Western United

[wswclaret]

I’ll believe the new stadium news when I se it. This joke of a club hasn’t even announced the location of its next home fixture or the one against us. I’ll get tickets to Avalon and they’ll probably play it out of Hobart or somewhere. 

[mack]

WU finally announce they are moving into their training facility/'temporary' stadium.

Their first home match from now is the Glory game on the 2nd of March, might be too soon. I wonder if they'd play the Victory there on the 16th?

[pseudonym]

3 minutes ago, mack said:

WU finally announce they are moving into their training facility/'temporary' stadium.

Their first home match from now is the Glory game on the 2nd of March, might be too soon. I wonder if they'd play the Victory there on the 16th?

I'd guess that their home fixtures against Victory and City will always be at AAMI Park, leveraging away fans buying more tickets

[mack]

First match at the training facility will be the Women's match vs Newcastle on 17th March, Men will be 6th April vs Macarthur.

[pseudonym]

Western United agrees to share their Tarneit stadium with rugby team Melbourne Rebels

 

[Carns]

Considering they're (Rebels) operating in administration it's a cheaper alternative to more expensive training/stadium costs.

WU make money in their off season. No brainer from them providing their club always has priority over facilities.

[StringerBellend]

2 hours ago, Carns said:

Considering they're (Rebels) operating in administration it's a cheaper alternative to more expensive training/stadium costs.

WU make money in their off season. No brainer from them providing their club always has priority over facilities.

Long as they don't have Super Rugby games cutting up the pitch the day before A League games, otherwise sort of defeats the point of having this purpose built football stadium 

[Davo]

They’re already part owners of the Jets. With the way the Rebels finances are going they might end up collecting another club.

[Sithslayer1991]

Clarifying Western United still have final say on how the Rebels use their infrastructure. The Rebels are sub-tenants

 

[mack]

Ibusuki in on 2 year deal.

[MathyouWSW]

15 hours ago, mack said:

Ibusuki in on 2 year deal.

Bit of a curve ball in my opinion as he was heavily rumoured to join Brisbane roar.

They were in need of a striker since Ruka got injured.

[BoyFromTheWest]

Good move by WU,  in my opinion. He will be what they need to work with Botic.

[pseudonym]

played a friendly against Caroline Springs George Cross

[Davo]

Tactical move by the graphic designer to exclude the club logos so people might accidentally assume they won.

[marron]

Red Bull sponsoring WU

https://wufc.com.au/news/red-bull-giving-western-united-wings-in-historic-partnership/

 

 

 

 

[marron]

Not choosing Macarthur lol

[theguyyouwishyouwere]

11 hours ago, marron said:

Red Bull sponsoring WU

https://wufc.com.au/news/red-bull-giving-western-united-wings-in-historic-partnership/

 

 

 

 

red bull gives  you fans

[pseudonym]

Western United will host their matches against City and Victory at AAMI Park

Monday 4 November - 7pm

WU vs City

Sunday 1 December - 4pm

WU vs Victory 

 

[pseudonym]

 

[SBW]

This is a very long read but this shows what a disaster Western United have been off the field

Home games: a Socceroo, a subdivision and the unpaid super
A struggling plan to bankroll an A-League club with a residential property development is emblematic of the financial challenges facing Australian soccer.

Peter Ker and Michael Bleby for AFR
Apr 28, 2025 – 5.00am

In a desolate landscape about 31 kilometres west of Melbourne, a small group of noisy fans is trying to generate some atmosphere by banging drums and singing through megaphones.

“Come on, you boys in green,” comes the chant from the south-eastern corner of the new Ironbark Fields soccer ground.

The fans are barracking for Western United FC, a little-known, six-year-old club whose ambitions go beyond football and to the creation of a multi-billion dollar residential and commercial property development in Melbourne’s west.

While rival A-League clubs such as Sydney FC and Melbourne Victory play in world-class, inner-city stadiums, Ironbark Fields is more like a rural venue, surrounded by empty paddocks and tumbleweeds in peri-urban Tarneit.

Behind the goal at the southern end of the pitch are giant piles of red dirt, reminding visitors that the vacant 62 hectares surrounding Ironbark Fields is still a construction site, which could one day be home to 900 new residences, a 15,000-seat soccer stadium, retail and commercial outlets.

At least that’s the plan; raising the funds to turn the dream into a reality has proved difficult in an era of soaring construction costs, market turbulence and red tape. The companies that underpin Western United are facing a wind-up order in the federal court over failure to pay the taxman, along with other creditors.

