Were you looking for a symbol to exemplify the gulf that lies between Auckland City Football Club and their rivals at the Club World Cup, you would find it at Kiwitea Street, the team’s home ground.
Hard up against the Sandringham suburb it serves, the roofs of the surrounding city’s single-storey bungalows are visible from the one enclosed stand, and to the north there is nothing but the modest clubhouse and some incidental shrubbery to impede views of the Sky Tower’s lonely tenancy in the distant skyline. This, certainly, is no towering football cathedral of the kind Real Madrid and Manchester City call home.
On Sunday, the team more used to this humble environment and the 100-to-500 fans who usually turn out to watch will line up against one of the world’s most famous and decorated clubs, Bayern Munich, Auckland City’s first opponents in a group also containing Benfica and Boca Juniors. “To be honest, I don’t know if we have ever seen a matchup like this in sport,” the assistant coach Adrià Casals tells the Guardian from Chattanooga, Tennessee. “But we can only play the game in front of us.”
And what a game, one that represents the chance for footballers of more modest talents to test themselves against some of the world’s best: Thomas Müller and Harry Kane could find themselves sharing the pitch with a genuine democratic cross-section of New Zealand life. “All sorts,” says the captain, Mario Ilich, of a team containing a barber, a teacher, a real-estate agent and university students. Ilich himself works in the sales department of Coca-Cola, a job around which the defensive midfielder moulds his football commitments, training three or four times a week after work and making frequent demands on his employer’s goodwill in order to travel overseas. “I’ve taken all my annual leave for this trip, so I won’t be going on a holiday with my partner this year, that’s for sure,” he says.
The team qualified thanks to their long-standing domination of Oceania’s Champions League, which they have won a record 13 times, most recently by beating Papua New Guinea’s Hekari United in the Solomon Islands at the end of another leave-sapping football trip earlier this year. And while there are two professional clubs in New Zealand – the recently inaugurated Auckland Football Club and Wellington Phoenix – they compete in the Australian A-Leagueand, because they are not allowed to play in the Asian Confederation’s continental competitions, they have no opportunity to qualify for the Club World Cup.
As it stands, this year marks the 12th time Auckland City have flown the Oceania flag at the Club World Cup – the 2014 team came third – but because of its new group-based format, Sunday represents the first time they will meet a European team.
The club’s qualification has been assured since late 2023, but for Ilich the prospect of playing in the biggest game of his life has hardly sunk in. Even to see the Auckland City crest arranged next to that of Bayern Munich, he says, seems peculiar and much of the side’s conversations have been about playing against teams they had grown up admiring as fans.
Ilich is “under no illusions” as to the size of the challenge, even if he seemed to allow for the chance of a fairytale. “We all have a dream and that is to win football games, whatever game you’re in. We know the task at hand is very difficult, but we want to just go out and make it as hard as possible for the opposition, and to just give the best performance we can.”
For Casals, a Barcelona native who was “running away from the game” when he settled in New Zealand only to be sucked back into its orbit by the club, Auckland City are playing not just for themselves, but for the vast majority of players worldwide who never get anywhere near the professional level. “We represent like 95% of the world’s footballers. If we can stay true to who we are, if we can be brave, then we can make a lot of people proud of us and everything we represent as an amateur club from a small nation in the middle of nowhere.”
At Kiwitea Street, as Saturday morning’s rain retreated in a veil of towering clouds, a couple of hundred fans watched as an Auckland City team robbed of their entire first-choice squad went down 2-1 to Waiheke United in New Zealand’s national knockout tournament, the Chatham Cup. But thoughts were already turning to 4am Monday morning, New Zealand time, when players that fans were used to sharing a post-game drink with will make their cameos on football’s global stage.
Some hoped Auckland City would have a chance to express themselves, others that their team wouldn’t be thrashed, that results wouldn’t give succour to those opposed to Oceania’s direct entry. Half a world away, Ilich and his teammates are doing their best to make those hopes a reality. “We’re fully focused on our performance and our plan, and on making sure everyone’s on the same page. That way we can hopefully give the best representation of Oceania, of New Zealand, of our city and our club.”
