Early in his tenure at Sydney FC Graham Arnold described the culture he inherited at the Sky Blues as toxic.
“When players walked in the training facility, they pretty much didn’t want to be there,” he told Guardian Australia. “What I’ve tried to work hard on since I’ve been here is building a culture. I had to put the footings down before I could even think about putting the slab down and then putting the walls up and then putting the roof on and then the roof tiles on.”
Four years later Arnold has turned a fixer-upper into the most desirable property on the block.
Whoever replaces the soon-to-be Socceroos coach will be taking over a club with unprecedented domestic dominance in the A-League era. Last season’s double winners added the FFA Cup to their collection earlier this campaign and Thursday’s 3-2 victory in Perth guaranteed another A-League premiership. Over the past 54 rounds Sydney FC have topped the ladder on 49 of them.
Arnold may have drawn up the plans for Sydney’s cultural revolution but he didn’t embed the change alone. Sky Blue stalwart Terry McFlynn was recruited by Arnold to handle player welfare shortly after completing a masters of coach education at the University of Sydney but has progressed to general manager of football operations. McFlynn’s buzzwords include loyalty and resilience, and under his guidance Sydney FC have created the template for A-League squad building and player retention.
A cornerstone of that model is operating with a perilously small pool of first-team regulars, making Andrew Clark’s job as head of strength and conditioning a vital one. But Clark is one of the most respected figures in Australian football, and his shamanic powers have allowed ten premiership-winning players to make at least 20 starts in consecutive seasons. Not only that, but he’s Arnold’s counterweight. “What he brings to me is sanity, balance and clarity,” Arnold explained to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2015.
Clark was part of Arnold’s inner sanctum in their Central Coast Mariners days, as was John Crawley, another whose influence cannot be overstated. The country’s foremost goalkeeping coach steered Danny Vukovic back to career-best form last year and has performed wonders with Andrew Redmayne, transforming the 29-year old journeyman into a fixture between the sticks with the ability to catch even Arsene Wenger’s eye.
Football intelligence is gleaned from assistant coaches Phil Moss and Steve Corica. Moss is another former Mariner, Corica a Sydney FC legend, long groomed for the top job when the time is right. On the bench alongside four Sky Blue managers during his eight seasons post-retirement as a player, Corica has also taken charge of Sydney’s National Youth League operation on a couple of occasions, winning the 2013-14 championship.
Such foundations off the pitch are reflected on it. Defensive solidity has been the hallmark of Sydney’s recent success with a back four screened by the hardworking pair of Josh Brillante and Brandon O’Neil conceding just 35 goals in their past 54 A-League games.
But it would be unfair to stigmatise Arnold’s Sky Blues as unadventurous. Sydney topped the goalscoring charts last season and have already exceeded that tally this time around. Bobo is one of the most predatory penalty-box strikers ever recruited to the competition while Milos Ninkovic and Adrian Mierzejewski have performed wizardry on a weekly basis.
It was fitting that Mierzejwski dominated the 90 minutes against Perth that confirmed back-to-back premierships. He has been the standout player in the league this season; you might say the roof tiles atop the construction work begun four years previously.
Before this season no side had won back-to-back premierships. Maintaining the required high standards year after year in an ecosystem designed to keep the pack bunched has until now proved impossible. Throw in player churn, the ease with which clubs in Europe and Asia can cherry-pick players from winning teams, and the handicap (for A-League success anyway) that is the Asian Champions League, for Sydney to not only repeat their success but arguably improve on it, is a remarkable feat.
A finals series now awaits, giving Arnold the opportunity to put to rest (statistically at least) the argument over the best side in A-League history. From there it’s off to the Socceroos and time to hand over the deeds of his empire to somebody else, safe in the knowledge that four years planning, graft and success has been a job well done.