Western United founder, director, shareholder and former Socceroo Steve Horvat has further worries; his family business Sava Engineering faces a crucial creditors’ meeting on Monday afternoon regarding nearly $11 million in unpaid debts.

Sava is owed $625,000 by the companies that underpin Western United, after Horvat chose to lend money to his football passion project, rather than pay his workers’ basic entitlements.

Among Sava’s creditors are more than a dozen employees who are owed between $578,000 and $1.19 million of superannuation, holiday pay and redundancy pay.

The escalating pressures at Western United are emblematic of the financial challenges facing the A-League, and the competition’s chairman and former Labor minister Stephen Conroy has warned of unsustainable financial foundations and the need to curb spending on player wages.

As the pipe welders who work for Sava Engineering gather in Geelong at Monday’s creditors’ meeting to discuss the fate of their superannuation entitlements, they’ll need to decide whether Horvat is building a field of dreams at Western United, or just selling a pipe dream.

Kieran Maguire reckons professional football club ownership is a pretty “dumb” business to be in if you are financially rational.

“You are open only 20 times a year,” he says, in relation to the number of times each season a typical football team attracts paying customers to watch their home games.

Maguire is an accounting lecturer at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom and has risen to fame as a leading expert on the financial side of the world game, thanks mostly to his podcast The Price of Football.

With a mix of sarcasm and seriousness, Maguire says the most successful and durable financial model for professional soccer clubs is to be owned by a rich person, who is willing to sponsor overspending in exchange for status and pleasure.

“The football-as-a-trophy-asset industry works very well,” says Maguire. “It [football] does not work as a profit maximiser because it is a talent industry, talent is very fluid and talent will always gravitate to who pays the best wages.”

Although A-League club Melbourne City can afford to employ experienced World Cup goalscorers such as Socceroo Mat Leckie, safe in the knowledge that the royal family of Abu Dhabi is ultimately paying the bills, not every club has a billionaire at its disposal.

So it is at Western United, which, depending on your perspective, is either reliant on an innovative property development for its financial survival, or is a Trojan horse that was cynically conceived to assist a bunch of property developers win the right to develop a 62-hectare block.

Either way, the idea to use a professional sports stadium as the centrepiece of a broader property development was eagerly embraced by one of Australia’s fastest-growing local government areas, Wyndham City, which struck a public-private partnership with the Western Melbourne Group (WMG) syndicate that includes Horvat and businessman Jason Sourasis.

At the heart of the WMG plan is a 15,000-seat soccer stadium, which would replace Ironbark Fields as Western United’s home ground. The proposed stadium would be the anchor around which other sports facilities, entertainment, hospitality, residential and corporate properties would be built.

Convinced that the plan would bring social and economic benefits to an outer urban community dominated by first-home buyers and migrants, Wyndham agreed to gradually transfer 62 hectares of former farmland to WMG Holdings as soon as the syndicate satisfied milestones linked to fundraising and investment.

Wyndham lobbied the state government to build a railway station next to the site and even gave WMG Holdings permission to build dwellings on the site at a density rate that is almost double the normal levels.

Rather than the typical 15 to 20 dwellings per hectare, Wyndham has signalled that the WMG development will be allowed to have 25 to 38 dwellings per hectare, with some buildings proposed to rise to seven storeys.

Wyndham City Council’s corporate services director Mark Rossiter says the creation of a hub with a stadium, retail, commercial and recreational facilities is an important part of balancing the region’s rapid population growth.

In the decade to 2024, Wyndham’s population rose by almost 136,000 people, or 12.7 per cent, lifting the total to 337,000 residents. It is the nation’s fastest-growing municipality ahead of Casey in Melbourne’s south-east, Moreton Bay in Queensland and Blacktown in Sydney’s west.

“A real challenge in local government is how to help generate a sense of community in places that are growing really quickly,” says Rossiter. “That sense of community can come more slowly if you don’t have infrastructure and amenity in balance with the growth of housing.

“This [stadium] is a fundamental catalyst to generating a sense of community. It becomes a destination, not just for Wyndham, it becomes a centre for the west.”

Mark Dawson from urban planning consultancy Urbis says Wyndham has “high capacity” for further population growth in the years ahead.

About 5000 new dwellings were approved in Wyndham in the year to February – up 25 per cent on the previous year – and the council plans to house more than 457,000 people by 2040.

