Just over 10 years ago – at the A-League’s peak (as opposed to Peak A-League) – the Western Sydney Wanderers achieved something that, as time rolls on, feels increasingly unfathomable in this era of Japanese excellence, state-backed Saudi spending and endless dysfunction in the Australian game.
Their victory over Al Hilal in the AFC Champions League final was the crowning moment for a club that had crashed onto the Sydney sporting scene like a tidal wave and looked ready to swallow everyone else up.
The glory days of the Western Sydney Wanderers.Credit: Getty Images
When the team arrived back from Riyadh, more than 2000 fans crammed into the arrival hall at Sydney airport to greet them.
“You think back and wonder if this could ever happen in Australian football,” said the hero of the final, Ante Covic, as he held the trophy.
It’s been pretty much downhill ever since.
Save for the year in which they made a losing grand final appearance, the Wanderers have played finals football just once since winning the Champions League, backsliding into irrelevance both on and off the field. They spent four years as nomads after the demolition of the old Pirtek Stadium, disrupting the cultural moment they had created as they were forced to take games to the ridiculously ill-fitting Sydney Showground and beyond. The red and black faithful did not follow.
The Wanderers are back, and so are their fans.Credit: Getty Images
Once the new CommBank Stadium was ready for them to move back in, they’d been so bad for so long that supporters only returned to Parramatta in a trickle, not a flood.
It was as if they’d done a deal with the devil, selling their future for a one-time opportunity to scale an impossible mountain.
Indeed, there have been plenty of games along the journey where it felt like there were fewer people in the stands than at the airport that day in 2014.
You might not know it unless you have a Paramount+ subscription, but the tide is turning. The Wanderers are back.
The Wanderers celebrate a goal at Campbelltown Stadium last weekend.Credit: Getty Images
This time, it doesn’t feel like a false dawn – not like two years ago, when they broke their long finals drought but stumbled at the first hurdle.
The belief out west, for the first time in a long time, is real. It’s not just words. You can sense it.
Under former Matildas boss Alen Stajcic, they rumble into the A-League Men’s finals series, which kicks off this weekend, as the form team, on the back of a 12-match unbeaten streak. If they can make it 13, by getting past Melbourne Victory, it will equal a club record. They boast the best attack in the competition, led by joint-golden boot winner Nicolas Milanovic and Socceroo Brandon Borrello, and a defence that celebrates blocks and tackles as if they are goals, embodied by potential find-of-the-season Anthony Pantazopoulos, a big beast of a centre-back who lives to crunch blokes and belt goal kicks into outer space.
Ticket sales for Saturday night’s elimination final are flying, and a crowd of around 18,000 is anticipated, which would go close to breaking another record: their biggest non-derby finals crowd.
Wanderers coach Alen Stajcic.Credit: Getty Images
It will probably feel and sound like double that amount, if the vocal away performance by the Red & Black Bloc at last weekend’s win at Macarthur FC was any indication of what is to come.
“It’s just the beginning for us,” said Stajcic on Wednesday.
And he’s not joking.
Stajcic, born and bred in Blacktown, insists the Wanderers have a duty to the area and, more broadly, to the sport.
Brandon Borrello is a key man for the Wanderers.Credit: Getty Images
“This club, for me, should be the leader to drag us out of … I wouldn’t say mire, but out of the hole that we’re in, in domestic football in this country at the moment,” he said.
Having ‘won’ the wooden spoon with Perth Glory last season, the renovation job he has done with Western Sydney is nothing short of remarkable. After a near-decade of underachievement, he has established strong foundations at the Wanderers, but he is nowhere near satisfied. He wants to build on them, help them realise their untapped potential, and turn them into the biggest club of any code in the country, and the most dominant sporting team of any sport in the western suburbs.
“I think we can be and should be bigger than all of them,” he said, indulging in a level of bravado talk not heard from any A-League operative in some years.
“They represent one small town: Penrith Panthers represent Penrith and Parramatta [Eels] represent Parramatta, and we represent everyone, the whole western front, going from Campbelltown through to Liverpool and Blacktown and Penrith and Holroyd and Auburn. You’re talking a couple of million people.
“The demographics of our area is young families, migrant families, first generation Aussies, second generation Aussies – who we know have all come from football backgrounds, and that’s why we could and should be the best club in the country. That’s what we’re aspiring to be.”
Wanderers captain Lawrence Thomas, another dyed-in-the-wool westie, experienced the glory days as an opposition player. He remembers sitting on the bench at a rocking Pirtek Stadium as Melbourne Victory’s reserve goalkeeper, and feeling proud of a club he was not yet involved with.
“I think it’s something that can’t be faked,” he says of the team’s symbiotic relationship with their fans.
“The community can see on the players, by their actions on the pitch, what the game means to them, what the results are for the club, and that we take our responsibility quite seriously for the people we represent.
“It felt like, especially in the Macarthur game, the fans rode every tackle, every shot, every action – so it feels like we’re all in this together.”
