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The Wanderers have pulled off one of Australian football’s greatest coups.
A football club less than three years old, and with a budget 20 times smaller than most of their opponents, has beaten the best and richest football clubs that Korea, China, Japan and West Asia has to offer.
Their final opponent, Al Hilal, is backed by the Saudi royal family, comprising some of the richest and most powerful people on earth.
But in addition to being a remarkable mental, technical, and coaching achievement, the Wanderers have also handed the FFA a big win in its somewhat strained relationship with the Asian Football Confederation (AFC).
The significance of the Wanderers’ ACL win for Australian football’s place in the AFC cannot be understated. The FFA had to lobby both the FIFA Executive and the AFC for a long time before joining the world’s largest confederation in 2005.
Frank Lowy and the FFA recognised the potential value of a 3 billion-strong audience, as well as not being stuck in Oceania for World Cup qualification. The problem for the AFC was that when Australia came on board, the conference didn’t receive any more World Cup spots. Lowy and the FFA had to convince the AFC that Australia’s presence would add sufficient value to their sponsorship and TV rights, to make it worth the AFC surrendering one of their World Cup qualifying spots to the Socceroos.
It hasn’t always been smooth sailing in this football marriage of convenience, and there have been some enduring rub points between the FFA and AFC.
The AFC has been unhappy with aspects of how the A-League is run such as no promotion/relegation (only the United States also gets away with this), no independent clubs, and their discomfort with having Oceania’s Phoenix playing in the A-League. If the Phoenix did qualify for the ACL, no one is quite sure what would happen.
However, perhaps the biggest sore point for the AFC was the A-League teams’ lacklustre performances in the ACL. Adelaide’s 2008 performance aside, from 2007 to 2013, A-League teams have been routinely bundled out of the competition.
After the AFC was convinced that Australian participation would bring more competition, interest and revenue, this expected windfall largely failed to materialise. Instead, A-League clubs baulked at paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to fly their teams around Asia to be pummelled by squads with far larger budgets.
Crowds at home were uninterested, and the mounting financial losses resulted in some A-League clubs openly stating they didn’t want to participate in the ACL. The A-League clubs clearly prioritised domestic competitions over the ACL.
The lack of bonafide participation really grinded the AFC, who had only agreed to the FFA joining on the basis that it would make their conference more exciting. After increasing Australia’s ACL spots from 2 to 2.5 in 2012, the AFC reduced the Australian places to just 1.5 in 2013. The official line was that Australia “did not meet the criteria for full participation” as we didn’t have a promotion/relegation system.
This was rightly interpreted as a warning shot over Australia’s place in Asian football by the FFA, who immediately appealed to FIFA. FIFA upheld the appeal, and Australia’s number of ACL places was reinstated to 2.5.
Despite this, what the FFA needed more than anything was to prove Australian club football’s place in Asia with on-field success. And with their unexpected win the Wanderers have handed it to them on a platter.
Even as the Wanderers were pulling off their remarkable campaign, the rhetoric out of most of their more fancied opposition was that the Wanderers were a tiny club who did not deserve to be there. These comments mirror the disdain with which Australian club football was held by the Asian powers.
The scenes after the matches with Guangzhou and Al Hilal betrayed their shock at being beaten. They simply did not expect it, and were even angry that what they saw as their right to win had been stolen away.
Marcello Lippi charged onto the field and manhandled a WSW player. Al Hilal have called for an investigation. The Korean and Japanese teams were more polite, but equally as dismissive of the Wanderers’ chances of success.
This is why the FFA bent over backwards to help the Wanderers in their ACL finals legs, which was the right thing to do. They hurriedly changed the scheduling of the domestic competition so that the Wanderers didn’t have the pressure of two games a week. The FFA also turned down a potential big stadium cash bonanza by not fighting the Wanderers’ wish to play their final leg at Pirtek.
Like the champions they are, the Wanderers brought home the bacon. But for the FFA, this win undeniably cements A-League clubs’ right to play alongside AFC’s elite for years to come.
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