The current hottest topic in Australian football is A-League expansion. The list of candidates grows by the month: Tasmania with their political heavies, South Melbourne with their half-truths and histrionics, Wollongong Wolves, South Sydney, south-west Sydney, Geelong, Brisbane Strikers. Yet one region has so far been conspicuously absent from the recent discussion: Canberra.



A few years ago the football community of Canberra, led by local businessman Ivan Slavich, were banging on the door at Football Federation Australia for an A-League licence. Now, after effectively being told by FFA chief executive David Gallop to stop trying, a partnership with the Central Coast Mariners has been formed and Slavich hired to “create awareness of the Mariners brand” in the nation’s capital. According to Slavich there is “no point in trying again” to bid for an A-League licence.

This weekend is an appropriate time to reflect upon this unfortunate situation. Sunday 2 April 2017 marks 40 years since the National Soccer League kicked off in Canberra. At Manuka Oval, a small cricket ground not far from Parliament House, a little more than 1,500 people witnessed Canberra City lose 3–1 to West Adelaide.

It was a historic moment. The NSL, which in its early days was known as the Philips Soccer League, was Australia’s first truly national league in any sport.

Originally comprised of 14 teams from five cities, the NSL was also one of the most diverse sporting competitions in the world. Players and spectators from all walks of life integrated into clubs that were mostly run by ethnic communities. There was the Brisbane Lions and Mooroolbark United, both founded by Dutchmen; the Greeks of South Melbourne, Fitzroy Alexander United and Sydney Olympic; the Italians at Marconi, Brisbane City and Adelaide City; the Yugoslavs at Footscray JUST, the Anglos at Western Suburbs, the Jews at Eastern Suburbs Hakoah and the Hungarians at St George.

Only one club was created specifically to compete in the new competition – Canberra City.

Photograph: Steve Doszpot personal collection

In the first season City had no social club, no junior sides, no history and no clear mandate from the local sides. At their first training session, there were no footballs. The club owed more to concept than to reality. Canberra City, wrote coach Johnny Warren in the first of his weekly columns for the Canberra Times, “had to be achieved from scratch”.

To this day, the central drama in Australian football is whether clubs should be built around geographic areas or ethnic communities. Canberra was the pioneer of the former, 20 years before Perth Glory were founded and nearly three decades prior to the establishment of the A-League.

“The Australian public will support soccer if they see quality football, marketed professionally,” wrote David Dillon, the club’s first president, in City’s application to join the NSL. “The public will be quick to see that the proposed members of the 1977 league merely represents ethnic groups, and the Australian public as a whole will not identify with an ethnic group. Hence the promotions manager will not be able to market his product adequately. The National League needs support from the migrant communities but not at the expense of losing the potential Australian market.”

Canberra was a terrific place to conduct this bold new experiment. The “bush capital” was selected for its isolation, in the hope that it would transcend state rivalries and engender feelings of national unity and progress. Sir Robert Garran, an architect of Federation in 1901, once remarked that the city was “undoubtedly an integrating force in a country that has a longer period of disunion behind it than of union, so that its citizens need an occasional reminder that they are more than Queenslanders or Victorians – they are Australians. Canberra is more than a city, it is an idea; and as the city grows, the idea grows with it.”

Just as the city was artificially constructed to assimilate the notion of one united Australia, so too was its first top-flight football club. Their first coach was the legendary Socceroo, Johnny Warren, and the squad was a grab-bag of relative no-names. Some players, like Tony Henderson, Ron Tilsed, Jim Cant and Oscar Langone, were genuine imports brought to Australia specifically for the purpose of playing in the NSL. Others, such as English defender Mike Black, Croatian midfielder Ivan Grujicic and Fijian forward Keni Kawaleva, came up from local and state league sides.

“We’re not a magic side,” conceded Canberra City’s first guest player, Adrian Alston, “but they’re a great bunch of lads.”

City’s major benefactor was Brian Pollock, a local car salesman, and the board was comprised of men of different faiths and nationalities. By 1978 the legendary Indigenous activist, Charles Perkins, became the club vice-president, joining a board full of experience in Canberra’s commercial, cultural and political life. Perkins was the deputy secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, while other board members were real estate agents, pharmacists, computer salesmen, restauranteurs and public servants.

By 1979 Perkins became the president of the club – the first Indigenous person to run a sporting team on a national stage. Under his leadership the then-prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, was brought in as a patron. There was no other club like it in the country and, at the time, Canberra City was seen as the future of the Australian game.

“Within one year,’ reported Soccer World in 1977, “Australia’s capital city, the long dormant public service haven and a backwater in major sports, has gained national prominence through soccer.”

Photograph: Steve Doszpot personal collection

In many ways Canberra City is the “Cassandra” of Australian football. Since Perth Glory entered the competition in 1996, the game has trended toward clubs that represent cities and regions rather than ethnic communities. Yet it would take nearly three decades for the Canberra club model to be mandated throughout the competition.

City’s first promotions manager was Steve Doszpot, a polite and conservative firstborn son of Hungarian refugees. Doszpot had arrived with the great wave of Hungarians in 1957, fleeing cold Soviet tanks on hot Budapest streets, and found refuge at St George-Budapest. He had played in the reserve grade side and followed the first team week in, week out.