Observers of the WMG project cannot resist comparisons to Kevin Costner’s 1989 film Field of Dreams, in which a humble farmer builds a baseball diamond in one of his cornfields in the belief that “if you build it, they will come”.

Horvat has been vigorously selling the Western United dream – he is a director and shareholder in WMG companies – in the creditors’ meetings for his family business, Sava Engineering.

The fate of Sava is inextricably linked to Western United because the engineering company transferred money to WMG before it was put into administration.

A report filed by Sava administrator Nathan Deppeler in October 2023 revealed that it was owed $625,000 in relation to a “Western Melbourne Group loan” when it collapsed.

That loan to Horvat’s football passion project would have easily covered the $283,000 of unpaid superannuation and holiday pay that Sava owed to its 19 employees as of Deppeler’s October 2023 report.

An updated report circulated to creditors this month said Sava employees were now owed at least $578,000 of wages, superannuation and annual leave entitlements. The new report said total obligations to Sava’s employees could exceed $1.19 million if redundancy and pay-in-lieu claims were successful.

While Sava employees wait for their basic entitlements, WMG still has not repaid the $625,000 it was loaned.

Horvat also took personal loans of more than $4.3 million out of Sava before it was placed in administration. Sava owed the ATO close to $4.5 million when it was put in administration.

Horvat has promised Sava creditors he will repay them once he sells some or all of his shareholding in WMG. The veteran of 32 international caps for the Socceroos owns about 4.4 per cent of the soccer and property development syndicate, based on ASIC filings.

Eyebrows were raised at a tense meeting of Sava creditors in November 2023, where the business value of WMG was said to be “upwards of $160 million”; a valuation that implies Horvat’s shareholding is worth about $7 million.

From a football perspective, the $160 million valuation looks high compared with the implied $25 million valuation put on Melbourne Victory this year when British billionaire Tony Bloom bought 19.1 per cent of the club for less than $5 million, according to documents filed with ASIC.

From a property development perspective, documents filed to ASIC by WMG in October 2024 also cast doubt on the $160 million valuation.

The documents contained a feasibility study for subdividing and selling the 62 hectares around Ironbark Fields, which suggested the project could generate a “net development profit” of $89.5 million.

Profits from developing the land near Ironbark Fields would need to be offset against the $44 million of debt that WMG Football had already accrued, according to its 2023 accounts.

Revenues to clubs from the A-League’s central television rights deal have gone down since WMG Football filed its last set of accounts, suggesting that running a professional football team in Australia has only become more expensive since WMG Football posted an annual loss of $12.4 million in 2023.

But some investors appear to accept the $160 million valuation; companies controlled by Bendigo property developer Mark Erskine paid $10 million for a 6 per cent stake in WMG in November.

It’s a bold bet by Erskine; he invested the money despite the fact WMG has still not taken ownership of the 62 hectares of land because the syndicate has not satisfied the milestones required by Wyndham City to trigger the transfer.

The land remains owned by the council and not a single home has been built. There’s also no sign of a 15,000-seat stadium beside Ironbark Fields, which with a capacity for 4000 spectators, appears to be a more appropriate size for Western United’s small supporter base.

Erskine’s investment was formalised just four months before the ATO filed a winding-up order in the federal court against the group’s flagship property company (WMG Holdings) and its flagship football company (WMG Football).

The wind-up application against WMG Football has since been joined by other creditors, such as the Victorian state revenue office and team shirt supplier BRZ Apparel.

Erskine declined to comment when approached by The Australian Financial Review.

Regardless of whether WMG is worth $160 million, Horvat still hasn’t sold his shares in the syndicate, and he missed a September 30 deadline to make payments under his original rescue plan for Sava Engineering.

Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) spokesman Tony Hynds confirmed that creditors’ patience with Horvat and Sava has worn thin after a subsequent deadline for payments was missed on March 31.

“We have been working with the company for over five years and been patient, but enough is enough,” says Hynds.

Sava’s administrators called a creditors meeting for April 28 to decide whether to give Horvat more time to raise the funds, or consider alternatives like liquidation of Sava’s assets.

The administrators provided creditors with a list of things to consider ahead of Monday’s meeting, including some unflattering character assessments.

“The company and the director have had poor compliance history,” said the administrators.

Horvat did not answer a series of questions posed by the Financial Review.

