My interview with Mr
Ange Cimera, president of Melbourne Knights Football Club.
Date: Tuesday, 16
February 2010.
Location: Knights’
Stadium, Somers Street, Sunshine North, Melbourne.
Time: 1 hour and 40 minutes.
Kieran
James: What are your comments about the cancellation of the National Soccer
League and establishment of the A-League?
Ange Cimera: Look, as far as the end of
the NSL is concerned, it was disappointing in the way they did it. With the Crawford Report, we knew what was
coming, we suffered, we didn’t play in any competition for over a year; we were
out of soccer for fourteen months.
I have no problems with
what they were trying to do, but the way they did it was not fair to clubs that
have been there fifty years or so. They say they are bringing in more people to
the league - [Melbourne] Victory, Sydney, [Adelaide] United are successes. I
think some of the clubs, like Central Coast and Brisbane, are struggling at the
moment. The majority, the owners are putting up lots of money; how long they can
still do it? They should have got the clubs that have been around fifty years
involved, but they pushed us aside. I don’t think the standard of the game in
the national-league improved that much, it maybe improved in the last few years
of the NSL. There was an export of so many good players. In the nineties, we
lost Viduka, many others. In the 90s that went overseas, from Marconi, Adelaide
City, around one hundred and fifty players from the NSL are playing in Europe. That’s
why I felt, since the late-nineties, the standard of the NSL had dropped -
because so many players went overseas. The standard of the A-League is not that
high - it’s a long way from a super-league. In the first year of the A-League,
Victory’s whole defence was our defence from the NSL days. Our last-year-NSL
defence virtually won the Championship for Victory. We finished third-last.
[Author’s note: Actually Melbourne Knights finished second-last, out of
thirteen teams, in the last NSL season.]
Lowy gets a lot of
credit for destroying the clubs. He should get a lot of credit for destroying
the clubs. For someone who loved soccer, he pulled the pin on Hakoah, the most
powerful club. [Author’s note: This comment refers to Lowy’s decision to
withdraw Hakoah from the NSL immediately before the first match of the 1984
season.] He should have not pulled them. He’s the man of the time; everyone
kisses his ass, but he destroyed every club that meant something to our soccer
community, not only here but in Sydney as well.
They [i.e. the A-League
clubs] have not developed any players for five years. They have no junior
system. We can have a junior for eight, nine years, he goes to Victory, and
it’s a three-page write-up in the Herald Sun
about a great new superstar. We spent fifteen years on him. They don’t pay
for it, cap is $3,000 maximum. They find an excuse not even to give the $3,000.
They have no grassroots development.
We did not even get
$3,000 compensation on player X, that’s totally wrong; it should be a win-win
situation; there’s nothing coming back to the clubs; that pisses me off. The
FFA in a dispute will always back the A-League club, not the small clubs.
Mate Dugandzic - we spent $30,000 on him, sent him to Dinamo Zagreb; and got back nothing at
all. [Author’s note: This player should not be confused with Marko Dugandzic.]
KJ:
What were the prospects of joining the A-League in the beginning?
Ange Cimera: These clubs were given no
chance [to join the A-League] - they [the FFA] didn’t want to hear about it.
Ethnic-based clubs could not even put in a proposal; they did not want to hear
about it. In regards Bobby Despotovski, the war was on in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
That signal signified what was going on over there so the community got pissed
off over it. He just got a few matches suspension.
VPL don’t promote the
PL at all, every newspaper jumps on everything negative connected to the game.
Victoria is the biggest state with the most to lose with the NSL. If soccer
takes off here, it will be difficult for the AFL. Any incident in soccer here
will make the front page and ‘ethnics’ blamed. Every game of cricket at the
MCG, one hundred will be ejected – we don’t see it on the front page of the Herald Sun, they protect their own, it
just wouldn’t happen.
David
Hill sold the TV rights in the 1990s. He said we need commercial TV - Channel 7
got aboard. I told David that’s the biggest mistake as 7 had the footy [AFL]
rights but next year they lost it to 9 and 10. That deal [for soccer] was a
ten-year deal, ten or twenty million dollars. We were told that there would be live
games on TV. He didn’t ask the clubs until the whole deal fell through. All you
saw was highlights packages at 1:00 a.m. on a Tuesday night. Why pay such money
to put it on TV at 1:00 a.m.? I heard that the AFL paid the twenty million to
put them on at 1:00 a.m. and don’t telecast any games. Hill went ahead and
still sold us out. He made a lot of clubs broke.
KJ:
Why did Hill still keep the ethnic clubs in the NSL if he was against them?
Ange Cimera: We maintained our
membership [in the NSL] because without the ethnic clubs there was no league.
