Ten years since joining Sydney FC, Del Piero reflects on his Australian legacy

It started, as so many good transfer stories do, with an email.

Lou Sticca, one of Australia’s leading soccer agents, caught wind that after 19 years at Juventus, Italian legend Alessandro Del Piero wasn’t going to be offered another contract, and was contemplating his next move.

Sticca had an existing business relationship with the club, and leaned on it to dig up contact details for Del Piero’s brother and representative, Stefano. They arranged to catch up after Juventus’ final game of the 2011-12 season against Atalanta, which Sticca – a lifelong fan – already had tickets for.

It was then he posed the question that would irrevocably shift the fortunes of Australian soccer, at least for a while: would Alessandro consider playing in the A-League?

“I remember looking at Stefano’s face, and he was trying really hard not to laugh,” Sticca said.

“Think about it. He’s at the peak of Europe, won a World Cup a couple of years before … and here I am suggesting he comes to Australia.

Alessandro Del Piero celebrates one of his four goals for Sydney FC against Wellington Phoenix in January 2013.Credit:Getty Images

“We shook hands, said we’d keep in touch, and then over the next three months, I basically harassed him. I was on the phone, emailing him every week, just using any excuse to keep the comms going. Then one day out of the blue, I get an email back.

“Have you ever been fishing? You know when you get that little nibble, that faintest of nibbles, and you think, ‘I’m in’? When I got that nibble, it was amazing. I thought, ‘Shit, this is serious.’”

So much of what would unfold over the next two years is as hard to believe today as it was back then. Did all that really happen? Did Del Piero actually knock back Liverpool to sign for Sydney FC? Was Australia truly that obsessed with the A-League?

The Sydney Morning Herald’s back page Monday, September 17, 2012.Credit:Fairfax Media

Yes, yes, and yes. Friday marks a full decade since one of Italy’s greatest players stepped off the plane at Sydney Airport, met the hundreds of fans who packed into the arrivals hall to greet him, and completely changed the Australian sporting landscape.

The following day, 10 years ago today, The Sydney Morning Herald produced one of its most famous back pages. On pink paper, imitating Italy’s renowned daily sporting newspaper, it was La Gazzetta Del Piero. Lunedi, Settembre 17. ‘BENVENUTO ADP’. The whole page was in Italian, including pointers to Phil Gould and Roy Masters’ rugby league columns at the top.

A few months earlier, then-FFA chairman Frank Lowy had stripped Gold Coast United owner Clive Palmer of his licence and shut the club down after an unedifying public war of words. The year before, North Queensland Fury were shuttered, too, after their owners ran out of money. Crowds were down, expansion had been a disaster, and the A-League had almost completely its lustre.

Del Piero brought all it back, with a stroke of a pen.

“The pitch was simple: we want you to do what David Beckham did for Major League Soccer. And he did,” said Tony Pignata, Sydney FC’s chief executive at the time and the man who, along with Sticca, convinced the Italian legend to become the new face of the A-League.

‘It was a great moment. For those two years, the crowds were amazing. For me, Alessandro was, and will always be the biggest signing.’

Del Piero looks back on his decision fondly, rattling off a host of on-field highlights in a half-hour interview with the Herald to mark the anniversary of his landing in Sydney: his free-kick goal in his home debut against Newcastle Jets in front of a record 35,419 fans; his winner in the inaugural derby against the Western Sydney Wanderers; his four goals in a 7-1 win over Wellington Phoenix; a 5-0 rout of Melbourne Victory.

As a team, Sydney FC were dysfunctional, but it didn’t really matter. Everywhere they went, crowds and media followed. Sydney made Del Piero the highest-paid footballer at the country, at nearly $4 million per season, while the Jets and Wanderers responded in kind by signing Emile Heskey and Shinji Ono respectively.

“The atmosphere about the game changed,” Del Piero said from his base in Los Angeles, where he and his family moved a few years ago.

“I felt that because everybody around me was saying, ‘Wow, never happened this before. Oh, we never packed the stadiums before.’ This kind of thing was cool, to be honest, to hear. Everybody in Australia, around the world, knew who Sydney FC was.”