Two races against time are now underway; WMG needs an injection of funds before it goes to court on May 14 to defend the ATO’s wind-up order.

If WMG can secure a big new investor, it might be able to repay its loan to Horvat’s family company Sava Engineering, which would help Sava pay its debts and avoid liquidation.

For several months now, creditors of Sava and WMG have been hearing the same reassuring story from those close to WMG; a big company with experience in stadium-centred property developments is on the brink of investing in WMG and making its field of dreams a reality.

The Financial Review has spoken to some creditors of WMG who are so convinced of the story’s merit that they have deferred lodgement of notices of default against the company.

Many of those creditors have kept the faith, even when promises of this white knight being announced “within days” have turned into weeks and months of silence.

Other well-placed sources say the prospective investors are real and have visited Melbourne recently, but finalisation of the deal has been bogged down in red tape; it will require approval from other A-League clubs, Wyndham council and potentially the federal government’s Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB).

The notion that a big investor might want a piece of a stadium development in Melbourne’s fast-growing west is not fanciful; there is a trend overseas for “sports-anchored real estate developments”, where stadiums are built as part of an entertainment hub with hotels, hospitality venues, retail outlets and residential neighbourhoods.

One example is in Atlanta, where the owners of Major League Baseball club the Braves spent $1.1 billion between 2013 and 2017 building a new stadium on a 50 acre property far from the city centre.

Known as “The Battery”, the precinct has hospitality, retail and light commercial facilities surrounding the stadium.

The owner of English Premier League club Manchester City – which also owns Melbourne City – has done a similar thing in New York, building a fresh $US780 million stadium for its American soccer franchise alongside a school, a hotel and residential dwellings in suburban Queens.

Maguire is not yet convinced that football clubs can be bankrolled by “cinemas and bowling alleys and all this type of tedious nonsense”.

“It looks really good on a PowerPoint presentation,” he says of the trend to incorporate stadiums into entertainment and property development precincts.

Maguire says sports franchises are increasingly being used as decorative “baubles” to secure support for property developments from lawmakers and regulators.

“It is being used as a Trojan horse to get approval for the property development, by saying there is a community benefit here as well,” says Maguire of the trend.

“There will often be talk about intangible benefits, engaging the local community and encouraging people to be more healthy – it’s a load of old crap. But it does open that door, it gets things moving.

“It’s good at persuading politicians to say ‘yes’. It looks good, potentially, in being able to get perhaps some external finance as well, because people take off their commonsense head when it comes to sporting ventures.”

WMG already has a financial relationship with American lender Johnson Controls, which has been involved in several American stadium property developments, including “Deer District”, a hospitality and retail hub in Wisconsin that contains the home stadium of basketball’s Milwaukee Bucks.

There’s a big difference between the commercial appeal of Western United and the Milwaukee Bucks, which play in the world’s top basketball league and have their games broadcast to a global audience.

The Bucks play at least 41 home games per year in Deer District and typically draw more than 17,000 fans to each game. Western United plays closer to 13 home games a year and draws closer to 3000 fans per game.

“This model of privately owned stadium combined with major development areas has been moderately successful in other parts of the world,” says Maxwell Shifman, the chief executive of residential property developer Intrapac. “The US is doing it better than most places, but it’s not a model that’s been done successfully yet in Australia.”

Ben Speed is the Milwaukee-based global head of private credit for JC Capital, the internal finance group of Johnson Controls.

Speed says JC Capital won’t be the major funder of WMG’s project, but he says a deal with other investors is “going to happen very soon”, and he is optimistic about the project.

“The population growth happening in Wyndham, the amount of people moving into the community, the amount of new babies and families arriving every day – it’s fantastic. The stadium, and team, is going to be a great anchor for this community,” he says.

“There’s activity that is happening that will, very close to the near term, start seeing vertical development of residential and commercial and sports and entertainment areas.

“While we were a significant participant in the funding of the early stages of this development, ultimately on a long-term basis we’re going to play a small role.

“We will be one part slice in the capital stack. There will be multiple players, multiple investors both domestically from Australia as well as internationally.”

Shifman says WMG are unusually blessed by the fact Wyndham City does not require WMG to pay market rates for the 62 hectares of land up front.

The compensation Wyndham will receive for the 62 hectares is shrouded in secrecy, but it is understood that a portion of the compensation is derived gradually over time, and the council is also motivated by longer-term, intangible benefits like amenity and culture.

