They’re the best soccer team in the bush. But they’ve got nowhere to play

In the middle of practically nowhere – six hours’ drive west of Sydney, five hours’ drive north of Melbourne – lies the best-kept secret in Australian soccer.

Maybe Australian sport.

Griffith, NSW, is a place that shouldn’t exist. Without irrigation, it would be a desert – dry, flat, and empty. But in 1916, as part of the bold, utopian Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area scheme, it was built from scratch as a planned city, designed by Walter Burley Griffin, the same American architect who laid out Canberra. The early settlers, mostly returned servicemen and British migrants, struggled with the land; it wasn’t until the Italians arrived, bringing with them generations of agricultural know-how and a relentless work ethic, that the region truly began to bloom.

Today, around 60 per cent of the city’s 25,000 residents are said to claim some degree of Italian heritage, and it shines through in everything they do. Top-notch Italian eateries line the city’s main drag, Banna Avenue; walking into the famous old La Scala restaurant, down a dingy, dimly lit staircase, was like stumbling into a dinner scene from Goodfellas. The local wine scene is quietly excellent; Yellowtail, Australia’s leading export brand and a bona fide global phenomenon, is produced in Yenda, which is a 13-minute drive to the east.

Season two of Underbelly was also partially set in Griffith, harking back to a darker past that has unfairly coloured the town’s reputation.

And then, of course, there’s the soccer.

The standard of play at Griffith’s grassroots is surprisingly high given its geographic isolation. The passion for the game is strong, and it has to be, considering the immense obstacles that need to be overcome just to take part. To play at any serious level is to accept many, many hours of driving for hundreds of kilometres just to find an opponent.

In football, as in agriculture, Griffith’s best produce ends up elsewhere. If you happen to be decent – like Brisbane Roar youngster Pearson Kasawaya, or former national league players such as Michael Musitano, Eliza Ammendolia or Jordan Jasnos – you eventually have to move to the big smoke to pursue your dreams.

‘A big family affair’

Griffith’s biggest and most successful club is Yoogali Soccer Club, named for the small township on the city’s eastern fringes, towards Yenda.

It was formed in 1954 out of the Yoogali Club, one of Australia’s oldest ethnic social clubs, which was where members of Sydney’s Italian community visited for inspiration before founding Club Marconi – though it no longer plays there, having linked up with the Griffith Leagues Club down the road years ago. (That’s why there’s a second team based in Yoogali, known as Yoogali Football Club; the schism between ‘YSC’ and ‘YFC’ would require a whole book to properly explain.)

Yoogali has won 34 first-grade titles in various competitions and regularly hosts teams from Sydney for pre-season matches. Tom Sermanni used to bring the Matildas there regularly for training camps during his first two stints as national team boss and spoke at Yoogali’s season launch at the start of this year.

In an alternate universe, where Griffith is, say, two hours’ drive from Sydney instead of six, it’s not difficult to imagine a club like Yoogali climbing the ranks into the old National Soccer League, back when it had promotion and relegation into the state leagues.

Luke Santolin is the current coach of Yoogali’s senior men’s team. His grandfather (or nonno) Noé was one of the club’s founding fathers – the field at the Yoogali Club is named for him – and his father Tony used to coach, and still plays.

“They used to play after church with all the Italian immigrants, and it just grew from there,” Santolin says.

“Like most football club stories, they were doing everything: they were cutting the grass, they were painting the lines, putting the nets up, all that jazz. It was a big family affair back then. My two boys have just started playing now. It’s really all I’ve ever known.”

Yoogali has an itinerant soccer history, through no fault of their own. Far too big for the local league in Griffith, they have spent decades trying to find somewhere to play, only to be consistently rebuffed. They’ve played in Shepparton (twice), Wagga Wagga, a short-lived Regional Premier League involving other Victorian teams, and most notably, in Canberra.

Invariably, other teams get sick of driving to Griffith and find a way to get rid of them, even though they only have to travel once per year, and Yoogali every fortnight.

“We’ve never forfeited a game. Would you believe that? Never,” says Santolin.

Griffith’s greatest soccer triumph came in 1971, when a team called Griffith United (an amalgamation of Yoogali and Hanwood FC, their fierce rivals) won the league and cup double in the ACT. They played in front of big, boisterous crowds at home, and then jumped on a bus to Canberra every other weekend to fulfil their away commitments. In that team? Not only Tony Santolin and two Paraguayan brothers, Willie and George Wood, but a 16-year-old Walter Valeri, the father of future Socceroo Carl; his father (Carl’s nonno) was one of Hanwood’s founding members. The Valeris later moved to Canberra for work opportunities.