Every club then had an ethnic background apart from [Perth] Glory. The
structure now is going to collapse without promotion-relegation. They tried it
in the USA and that collapsed and they brought superstars. It becomes like AFL
football where who cares who finishes last?
They
have no choice but to bring in a B-League. VPL wanted regional summer league here
with eight or ten teams in Melbourne plus regional teams. You can’t put five
clubs together and say “you are one club”.
They need a strong B-League [for] when clubs drop out. Where do they go
now? It’s a long way back to the Premier League where we play here on
cow-paddocks. Even a B-League by itself is not enough, that league needs
promotion-and-relegation. It doesn’t matter how you work it - unless Premier
League ethnic clubs are involved, nothing is going to work.
KJ:
What are your goals for the Knights?
Ange Cimera: We just want to stabilize
the club; we have a young team now. We will survive; we have our core of
supporters. We own our own ground and facilities; no-one can force us to do
anything. Thirty or forty years later we will still be the Knights backed by
the Croatian community, but second, third or fourth generation. Do we want to
join the A-League? No, not the way it is set up now. If Marconi, Sydney United,
us and South [Melbourne] could get promoted and relegated, then yes. We would
need three or four leagues with promotion and relegation. A small club needs to
have a goal - to be able to get promoted to the A-League. At the moment we just
want to survive until they stop ethnic cleansing. You are getting rid of the
community that loves the game. In Europe every club is an ‘ethnic’ club.
The
thing is now we have no chance to bring up another Mark Viduka. They [A-League
clubs] will send a youth-team coach here, sit in the stand, give them amateur
contracts, and run them in the second-league. If we play in a higher league,
our crowds will go up and vice-versa. Why are the Victory entitled to the money
and no-one else? We never saw a cent of it. We nurture them, bring them up, and
they get all the credit. They sell a player for $500,000 and we get $3,000.
Danny Tiatto - he was at Brisbane.
KJ:
What was the annual turnover for the Knights both in the NSL years and now?
Ange
Cimera: $1.2 to 1.3 million during the NSL years and now $250,000 per year.
KJ:
Has the Knights ever bid for an A-League licence?
Ange
Cimera: We have not bid for the A-League.
KJ:
Was the Knights behind the Melbourne United consortium?
Ange
Cimera: A few people who used to play for the Knights were in it - a few
Croatians were going to back it. The Knights did not apply and have never
applied. The Heart [i.e. Melbourne Heart, now Melbourne City] - unless they
have a superstar marquee; they need another market. There should have been two
clubs at the start from Melbourne and Sydney, I said, but Victory has picked up
the soccer supporters, ninety percent of whom are ‘ethnics’.
KJ:
Did the Knights lose fans to Victory?
Ange
Cimera: Not many Knights fans, not the oldies and youngies, but the
middle-aged, 35-40, with kids, are taking the kids to the Victory. If they
bring them to Knights’ Stadium, with six hundred people here, will that attract
the kids to play soccer? I keep telling South Melbourne they have no chance in
hell, even with a different name. With
the current backers they have no chance, I have told them that.
KJ:
Is there a chance of a breakaway league?
Ange
Cimera: Eight or nine clubs here in Victoria met to talk about a breakaway
league along with some Sydney clubs. We sat down and spoke about this but they
don’t realize how complicated it is - admin, referees. The FFA would not
sanction this - admin and tribunals would have to be put in place. The original
NSL had Soccer Australia’s blessings and they helped them with infrastructure.
You could not do it unless you had the blessing - it would not become viable.
You would need million dollar sponsors initially. It would be very difficult
without FFA’s blessing. Soccer Australia owed the NSL $1.2 million. NSL had
$600-700 thousand debt - the clubs got left with that. The clubs had to pay
$30-40 thousand to repay that money or they would not let us in the Premier
Leagues - that was absolutely ridiculous. We could not be registered unless we
paid that debt that was accumulated by the national-league but Soccer Australia
owed the NSL $1.2 million, which could have covered the debt. Now we are
starting on minus three points because the club was $1,100 in debt at the end
of last year. All youth and juniors are all fined minus three points right
through. It’s ridiculous.
KJ:
Can we say that the A-League stole the goodwill of the NSL?
Ange Cimera: We made the competition, we
attracted the fans; it was like goodwill; they took it off us; they said you
can’t play here anymore. We were down last year in crowds - around one thousand
to one thousand, two hundred people at a game, five hundred to six hundred
paid, others were season and junior passes.