“If they (WMG) are struggling to get it done under those circumstances, you can only imagine how much harder it would be for someone to do it on a purely commercial arm’s-length basis,” says Shifman.

“It’s whether or not they can find the right long-term patient investment capital to see the long-term benefit. If they can do that, they (WMG) will get it up. If a financier doesn’t have that long-term view, it’s going to be harder.”

Shifman was part of a syndicate that unsuccessfully bid for the A-League licence that WMG ultimately secured for the 2019 season.

Shifman’s syndicate, Team 11, proposed to build a new stadium on a brownfield site directly opposite Dandenong railway station in Melbourne’s south-east, and he reckons WMG will need the state government to come to the party by providing infrastructure like a train station.

Wyndham council has given its approval for a train station to be built beside WMG’s proposed 15,000-seat stadium, but the Victorian government said it was still considering multiple locations for a new train station in Tarneit.

“Only the state government builds new train stations and train line extensions,” says Shifman.

“That’s going to be a massive plank in terms of unlocking that (WMG) site for a prospective stadium.”

Wyndham City Council’s Rossiter says ratepayers won’t suffer if private investors like WMG hit financial turbulence.

“They [ratepayers] should absolutely not be concerned, the arrangements in place have deep levels of protections for council and for the ratepayers,” he says.

“There are complicated commercial and financial constructs that sit in the back end of this. Those arrangements are, of course, commercial-in-confidence.”

If Western United is wound up in May, it won’t be because of a lack of effort from the players who wear the green and black uniform on Ironbark Fields.

As the off-field pressures have mounted this year, an uplifting story has unfolded on the pitch, where a team of talented youngsters have moulded with a couple of wily veterans to create a winning combination.

Western United haven’t just been winning regularly in this year’s A-League mens’ competition; they’ve been winning in style, scoring 43 goals in the 17 games prior to Sunday’s fixture against Sydney FC.

Buoyed by break-out seasons from youngsters like Noah Botic and Abel Walatee, Western United has spent much of the season in the top three slots of the ladder and have already qualified for the play-offs in May.

Western United’s womens’ team also looks set to play finals.

The bare paddocks and giant piles of dirt that surround Ironbark Fields may seem bleak to the casual visitor, but to Walatee, it’s paradise.

“Waking up in the morning, coming here, it feels like home, this is my second home,” the 21-year-old told viewers on streaming service Paramount, moments after he had starred in Western United’s 3-0 demolition of Adelaide United on February 23.

Walatee was born in Ghana and raised by his grandmother in Liberia, before reportedly being brought to Australia at eight years of age to live with his mother in Melbourne’s west.

Like many migrants of non-English speaking origins, the local football club became a sanctuary for Walatee, and it has shown in the brilliant form he demonstrated for Western United over the recent summer.

“I know everyone here, everyone here really loves me and I love coming here every morning for training. This is a team that if I was to go overseas, I would like to come back here and retire,” he told the Paramount post-match broadcast.

There’s every chance Walatee will get a shot at a big-money contract at an overseas football club in coming years, as financial constraints make the A-League more an exporter of talent, rather than an importer.

But will there be an A-League club at Ironbark Fields for Walatee to come home to in a decade from now?

“We are very much committed to that being the case,” says Wyndham City’s Rossiter. “The community in Wyndham is absolutely football crazy. So we want that because we work for them.”

[Davo]

 

[SBW]

If they get second to qualify for the ACLE, how are they going to compete with the Ban?

[Sithslayer1991]

11 minutes ago, SBW said:

If they get second to qualify for the ACLE, how are they going to compete with the Ban?

How are they going to compete in the A-league. You know its bad if FIFA get involved

[Davo]

There were rumors that players hadn't been paid on time. I'd imagine that sort of thing would go up to FIFA pretty quickly and it could just be a temporary ban until all of that is resolved.

[StringerBellend]

52 minutes ago, Sithslayer1991 said:

How are they going to compete in the A-league. You know its bad if FIFA get involved

Given the way the a league works with short contracts and players coming free all the time. It wouldn't surprise me if they are deep **** for next year. Players leave when contracts up if they can't replace them they will struggle to field a team 

Such a shame a proud club with such history 

[Davo]

 

[Sithslayer1991]

Never a dull moment in this league

[SBW]

55 minutes ago, Davo said:

 

So its a simple stuff up by WUN that they had no cash to pay him out

[mack]

If they're about to swap owners everything would be locked down and no-one would be allowed to touch accounts.