In 2001, at the close of the college soccer season, I sat in my coach’s office for our annual year-end evaluation. I’d just come off a mediocre campaign as a starting centerback, and my coach—a short former English professional and ESPN soccer analyst named Eddie Mighten—was ready to hear me break down all the ways I was going to improve in the offseason. Instead, I told him I was going to spend the Spring semester in Australia at the University of Sydney. Not to worry though, I said. I’d train with the university team over there. Mighten scrunched up his nose. “In Australia?” he asked, rhetorically. “But their football is shit!”

And it was true. For so long, soccer in Australia languished as a sport of immigrants, called “wogball” or worse. Top young Australian athletes, in the same vein as Americans, turned to Aussie Rules Football, rugby, basketball, tennis, swimming, throwing things at sharks, nearly anything other than soccer. Meanwhile, the ones who did play were isolated by Australia’s location and weak international conference. The country didn’t qualify for its first World Cup until 1974, where the team embarrassed themselves by failing to score once in the tournament. It would take 32 years, a conference switch, and a once-in-a-lifetime talent pool to get Australia back into the championship.

The first key move was getting Australia out of the comically bad Oceania Football Confederation (OFC). Playing in Oceania meant facing, and easily crushing, tiny, tiny island nations made up of wayward fishermen and stranded dogs. And I mean Lizzie the Lizard in Rampage-style crushing. In 2001, Australia beat American Samoa 31-0. One player—Archie Thompson—scored 13 goals, and he wasn’t even a typical starter. Two days earlier, they’d beaten Tonga 22-0. And, mind you, these were official World Cup qualification matches.

But aside from the unhelpfully soft competition, there was a more important downside to playing in the Oceania federation: it didn’t get an automatic World Cup berth. Even if the team won Oceania—and really, that only ever came down to Australia or New Zealand—it still had to play another team from another Federation—usually the fifth-place South American country—in order to get in. Clearly, this was not a good way to become a credible international side.

In 2005, FIFA approved Australia’s move to the Asian Football Conference. But its qualifying effort for 2006 would have happen, one last time, through the OFC.