“The impossible dream came true,” wrote local newspaper The Area News when Griffith United were crowned champions. “They trained hard, travelled long distance and fought tenaciously to give this town an enviable soccer supremacy. They won and thoroughly deserved it.”

The next year, they were kicked out for administrative reasons.

For the past five years, Yoogali has been competing in Canberra again, as part of the Capital Football system. In 2023, they won promotion to the top-flight NPL – putting them technically just one step below the A-League – and then last year, defied the odds to stay up.

Unlike their opponents, they don’t pay their players – although they do have a long, proud history of sourcing players from overseas, particularly from Scotland. They don’t get paid either, but the club does cover their airfares and finds them work in Griffith (picking fruit, usually, at first) and a place to live.

Some of them never go back.

“I remember as a kid growing up, my grandparents had a granny flat at the back of their house where the overseas players would live in,” Santolin says.

“I remember going to kick the ball with them and then seeing them play for Yoogali on a Sunday. We got to a level where players were calling us, saying they’d heard from a mutual friend or a contact about our club, and how do they come out? You only get that reputation by conducting yourselves the right way. Some of my best friends ever started off as visa players, and now they’ve got three, four kids, a wife, a business, when originally they just came over to kick a ball. So it’s pretty special.”

This year’s team features five members of the Donadel family who, like the Santolins, are Yoogali royalty. Two of them are sons of Sante Donadel, assistant coach, former first-grade coach and a former player for over 50 years. The Donadels moved to Griffith in 1970; Sante’s father played for Yoogali, and made life-long friends at the club, and his uncle was coach of Griffith United when they did the double in ’71.

“We’re still learning, as players, coaches and our committee, how to deal with that level of football, the NPL,” Donadel says. “It’s by far the best comp we’ve played in. But it’s been good. We’re one of the only [regional] clubs to have ever done something like this.”

Things have been tracking well on the field. They recently smashed last season’s premiers, Gungahlin United, 5-1.

But then, without warning, Capital Football (CF) announced last month that the 2025 season would be Yoogali’s last, having conducted a review which recommended the removal of teams from the Riverina – including the Wagga City Wanderers, who play in Canberra’s second tier – from their competitions, again citing administrative reasons.

History is repeating.

“Unfortunately, we can’t control where we’re located. For some reason, our grandparents chose Griffith because of the soil,” Santolin says.

“When it comes to football, yeah, it’s always been a hurdle. But it’s never dulled our spirit. If anything, as a club, we’ve embraced it. It’s a feather in our cap, in the sense that we go there, and we go toe-to-toe with these teams from the bigger cities, and in many cases, come out on top. We use it to galvanise us. And that’s why we’ve got such a big club spirit, that we’re just not willing to surrender.

“But it just gets to a point … it’s our 71st year in existence. When do we get to breathe easier? It feels like we’re always looking over our shoulder. As soon as you start doing well or getting too comfortable in a competition, the rug gets pulled from under you.”

‘People don’t realise what they’re doing to us’

CF’s review determined that, from 2026, all NPL teams must also field junior teams in their sanctioned leagues. While it has established an exemptions process, Yoogali has been explicitly excluded because the travel to and from Griffith – four hours each way from Canberra, on a good day – was deemed “not a viable option” as there would be too many forfeits, according to a letter to the club from CF. It also said that them fielding a senior team without juniors would compromise the “sustainability and integrity” of their competitions.

It amounts to a reversal of CF’s decision in 2017 to expand into the Riverina, partly to help broaden regional support for a Canberra A-League Men’s bid. Until 2023, Griffith was represented at junior level by a team called the Riverina Rhinos (later Griffith FC), who were strong at most age groups but struggled at under-18s – largely because, as Santolin says, in a place with a small population like Griffith, a good player at that age is usually playing seniors, which is better for their development anyway. Numbers are further drained by the fact that many teenagers leave to board at schools in big cities, and because there is no university in Griffith, they often don’t return.

“We’ve had a lot of kids that have come from here and played and gone to uni and played for decent clubs in Sydney. That’s the pathway. We can’t hold our kids,” Donadel says. “Honestly, if we had a uni here … we’d be unstoppable because we’d have these kids staying and playing for us.”