By 1977, however, he was nearing 30 and working as an executive in the computer industry. Physically and emotionally he had moved on from the warm embrace of the ethnic club and was determined that Canberra City would be seen as a team for the entire region. This new club structure would serve two interrelated functions: first, the migrant supporters would no longer be referred to as Hungarians, Greeks, Scots or Italians but as Canberrans; and second, their invisibility would precipitate the involvement of the Anglo–Australian sporting public.

“What we did was a tremendous exercise in showing people that soccer can attract the average Australian who hasn’t seen a soccer match before,” Doszpot later explained. “I had friends who were involved in rugby league, Aussie rules and basketball all coming out to watch Canberra City because they didn’t feel different there.”

Quietly, City were imbued with the best of St George-Budapest, Australia’s leading club during the 1960s and early 1970s. The club’s blue-and-gold emblem was designed by Doszpot in the same shape as the Hungarian coat of arms. At Doszpot’s recommendation, Johnny Warren – St George-Budapest’s favourite son – was Canberra City’s first coach. His assistant was the Argentinian Vic Fernandez, another St George-Budapest alumni.

The Kunz family – headed by the patriarch Frank Kunz, a Hungarian-born scholar who wrote about migration and refugee flows – formed Canberra City’s first supporters club. Like A-League supporters today, they would dress in club colours, travel to interstate matches, congregate in a specific area of the stadium to chant for their team, hand out instructions to new supporters and hang banners on the railings to mark their territory.

“Within months, the Canberra Cheer Squad became a legend in Australian soccer,” wrote Kunz in 1978. “Interstate soccer writers, coaches were writing about us with envy and the crowds began to grow.”

After one match in Sydney, Johnny Warren congratulated the supporters club for making the trip north. “This,” he observed, “was the first time in my soccer days in Australia that I had heard a crowd support a team when it was behind.”

A Canberra City v Newcastle KB United program from 1978. Photograph: Steve Doszpot personal collection

By 1978, City were joined by another one-town-team in Newcastle KB United. Immediately the two clubs formed a fruitful relationship. Within a year Canberra City recruited ex-Newcastle boss Max Talbot to work as their secretary-manager, the supporter groups built a terrific rapport, the promotions managers liaised regularly, and together the two clubs had established a new cup tournament.

“The idea of playing annually for a trophy between two clubs with virtually no ethnic affiliations […] came from City coach Johnny Warren,” explained a reporter for the Canberra Times. “It was later expanded by the club board and culminated in the prime minister, Mr Fraser, giving permission to call it the Prime Minister’s Cup.”

At one match, an Indigenous man performed a boomerang throwing demonstration as pre-game entertainment and Harry Williams, the first Indigenous Socceroo, was one of Canberra’s star players. Other well-known Indigenous people such as John Moriarty and local journalist John Janke were engaged to promote the club, and within a few years, the Canberra Nomads – perhaps Australia’s first Indigenous football club – would be formed in the local Canberra competition. It included Perkins, Janke, Moriarty and Steve Doszpot, who was one of the few white players in the team.

“This is the thing about soccer – we were in a place where our passions and our lives weren’t governed by politics,” remembered Doszpot, who served as vice-president of Canberra City under Perkins. “Charlie was put through so much hell in politics. But when we were at the soccer, Charlie was totally immersed. I think it kept him motivated in his political life. He could just be himself.”

By 1980 Canberra entered men’s and women’s teams in the local competitions, sponsored a local woman to enter the Miss Australia contest and reorganised the recruitment policy to focus on the development of junior players. The club took part in the Canberra Day Parade, and invited the prime minister and the governor-general and handicapped children as guests of honour to its games.

Both Canberra and Newcastle KB United struggled to win games in those early seasons, but large crowds would turn up to their matches at the newly-opened Bruce Stadium in Canberra and the International Sports Centre in Newcastle. And in the Canberra clubhouse, behind the main bar, a blue-and-gold club scarf was wrapped around a green, brown and white scarf of United.

“The official reason given is that this is the knot of eternal friendship,” read a supporters’ column in the club magazine. “The symbolic uniting of the first two city-based non-ethnic clubs in the PSL.”

Canberra City players and staff in 1977. Photograph: Steve Doszpot personal collection

In the end, the Canberra City experiment lost momentum after a few seasons and the club was taken over by a local Greek side, Downer Olympic. Public interest fell away, crowds dropped and by 1987, it was relegated. The club would never recover.

These days the National Soccer League is remembered primarily for its ethnic clubs and, perhaps unfairly, for the associated problems that came with them. Equally, however, the NSL should be remembered for clubs such as Canberra City – one-town-teams that participated from the very first match.

Indeed the influence of those associated with Canberra is still felt today. Doszpot, a member of the Liberal Party, was later instrumental in bringing Ian Knop into football. And it was under Knop’s short reign as chairman of Soccer Australia that the Howard Government commissioned the Crawford Report into the structure, governance and management of the game. And current FFA board member Danny Moulis got his start at Canberra as a teenager in 1977.

Moreover, in 2003 Warren headed the NSL task force that was responsible for building what we know as the A-League. One of the recommendations of that report was for clubs to represent regions. Warren had first learned this lesson, of course, at Canberra. As he wrote in the Canberra Times back in 1977: “It is reasonable to say that City’s concept of a truly Canberra team not based on one nationality is a first in Australia and a good thing for our football.”

If in the years to come Canberra is granted an A-League licence, there will be a ready-made blueprint for the owners to follow.

This is an edited extract from The Death and Life of Australian Soccer, which will be published in August 2017 by UQP