Last week, Brisbane Roar unveiled their new logo, Mincy the Lion, which follows Melbourne Heart’s recent conversion to Melbourne City. Rebranding, it seems, is a favourite pastime of Australian football administrators. In David Winner’s history of English football, Those Feet, Stephen Knight explains that Australians are “obsessed with the future. They want to forget the past while the English want to live in it.” In football, Australians are masters of the identity crisis, and the game’s history has suffered as a result. To look through the history books is to lose yourself in a labyrinth of ever-changing club names. Here are six of the silliest club names – and that’s without even getting into the State Leagues.

Sydney City Slickers

One of the most successful sides during the 1960s and 1970s, Sydney City began life as simply ‘Hakoah’ in 1939. ‘The strength’ in Hebrew, the Hakoah label has been used by sports clubs representing the Jewish diaspora around the world. However, it was not strong enough to survive Australian soccer politics, and after changing their name from Hakoah Eastern Suburbs to Sydney City, someone came up with the bright idea of tacking ‘Slickers’ on the end of it. The Sydney City Slickers remains one of the stupidest names ever thrust into the national imagination, and just a few years after the rebranding, the club slid into oblivion. Thankfully, the Hakoah brand has gone through something of a renaissance in recent years, with Hakoah Sydney City East recently involved in the inaugural FFA Cup.



Brisbane Gladiators

In 1981, the success of the North American Soccer League in the United States prompted the Australian Soccer Federation’s hired marketing hand, Rik Booth, to ‘Americanise’ the Australian competition. In late 1980, Booth told the press: “clubs, we hope, will change their names, all club emblems will be redesigned, we will deethnicise it in every way. People will be able to relate to it more. The League will be remodelled over the next four or five years on the North American Soccer League.” Azzurri, a club run by Italian-Australians in Brisbane, had become Brisbane City upon their entry to the NSL in 1977, but after it was decided that ‘City’ was a bit drab, they became the Brisbane Gladiators. In doing so, they joined the wonderfully ridiculous Marconi-Datsun Leopards, Adelaide ‘Giants’ and Newcastle KB ‘Raiders’, not to mention the Leichhardt Strikers, whose ‘APIA’ (Associazione Poli-sportiva Italo Australiana) acronym at the start of their name was deemed too ethnic. The Gladiators of Brisbane football now play in the National Premier Leagues Queensland as Brisbane City, but the ‘Azzurri’ lives on in their blue shirts.

Melbourne Knights

Oh, the Croatian teams. So much trouble, so much fun. Perhaps the most nationalistic of all the groups that dominated Australian football, there have even been academic papers spawned about their influence of the game in this country. Written by Australian football’s very own font of knowledge, Roy Hay, the title, fittingly, is Those Bloody Croatians: Croatian soccer teams, violence and ethnicity, 1950-1999. Name changes started early for Melbourne Croatia: in 1972, after they were booted out of the Victorian State League, they merged with the Ukrainian club Essendon Lions to become Essendon Croatia. They still sell replica shirts from those days in the club shop.

In Sydney, their sister club has been through more facelifts than Severina Vuckovic, evolving from Metropolitan Adriatic, South Sydney Croatia, Croatia Sydney, Sydney Croatia, Sydney CSC (no prizes for guessing that acronym), Sydney Crows (Cros?), Sydney Pumas (by virtue of their shirt sponsor), Sydney United Bravehearts before finally settling on Sydney United in the mid 1990s. They are now Sydney United ‘58.

It all began after the Bradley Report in 1990, where it was recommended that clubs lose their ethnic image. Melbourne Croatia briefly became Melbourne CSC, but they were always more militant than their sister club about the issue. In 1995 the head of Soccer Australia, David Hill, was adamant that they Anglicise their name. The members refused and prepared to drop down to the State Leagues if necessary. A committeeman for the club recommended Melbourne Reds, which would match a sponsorship from Tooheys and their red shirts. But that was seen as too communist for a club formed – at least in part – out of opposition to Tito’s Yugoslavia. And so some of the younger board members came up with Melbourne ‘Knights’ – a seemingly innocuous title which Soccer Australia accepted. What they didn’t tell them was this: Knights is an acronym for Klub Nogometa i Gdje Hrvati Takmice Srcem (football club and where Croatians battle with their heart). The members were happy, and Croatia lived on.

South Melbourne Lakers

The Oceania “club of the century” is now known simply as South Melbourne, and colloquially referred to as South or Hellas by members. The merger of South Melbourne United, Yarra Park Ajax and Hellenic, the club began as South Melbourne Hellas in 1959. Booth’s wacky marketing mayhem had them playing as “the Gunners” in 1981, but that didn’t last long. Still, a little over a decade later, South Melbourne became the Lakers after pressure to ‘Australianise’ the club. Yes, their home ground is on the banks of the Albert Park Lake, but according to club historian and blogger Paul Mavroudis, the newly named club was threatened with legal action by the NBA’s LA Lakers. Whatever the legal grounds, whoever came up with the name should at least be subject to punishment for crimes against good taste. Thankfully, loyal fans continued to chant for Hellas, and the Lakers name is now history.

Olympic Sharks

The acronym UTS - which stands for University of Technology Sydney - never really looked right on the front of Sydney Olympic’s jersey, even when Ian Rush wore it. But those were the 90s, where football administrators in Australia took a ‘by any means necessary’ approach to marketing. Sydney Olympic (nee Pan Hellenic) fans are used to having fraternal sponsors such as De Costi Seafoods or the Cyprus Bank on the front of their shirts, and so ‘UTS’ was just confusing. But while UTS Olympic wasn’t a particularly inspiring name, it was more forgivable than Olympic Sharks. When the club moved to Toyota Park in Cronulla in 2001, the Sharks name was supposed to entice rugby league fans in one of the whitest areas in Sydney to support a Greek-Australian soccer club traditionally from the inner western suburbs. Despite the fact that the area has a strong participation base, nobody in the Sutherland Shire cared for the Olympic Sharks, and thankfully the club has since returned to Sydney Olympic and Belmore Sports Ground. If only they could resurrect that old logo with the Olympic rings.



Football Kingz

Worst. Name. Ever. Based in Auckland, club owners clearly felt that geographical place names were underselling the potential of this new franchise. Not only were they the ‘Kingz’ of Auckland (not hard considering they were the only professional side in New Zealand), they were apparently the ‘Kingz’ of football. In their new kingdom, even the English language was open to interpretation. Still, notwithstanding the fact that Kingz isn’t a proper word, it all looked a bit odd when they failed to make the finals series in their four-year history. As the old national league was aborted in 2004, the clearing house for ageing British expat footballers in the antipodes was restructured and renamed the New Zealand Knights (with no hidden Croatian acronyms). Still nobody wanted a bar of them, and the club died an inglorious death in 2007, finishing last before their licence was revoked. Better to die as Knights than live as Kingz, I say.