In 2011, the year before the GWS Giants made their debut in the AFL, Collingwood president Eddie McGuire glibly referred to western Sydney as “the land of the falafel”, at once offending a great many while illustrating the unique challenges facing the code’s newest expansion club.
Though most of those challenges would come off the field, affairs on the field were torrid in those early years. The Giants’ first team was comprised mostly of teenagers, with the odd mature-age recruit and a rugby league convert, Israel Folau, thrown in for good measure. The club’s foundation coach, Kevin Sheedy, said he was the “highest-paid Under-19s coach in the history of the game”. It really was boys against men. GWS won just three games in their first two seasons and 100-point thrashings were commonplace.
But the club, and a ruling body which bankrolled the code’s push into western Sydney, have always taken the long view. This week, the gamble goes some way to paying off when the AFL’s upstart club takes on the might of Richmond in the grand final.
In many ways it’s a fairytale fixture for the AFL. But the truth is, the Giants have battled resentment and indifference from the beginning. Rugby league, the dominant sporting code in western Sydney with four NRL clubs, was largely dismissive of the intrusion, and the response from within Australian rules football was lukewarm at best. Sheedy, for his part, was coach half the time, mentor half the time and salesman all the time. “Getting Sydney to believe it wasn’t an AFL hoax was the biggest challenge in getting GWS up and running,” Sheedy said in 2018.
While sections of the industry view AFL stronghold states Tasmania and the Northern Territory as more deserving homes for an AFL club, there was never a meaningful push from within western Sydney for their own team. The Giants were essentially foisted upon the area, a strategic territory play by the AFL to grow the game in a populous, multicultural part of the country. On top of the cash handouts, the new club was given preferential access to Australia’s best young talent via draft, academy and zone concessions. It was all grist for the mill. The Giants became known as the “plastic club”, pilloried in the southern states as a manufactured entity set up to succeed but destined to fail. When the Giants finally started to taste on-field success, reaching the preliminary finals in 2016 under present coach Leon Cameron, Sheedy spoke of the “sooks and whingers” who complained the fledgling club had been handed success on a platter.
But the real threat to Greater Western Sydney’s viability would not come from snipers within, nor from the insecurities of rival codes. The real challenge was, and is, winning over western Sydney, a region so culturally diverse it is home to almost two million people hailing from more than 170 different countries. “When we first came to western Sydney, we made a point of saying we are a team for the community,” Ali Faraj, the Giants’ head of community, tells Guardian Australia on the eve of the grand final. “We might not have been winning on the field, but off it we were building relationships, educating and engaging with the community.
“When we first started visiting schools and other groups, people thought we were a basketball team or an ethnic group. Some had no idea about AFL at all. But we have spent years building brand awareness and now people come to us. They know who the Giants are.”
The Giants acknowledged from day one that growing the game in western Sydney and embracing cultural diversity are not mutually exclusive ventures, using their chosen sport as a vehicle to promote social cohesion, and vice versa. “The sport of Australian football isn’t just for white faces with Anglo-Saxon surnames; it’s for people of all backgrounds,” Michael Shillito, a western Sydney local and member of the Giants cheer squad, says. “The club has done a great job in reaching out to the community. I don’t think a club like this could survive without establishing strong roots in the area and it’s going to take time, but it is happening. If you look at Giants games now, you see more and more people from a variety of backgrounds in the crowd and that is great.”
Sheedy, who coached the club for its first two seasons, fronted the media on Wednesday, Giants scarf draped around his neck. “It was a magnificent journey when we started 10 years ago,” he said. “We started a lot of footy clinics out in the schools. I remember a beautiful trip out to Orange and all those kids turned out in orange, and I thought ‘gee whiz, there’s a little bit of silent passion for AFL’.”
But it’s a slow burn. Youth participation rates for Australian rules football in New South Wales still toil behind the likes of football and tennis. And though hundreds of fans might have attended the Giants’ training session at Homebush on Tuesday, it’s a stretch to say Blacktown, in the heartland of GWS territory, is awash with the club’s charcoal-and-orange colours. “We know the job isn’t even close to being done,” Faraj says. “For kids in western Sydney, it’s about generational influence. What we’re trying to do is let them know there is an elite AFL team representing them and to educate them about this sport.
“We’re only at the start of our journey. We’re going up against 100-year-old rugby league clubs in western Sydney. But it’s not a war. We just want to create awareness and encourage more diversity in sport. We want to give kids another opportunity that wasn’t really there before the Giants.”
Several senior Giants players are deployed in ambassadorial and community support roles and, fittingly, in the week the Giants have come of age as a football team, one of their biggest stars, Stephen Coniglio, won the AFL’s Jim Stynes Community Leadership award for his efforts off the field. Earlier this year the Giants hosted the Welcome Game, an event that doubled as an AFL fixture and a citizenship ceremony for 300 western Sydney residents. “We get to become far more culturally rich by engaging in different communities and bringing new people into the game who have different cultural ideals and different values,” James Avery, the club’s chief operating officer, said at the time.
Though there is still work to be done, the results are starting to trickle through. Women’s participation rates are rising, and this season the Giants celebrated Haneen Zreika becoming the first Muslim woman to play the sport at the highest level. “The feeling is amazing,” Zreika told Fairfax at the start of the AFLW season. “Representing my own state and western Sydney is a big thing to me.”
Membership, too, is on the up, jumping from 25,243 in 2018 to 30,109 this year – half the number of their established city rivals, the Swans, but more than twice the size of the Gold Coast Suns, who entered the AFL the year before GWS but are yet to qualify for the finals and this season finished bottom of the ladder. “Richmond has over 100,000 members and good on them, but it has taken them over 100 years to get there. We’ve done it in only eight years,” Shillito said.
On the Gold Coast, the Suns were afforded much the same in terms of finance and talent concessions, but club officials will again spend the post-season wondering what they are doing wrong. And by comparison, what the Giants are doing right. On the field and off, Gold Coast seem light years away from making their mark in a region notorious for churn when it comes to sporting teams.
Onto Saturday and the AFL’s showpiece fixture. Richmond, the 2017 premiers, are firm favourites to beat the Giants, but this is familiar territory for a club accustomed to being the underdog. None of the originals – and as many as eight or nine foundation Giants could line up at the MCG – will forget the turbulent beginnings of a club that through its infancy was thrashed, mocked and dismissed as an expensive experiment. “It could end up the greatest story in sporting history in my lifetime,” Sheedy said on Wednesday.
Ever the salesman, Sheedy is right that winning the grand final would be a vindication of sorts. But there won’t be a soul in the land of the Giants who’ll be fooled into thinking success, or failure, will define them as a club. “Even if we win, we won’t be shutting shop and saying the job is done,” Faraj says. “This is only the beginning. We’re in it for the long haul.”