Del Piero’s arrival in Sydney took to the A-League to new heights on all fronts.Credit:James Alcock

The off-field experience for the Del Piero clan, who set themselves up in Rushcutters Bay, was also exemplary. It was here his kids first learned how to speak English, saw native Australian animals in their natural habitats, and where his family fell in love with the Aussie lifestyle. “Everything changed for us – languages, habits, what side of the road to drive, right or left,” he laughed. “It was a new world.” Del Piero also took a liking to the other footy codes played at Allianz and the SCG. (“The Swans were good that year!” he remembers – correctly. They won the AFL flag in 2012.)

Since leaving Australia in mid-2014, Del Piero has kept one eye on his old team through social media, and enjoyed the success of former teammates like Rhyan Grant, who went on to become a regular Socceroo.

He’s watched on with envy as they won trophy after trophy under Graham Arnold and then Steve Corica, and his jealousy has ramped up even more now that they have a new stadium to play out of this season. “I miss playing every single day. I saw the new Allianz Stadium, they just rebuilt it, where Sydney are going to play. I’m like, ‘Really? Come on.’ I’m waiting for an invitation, guys,” he said.

In his book, Playing On, Del Piero wrote: “I think all sportspeople should try to spend a period of their professional lives in Australia, because for anyone in my profession it’s a sort of paradise.” He stands by that nugget of advice, even if very few of his contemporaries have taken it on board.

“It depends what you want. That’s the only answer, the only thought that you can have about your next transfer,” Del Piero said when asked about the A-League’s struggle to attract big-name players since his heyday. To be fair, players like Keisuke Honda, Daniel Sturridge, William Gallas and David Villa have flown in and out to varying levels of success, but none have come close to matching the dizzying Del Piero experience.

“What are you looking for? Money? A good place to live? A new challenge? Which kind of challenge? What did you do before? There’s a lot of things around the choice, to be honest. But definitely, Australia is a unique place. For me, it was beautiful. And I believe that everybody who comes says the same thing at the end of their trip.”

While Del Piero left a decent enough legacy at the club, attracting sponsors and new fans who would stick around for years to come, the trajectory for the league seemingly set at the time by the ambitions of Sydney FC’s owners was not followed. In the ensuing years, the competition has tanked as a commercial product, for a variety of reasons.

The A-League is chasing similar highs again, with chief executive Danny Townsend openly admitting the competition’s desperate need for a “sugar hit” from high-profile players like Del Piero to help reach the masses from behind the obscurity of the Paramount+ paywall.

Ex-Manchester United winger Luis Nani is the A-League’s latest star recruit.Credit:Getty Images

But even with $140 million in the bank from private equity firm Silver Lake, the A-League still can’t seem to land a truly big fish. Former Manchester United star Luis Nani has joined Melbourne Victory for this season, which is genuinely exciting, but he doesn’t have anywhere near the cut-through of Del Piero.

The 47-year-old is aware the A-League, and domestic soccer in Australia, isn’t what it used to be. “I can speak clearly for the period that I was there,” he said.

“Those two years, we went up in many ways, from my point of view – not only from my point of view, but data. Numbers. It ended up perfectly, to be honest, with the [2015] Asian Cup, where Australia actually won. I don’t want to take any credit about that, let me be clear, but everything [in the sport] was moving towards in the right way, and up. Everybody did their part.

“After that, I’m following from outside. I don’t know a lot of things that happened, but I’m sad when something doesn’t go quite well. I wish you all the best, not only for Sydney FC, but for every Australian team to become better, and the league to become stronger than before, if possible even more.”

Del Piero has enough on his plate to worry about than the fortunes of the game in Australia. He runs a restaurant in LA, called No. 10, is a pundit for Sky Sport Italia, ESPN and CBS, an investor in several companies, and is contemplating a move into coaching. “I want to see deep, what it means, football as a coach. The last step is the Pro License,” he said. “Everybody says ‘no, don’t do coaching, it’s too stressful’. But they still do it.”

Could he return to Sydney as a coach one day? It would be no less fantastical than the idea of him coming here as a player was 10 years ago.

“It was a great moment in time,” Pignata said. “He transformed the A-League. For those two years, the crowds were amazing. For me, Alessandro was, and will always be the biggest signing.”

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