Weber’s legitimacy theory has been diffused widely throughout the corporate and political context but not to thesporting world. This paper adopts Weber’s legitimacy theory to better understand the context of Australian sport,particularly as it relates to soccer’s standing in the culture. For the majority of its Australian existence, soccer wasnot part of the mainstream, and academic and other writing has labelled it illegitimate. However, despiteappropriating the illegitimacy label, no theoretical model has been applied to the assertion. Weber’s Theory ofLegitimacy depicts three types of legitimacy; charismatic, legal/rational and traditional. This qualitative researchutilized interview data collected from a purposive sample (N=22) of the influential people who determined soccer’slegitimacy as a result of the sport’s restructure in 2003, through to the nationally acclaimed triumph of winning themen’s Asian Cup in 2015. The data was then compared against Weber’s theory to better understand soccer’stransformation, showing that Australian soccer was legitimised by the recruitment and leadership of Frank Lowy(charismatic), the intervention of the Federal Government (legal/rational) and the inter-generational growth of thesport’s popularity and participant base (traditional). This paper not only attempts to theorise Australian soccer butalso raises some important questions regarding Australian soccer studies in general.