforce. It’s a great story after those terrible early years without inclusion. I always remind myself in my journalism that there is another 10-year-old me out there.”

The story of inclusion is at the heart of Megalogenis’ book. Particularly the second chapter, where he reveals that his mother realised that sport was a way her young son could fit into Australian society.

“I think Mum intuited the social codes of the new country, and that her little boy needed to have a footy team,” he says.

“God knows how it got into her head that this was the way. It was like your first day at kinder and you’ve got your name tag ‘Giorgos Megalogenis’, half the kids might know you’re Greek and the other half of the kids wouldn’t know where you come from, but she sent me there as a Richmond supporter.”

In the book, Megalogenis further highlights the special relationship with his mum, when, in response to Richmond losing the preliminary final against St Kilda, he kicks his unsuspecting uncle in anger. But instead of punishing him with the koutala, his mum showed empathy as a football fan, not a disciplinarian.

“I love her to death for this,” he says. “It means that we are able to maintain this connection for close to 50 years now. Footy is part of our life. What I explore in the book is how it is a part in many people’s lives in Victoria. She must be pretty knee-deep by then as well if you think it through. She’d been in Australia at that point for nine years and had taken my sister and me to the first couple of games. We’ve had a ball, we won all the games we went to that year. So, in a strange kind of way, I often wonder who the bigger fanatic was.”

Everyone who follows sport thinks their team can win the premiership when they are winning. But Megalogenis has taken that belief even further. Spurred on by Richmond’s Grand Final success, and how they achieved it after so many years of heartbreak, he started to see a parallel with his team and Australian politics.

“It was to use the story of Richmond to gently remind those in the political system that there are better ways to run the country than how the country is being run now,” he says.

Megalogenis added that those in power need to shift their thinking with how they are leading the country.

“The role of government needs to be renegotiated,” he says. “Since the 80s they have been leaving a lot to the market. A lot of the challenges in the 21st century are not about this or that market reform. Governments have let go of too many things, like energy and transport. Too much is expected of households now to fund their own health and education. We have been riding the property boom for too long and we have a whole lot of indebted households. Whilst I remain an optimist about our ability to get along with one another, I’m not sure our political system is in a position to harness what is an otherwise great potential in the Australian people.”

Megalogenis says another major issue with the make-up of the government is the lack of diversity amongst Australia’s parliamentarians.

“Our parliament is whiter today than the country it serves,” he says. “I worry that our political institutions and our cultural institutions don’t understand quite the difficulty that arises with the new arrivals. How do you make that person on arrival understand the cultural currents of a country that they’re living in? You have to involve them almost immediately. You can’t just assume that it’s going to happen by osmosis. I’d apply this lesson not just to sport, I’d apply this lesson across the board to our institutions.”

Megalogenis is not the only Greek Australian intellectual who loves AFL; author Christos Tsiolkas is also a mad Richmond fan and he will be helping to launch the book in Melbourne.

“Our idea for the launch is to use the social history of footy to tell a migrant story,” he says. “I want to use the launch to get to the social heart of the book and what footy means to people. Christos and myself have had a bit of a different footy experience. He grew up on the other side of the Yarra and we both went our different ways. By the time the club came good again, we were ready to re-engage with it. We were sending texts to each other and saying, ‘I can’t believe it, this is amazing.’ We were like kids again.”

* ‘The Football Solution: How Richmond’s Premiership Can Save Australia’ will be launched at the Melbourne Athenaeum (188 Collins St, Melbourne) on Tuesday 8 August at 8.00 pm. Christos Tsiolkas and GeorgeMegalogenis will share the stage with Waleed Aly, while journalist Sally Warhaft will coordinate the panel. Tickets are $50 ($45 concession) and include a signed copy of the book. For bookings, go to readings.com.au/event/waleed-aly-christos-tsiolkas-and-george-megalogenis-on-football