Macarthur FC defender Ivan Vujica can usually count on the support of his family as a given whenever he steps onto the field. But not this weekend. “Best-case scenario for my friends and family is me scoring a hat-trick, and them winning 4-3,” he laughed.
Them is Sydney United 58, the club that has produced more Socceroos than almost any other, but for two decades has been sidelined from Australian soccer’s top table. On Saturday night, they’ll face the Bulls at CommBank Stadium in a clash that straddles the ideological fault lines of the beautiful game in this country.
Macarthur FC captain Ulises Davila and his Sydney United 58 counterpart Adrian Vlastelica with Saturday night’s prize.Credit:Getty
It’s the final of the Australia Cup, and despite it being a landmark occasion for their son’s team, the Vujicas – Croatian immigrants – will be supporting Sydney United. His father, Marinko, once sat on the club’s board while Ivan was coming through their junior system. His mother, Ivanka, used to work in the canteen.
“They come to a foreign country, 30-odd years ago, and there’s a place like Sydney United, five minutes up the road, where they can speak their own language, eat their own food, see their own people … it makes sense why they’re rooting for them,” he said.
Sydney United 58 – or Sydney Croatia, as it was once known – isn’t just a football team. For so many, it’s the entity through which they came to understand Australia, and became Australian, without losing sight of their heritage or traditions. For people like Socceroos coach Graham Arnold, who isn’t Croatian, but never felt like an outsider at the club, it was a different sort of life raft. “I lost my mother when I first started playing there, and the way they helped me get through that … they were such special people,” Arnold said.
The Bulls might be the team that boasts professional status, but their small fanbase will be totally swamped on Saturday. Not only are lapsed Sydney United supporters digging out the memorabilia from the back of their wardrobes, but the entire Croatian community will be behind them.
Graham Arnold, Mile Jedinak, Tony Popovic, Ante Milicic and Robbie Slater all came through at Sydney United – and that’s just the start of their stellar alumni list.Credit:Getty/Fairfax
This week is also the 46th edition of the annual Australian-Croatian Soccer Tournament, and the first held in three years due to COVID – and the King Tomislav Croatian Club at United’s home, Edensor Park, is hosting it. That means thousands of football-obsessed “Aussie Cros” will be in town from interstate – you’d imagine they wouldn’t miss this game for the world. Full tables already paid for at the tournament’s gala dinner on the same night will sit unused.
When it comes to the sense of destiny around this final, the stars haven’t just aligned; the sun, moon and planets are in on this, too. There are cosmic miracles everywhere you look.
Socceroos great Mark Bosnich played his junior football at Sydney United – but Dwight Yorke, the best man at his recent wedding, is Macarthur’s coach. Tomislav Uskok, the Bulls’ imposing defender, once captained Sydney United to a grand final. Goalkeeper Nick Suman was another Edensor Park junior. Anthony Crea, Macarthur’s fitness boss, was United’s coach when they won the NPL in 2020. Mile Sterjovski, the Bulls’ NPL coach, scored for United in the 1999 NSL decider. Jacob Poscoliero, their community manager, still plays for United, and will face his primary employers on Saturday.
And then there’s Sam Krslovic, Macarthur’s chief executive. He is a towering figure in the history of Sydney United 58 – a former player, coach, administrator, director and wielder of influence. While he stepped away from their football operations when the Bulls entered the A-League, he still sits on the board of the King Tom club.
“Regardless what happens, I’ll be taking a trophy home,” Krslovic said. “Macarthur is a professional club, based on purely football, and Sydney United is a celebration of the Croatian community and its contribution to Australian society, and football in particular. They’re two totally different things, but they’re intersecting at the moment, which is good.”
Founded in 2014 as the FFA Cup, and renamed this year to the Australia Cup, this has been easily the best season in its short history. It began in February with 742 teams from every state and territory – more than the number that contest the English FA Cup, which has been running for more than 150 years – and the main knockout rounds concluded with four A-League clubs brought down by state-league opposition.
Most of it is down to the sheer magic of football, and the shrinking gap between the A-League’s worst and the NPL’s best in a technical sense, but there has been an invisible hand at play. Football Australia made some small but significant changes to the format, timing it entirely within the A-League’s pre-season so that NPL clubs, who play through winter, are significantly fitter than the professionals – thus raising the probability of “cupsets” by part-timers.