Against
South Melbourne is a big game, Dandenong Thunder, Albanian club, just promoted;
Oakleigh, Heidelberg, Greek-based clubs; Green Gully, George Cross, and Hume -
South Melbourne, Heidelberg and ourselves, we have all dropped. South Melbourne
is lucky to get a thousand to their games. They pushed the ‘ethnics’ away,
except for the hardcore, but many walked away and they won’t come back. We have
tried to open our doors to the community, say “we are not a Croatian club,” but
they say “you are still a Croatian club”. This year we are going to push the
Croatian image. There are 50,000 Croats
in Victoria, how about getting 10% of them back? It is a Croatian club, that’s
our core; it’s always going to be a core. We said “we will open our doors to
anyone,” we still welcome anyone. Knights are multicultural, but people haven’t
taken up the offer. Now we go to the other end of the spectrum. You have Green
Gully, George Cross, and Western Suburbs just down the road and twenty small
ethnic clubs in this area with their own core group. The majority [of clubs] are
different nationalities.
KJ:
Will you bring back the name of Croatia?
Ange
Cimera: The VPL won’t allow the name Croatia, but we got our logo of the
nineties, when we won back-to-back flags, back this year. [Author’s note: This
would be the logo featuring the red-and-white chequerboard.] We have a Croatia
country back home. I like the name Knights. We know Knights is associated with
the Croatian community. Thirty or forty years ago we needed that association,
but everyone now knows who we are. … I would not agree with South Melbourne
calling themselves Hellas. Everyone associates us with the Croatian community
so we don’t need our name as name.
KJ:
Let us return to the topic of the goodwill being stolen from the NSL and its
clubs…
Ange Cimera: We need to be recognized as
the clubs that started the NSL, kept that tradition up, and got a kick in the
guts later on. No plan to enter the A-League at all, absolutely impossible
under these conditions. If the A-League changes in three to four years’ time,
maybe they’ll come back and ask us. It is all because of the Crawford Report - it says if you don’t
make changes, no money will come in. It’s all about the money. A-League will
soon fall flat on its face. Leeds United may have dropped down two divisions,
but they are still Leeds United - they have still got the name, Luton Town
also. In England you don’t get wiped clean, saying “you don’t exist anymore, we
only want the A-League”. They never talk about the grassroots as then they
would have to talk about Marconi, Sydney United, Knights, etc.
Then you had half a
dozen clubs in Sydney, now you just have one. If the NSL had four thousand, the
same number of people went to a number of clubs; now they all go to one place.
They attracted some of the newest breed. What rivalry is there between
Melbourne [Victory] and Sydney [Football Club]? You can’t have rivalry without
history. There was a hell of a rivalry between us and Perth [Glory].
New
Zealand Knights pinched our name. They were called Auckland Kingz. They didn’t
have much crowd in the NSL, this carried on into the A-League. These were the
two original clubs. Newcastle was Italia and Italian businessmen. Adelaide City
became Adelaide United, they had the same supporters.
KJ:
Some Adelaide City people were involved in United.
Ange
Cimera: They did it a different way to the way the others did. Brisbane Lions -
Dutch or Ukrainian (thirty or forty years ago)? I hate Lowy. They brought Pele
and Beckenbauer into USA [but] it fell apart. Exactly the same will happen to the
A-League. If it is called the World Game, it should be run how the world runs
it. Only in Australia do you have no promotion and relegation. We have gone to
FIFA about our minus three points. My daughter wrote a strong letter to the FIFA
Disputes Committee asking if it was sanctioned by FIFA. Still we have had no
reply. You may see a big article in the Herald
Sun; I will blow this up on TV. I know they are not sanctioned by FIFA as
it does not happen anywhere else in the world. I said, if it got out anywhere
in the world, the soccer world would laugh at you. I’m going all the way with
this - of course it [the three-point penalty] is just a way to give trouble to
the ‘ethnic’ clubs. Mark Rendell -
former CEO of Bowls Australia, CEO of FFV - these people are making decisions;
they have no idea of what is going on in the world as far as soccer is
concerned. I have never seen points deducted for late-payment in Europe. It
just does not exist. It is causing trouble for the ‘ethnic’ clubs. It is a
matter of ethnic cleansing, simple as that. South Melbourne has that attitude:
“I had better not say anything as we may want to get into the A-League.” My
[three] favourite clubs in the world are Liverpool, Chelsea, and, in Scotland,
Celtic. There is only one club for me - Melbourne Knights, no other club in the
world that I would have time to do what I’m doing, including Hajduk Split and
Dinamo Zagreb; as far as the A-League is concerned, not one. Regarding Sydney
[FC] and Melbourne [Victory], I don’t give a shit who wins. I hope they all
fall in a hole and disappear as that’s what they did to my club.
*****THE END*****
Footnote: Ange Cimera: We built our
stadium with no government grants except $60,000 for the lights. All was built
by the Croatian community from a former drive-in theatre site.
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