Santolin argues that Yoogali has a strong junior base and affiliations with a local academy, and that a suitable workaround could be figured out if the desire existed. He says CF is applying a cookie-cutter model that might work fine in metropolitan areas, but not out in the bush.

The situation is emblematic of how towns and cities like Griffith are cruelled by the tyranny of distance in Australian sport, and often disregarded by administrators based in big cities – even though a disproportionate amount of high-performing athletes come from regional areas.

“This is the thing about Griffith,” Santolin says.

“They look at us on a map, and they think we’re in the middle of nowhere – and we are, but come to the town. We’re not some country bumpkin, a thousand people. These decisions affect a lot of people – players, supporters, families, sponsors, everything that we do. People don’t realise what they’re doing to us, and if they wonder why we don’t want to take this lying down … we’re fighting for our family, almost.

“Football gets in its own way sometimes. Rather than work with us, look at our situation … they kick the whole club out. If something’s too rigid, it breaks. They’ve never taken a flexible approach. This is why we continue to arrive in these situations. I know that if they took a more big-picture approach to everything, it could be brilliant. But instead, they take the easy option. The way that we’ve risen through the ranks, beat every challenge and are continuing to progress – that should be celebrated.”

Yoogali has other problems with CF’s review. Not only was the club not consulted, they believe some of the people who conducted it are affiliated with clubs who would stand to benefit from their removal from the pyramid.

“There’s so many holes in it, it shouldn’t hold water,” Santolin says.

Nine other clubs from Canberra and surrounds have sent a letter to CF expressing their “serious concerns” about the “profound impact” their decisions could have on a club like Yoogali. But there are suspicions in Griffith that some Canberra clubs would be happy for CF to take the bullets so they can avoid all that pesky travel without political repercussions.

The decision has shattered Yoogali’s playing group, president John Keenan says.

“Our immediate thoughts were, we are going to fulfil our commitments for the rest of the season and show them the club we are and continue to turn up and give our best,” he says.

“If anything, it’s probably motivated the group a lot. But then reality set in, and we had to look at what our options were, and the first thing we asked for was the criteria so that we could examine through the right channels and through the right pathways if we could meet that criteria. We still believe there are avenues there for us to pursue.

“We weren’t invited to play NPL. We earned the right to play NPL. We managed to qualify to go up into NPL, and then we managed to stay up there. We’re determined to stay. We believe we belong there.”

CF did not respond to a series of questions sent by this masthead.

‘The strong will prevail’

Unless CF’s decision is reversed, Yoogali is facing a grim future. Playing in the Griffith competition is an option, but not a good one. It’s not what it used to be.

“My 70-year-old father plays in the Griffith comp. You can print that, that’s good publicity for him,” Santolin says.

“Where do we go from here? We’ve put all of our eggs into this basket. If we were crumbling, disintegrating, forfeiting games – you wouldn’t get any pushback from us. The gap between where we are now and where we would likely have to drop to is huge.”

Club officials have sought the assistance of Football NSW and Football Australia, but thus far to no avail.

“We’re not here to make any trouble,” says Donadel. “We just want to play soccer. Football in Griffith is the only sport that goes out of town to play. Rugby league is just around here. Aussie rules, it’s West Wyalong, basically, as far as they go. We try to travel, and the reason is to get to the best comp we can. And this is the best comp we can get to.”

One solution could be the establishment of a separate NPL competition for the Riverina, featuring clubs on both sides of the NSW-Victoria border. On paper, it would be compelling. Yoogali’s age-old nemesis Hanwood, who currently play in Wagga, would be a perfect fit, and ensure the first-grade return of what we might describe as the best Australian sporting rivalry you’ve never heard of.

Add the strongest teams from Wagga, Albury, Young and Cootamundra, and it could be something.

“You’ve got the basis of an NPL there,” Keenan says.

“It takes time, though, to organise competitions and get the structures in place for clubs to be able to compete at that level and under those guidelines of, say, a regional or Riverina NPL. That would be one of the directions that we’re hoping for because the amount of talent that has come out of the Riverina regional areas is substantial and continues to evolve and develop. If they’re serious about football in the regions, they need to consider it.”

Yoogali doesn’t have to look too far for some words of inspiration, if they need them. They are written on the club’s badge. Their slogan is ‘E Forte È Vincerà’, which roughly translates from Italian to: ‘The strong will prevail.’

Vince Rugari is a former sports editor of The Area News in Griffith.