Sydney United 58 goalkeeper Danijel Nizic celebrates with fans after their semi-final win over Brisbane Roar.Credit:Getty
The Australia Cup draw is also, finally, fair. It is no longer openly rigged to ensure at least one NPL team reaches the semi-finals, as it had been since inception. And yet for the first time, two NPL teams – Sydney United and Victorian side Oakleigh Cannons – made it that far anyway. “When you’re making these sort of decisions, you make your own luck,” FA chief executive James Johnson said.
This is a fairytale final for FA, pitting the A-League’s youngest club – the epitome of “new football” – against one of the NSL’s most staunchly “old soccer” clubs in a western Sydney derby. United’s cup run, coming towards the end of an otherwise ordinary season in the NPL, has awoken their dormant fanbase.
“The older people, like my mum – she doesn’t go to any games, but she knows who played, what the score was. They follow it, they know what’s going on,” Krslovic said.
Armed with an influx of new sponsorship money, Football Australia chief executive James Johnson is forging ahead with plans for a national second division for men.
Usually, they get no more than a few hundred people to home matches. But when they beat reigning A-League champions Western United 4-3 on penalties in the round of 16, there were 1300 people in the crowd, and they stormed the pitch in jubilation.
There was more than double that amount when they came from behind to topple Brisbane Roar in the semis, scoring a stunning team goal in extra time to clinch a 3-2 victory – and once again, the fans invaded the pitch.
These results have reopened old wounds about the way the former NSL clubs were discarded when the A-League was formed, the subsequent loss of “ethnic” footballing expertise at the top level, the merits of a promotion and relegation system and whether introducing one could give the struggling A-League a much-needed point of difference.
The final comes at a fascinating juncture in the Australian game. Football Australia – no longer responsible for the A-League, and suddenly awash with cash after a series of recent sponsorship deals – is publicly committed to introducing a national second division, which is likely to begin in the winter of 2024.
Johnson has staked his reputation on it, engaging a consultancy firm to help FA crunch the numbers. The federation will soon call for expressions of interest from clubs like Sydney United 58, which consider themselves too big and proud for the NPL, but don’t quite have the financial capacity to aim straight for the A-League. If granted a licence, they will be directed to evolve their businesses accordingly.
“We need to look at the DNA of football,” he said. “People that follow football in Australia … they need to feel that it’s authentic, and it’s genuine.
“Having a tiered league structure in Australia, a connected football pyramid, that’s appealing to people that know football – and there’s a lot more people that follow football in Australia than are following Australian club competitions at the moment.
“I think the important point is trying to make the traditional clubs relevant in the modern game. If you look at Manchester City, for example, they’re a historical club that, through new ownership, were able to transform – keep its traditional roots, but really modernise it. I think there’s a lot of untapped value in the history of the sport, and our traditional clubs, if we look at our code here in that light.”
Adrian Vlastelica, United’s captain, is convinced he and his teammates would not be out of place in the A-League if they had the chance to train as often as the professionals, without having to work a full-time job.
A project manager on construction sites, he knows getting out of the car for night sessions after a long day is easier said than done. “Especially Tuesdays – start of the week, work’s heavier, it’s raining, and you’re just like, ‘You know what? I could be at home,’” Vlastelica said.
“But things like the Australia Cup, it keeps you going. It could be a once-in-a-lifetime thing. There’s a lot of boys within our squad that could be at the next level, if they were given the opportunity. A lot have been at that level and for whatever reason, missed out on that second chance.”
Krslovic agrees. “Absolutely, Sydney United deserves a bigger stage,” he said. “But let’s not make the mistake that every club outside the A-League is a Sydney United, because they’re not.
“Sydney United is a club that has battled to get to where it has got to, its IP around football is very strong. But also from a financial and supporter backing … Sydney United is a unique club, and not everyone is a Sydney United.”
Saturday night, then, looms as a celebration of one club in particular, as much as it is actually a cup final between two. The Bulls are strong favourites, as they should be, but even Vujica knows they’re really the support act.
“They knocked out Western United … unreal,” he said. “Then to back it up against Brisbane – top for them, top for Australian football in general. They’re bringing in fans, and as we know, football without fans is nothing. We can see that they deserve to be there.”
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