Alen Stajcic was just sacked – but his OAM days later says much more

Alen Stajcic does not really feel like having “fake photos” taken. Not after the week he’s had. Not even for an article to mark his new status as an Order of Australia medal recipient.

The former Matildas and Western Sydney Wanderers coach has never dressed up reality to be anything other than what it is. He would not do well on Instagram – the platform for a perfect life.

He has been this way for 25 years. It does not mean he never smiles for a portrait, or that his dry style of humour is not endearing. It just means he is exactly who he is in whichever moment that happens to be. And who he is is precisely the reason he is being recognised for his service to football as a coach.

Only Stajcic would liken Australian football’s internal battles as “two seagulls fighting over one hot chip”. Last November’s sermon on the mount of frustration was underpinned by a belief his sport has an aversion to positive press despite its on-field quality. It’s not a bad bee in your bonnet to have. And pointing out football’s failure to pump itself up, as Peter V’landys does the NRL, gave the A-League Men’s Sydney derby a rare mainstream headline last November, which was a case in point.

There is nothing fake about how he presents this time either: slightly out of breath, having just returned from a bike ride. It’s been one of those draining, resuming-exercise sessions after recovering from an illness – influenza A has just ripped through his Western Sydney Wanderers squad. “Just tried to get back on the bike the last couple of days,” he says, before a pause for effect, “now that I’ve got a bit of free time.”

Stajcic has free time because his Wanderers squad is no longer his Wanderers squad. It’s been a few short days since he was sacked – the club’s sixth coach in nine seasons – and the word he uses is “gutted”. He uses some other words, too, but they are not for public consumption. Now is not the time, and this is not the interview for speaking negatively about the game he loves and has dedicated most of his life.

What a weird, incongruous time; to be at one of the lowest points in your career while receiving one of your country’s highest honours.

“It is, actually, yeah,” Stajcic acknowledges. “I’ve been coaching full-time for 25 years now and 22 of them have been pretty successful … then there were two or three that have been a little bit lower. You’ve got to take what you can out of those years and learn and grow, and find some way to bounce back and be resilient.”

Resilience is something Stajcic has always tried to teach his players – and there have been many over two and a half decades. From his national teams (Matildas, Young Matildas, Philippines) and clubs (Sydney FC Women, Central Coast Mariners Men, Perth Glory Men, Wanderers Men) and, right at the start, the NSWIS Women’s Football Program, through which he nurtured the Matildas’ golden generation.

Resilience is also a muscle he has been forced to flex during some low periods so severe – namely his Matildas sacking and all the erroneous innuendo accompanying it – it’s perplexing to the outsider he did not give coaching away completely and start fresh as a landscaper or diving instructor, or literally anything else unrelated to football.

“I don’t know, I just love the game,” he reasons. “It’s the one thing I can thank my parents for, and especially my father, who sacrificed everything for me to play the game and follow my dreams within the game. They came to Australia as immigrants from Yugoslavia without a word of English or a cent to their names, and gave me and my brother everything they could. Football was one of the things that they gave us.

“We’re lucky that this country gives you the opportunity to go through the ranks. As a first-generation Australian, to be able to go from immigrant parents without a cent to their name to coaching a country is pretty special. And little things like being the first Australian-born coach to win a game at a World Cup – and having three wins now at a World Cup – make it special, and more recognition for the sacrifice everyone put in for you to be able to follow your dreams.

“So this is probably more recognition for my family than for me. My mother and father, and my wife and my kids, who have sacrificed the most out of everyone.”

Careful, because this is not a eulogy. Stajcic is only 52 and still very much a coach, albeit one out of work (“Just hanging in there,” he laughs). But the past is what earned him this rare honour, bestowed on only a handful of Australian coaches.

“Especially in women’s football,” he says. “I started off on the journey when everyone thought it was uncool – the poor cousin of the poor cousin. Being disregarded and discriminated against, and not thought of or cared about by pretty much everyone in administration. I was warned off going down that field, but it didn’t bother me really. I just loved the game, and anyone who loved the game I was happy to share my time with.

“To think of the things we had to go through at the NSW Institute of Sport, just to get a training field and gear and women’s-sized clothing, and revenues and resources for the team. It was a pretty amazing ride. And to think about the talent ID – of finding those players from all around NSW and Australia, and how the group sort of grew up together and has become the golden generation. That probably gives me the greatest joy and pride, to see how we all evolved together as coaches and players, and went from virtually nothing to – for me – becoming probably the best team in the world.”

In 2017, the Matildas reached a record high FIFA ranking of No.4, behind No.3 England, No.2 Germany, and long-time leaders the United States. It was in July of that year that Australia first beat the US – a major milestone in Seattle after 26 fruitless attempts. Sam Kerr, Steph Catley and their contemporaries of 2023 World Cup fame were in the early 20s.

They almost repeated that 1-0 Tournament of Nations triumph at the 2018 edition (during which a 15-year-old Mary Fowler made her senior international debut against Brazil) but for an injury-time equaliser in Connecticut. Still, Megan Rapinoe shook Stajcic’s hand after that game and, in a casual chat, gave her former Sydney FC coach the impression that her all-conquering US team were wary of Australia leading into the 2019 World Cup.

This evidence, on the back of finishing runners-up at April’s Asian Cup in Jordan, was enough for Stajcic to believe his Matildas were genuine World Cup contenders. Seven months later he was at the centre of one of the most controversial dismissals in Australian football history.

“It hurt my soul,” he remembers. Then he repeats it. “It hurt my soul.”

The personal trauma was compounded, he says, by the knowledge he’d been offered the highly lucrative England head coaching job (China came knocking too), but turned it down.

“For four or five times the money, all the resources, they told me they were going to host the [2022] Euros, everything,” he says. “I knocked it back and then Phil Neville took it after me. I wanted to stay with Australia for the [2019] World Cup … and 12 months later I got sacked. I always said I’m not going to be that loyal ever again, but then I do it again. And again.”

Perhaps such loyalty is part of the reason he is now an OAM? “Not sure, to be honest,” is his answer, but he does know he possessed a “willingness to fight and fight back”.

Three months later he was hired as Central Coast’s caretaker coach, then permanent coach, and in early 2021 oversaw the Mariners’ first back-to-back A-League Men wins since December 2017. The competition’s laughing stock had transformed into table-toppers. Western United’s coach at the time, Mark Rudan, called him “a magician, as far as I’m concerned”. “There’s no magic,” Stajcic said pragmatically. “The magic is hard work.”

In late 2021, when was appointed head coach of the Philippines – he went on to qualify the nation for its first Women’s World Cup and they made their debut in the 2023 tournament with a win over co-hosts New Zealand – and handed the reins to assistant and club great Nick Montgomery, the foundations were laid for back-to-back championships, a premiership and an AFC Cup.

“Now six or seven of those guys have played [for the] Socceroos – from a team that, when I took over in 2019, had won one game out of 21 – and are now in contention for this next World Cup,” Stajcic says.

“That was a really massive highlight for me – knowing I could do it in men’s football as well and achieve so much. It was an unknown really. I had coached elite boys from 12 to 18 for 10 years as well. But coaching a professional men’s team? That was something that I had to learn.

“But the longer I went on the more I realised, especially as society as well has evolved, I think the genders have come closer together. And especially the younger generation who’ve grown up with phones and social media and all those kinds of things. So the problems they face and the dilemmas they have are more closely aligned with each other.”

This interview isn’t about the ins and outs of Australian football; it’s about a man and his achievements. But actually, it is nigh on impossible to talk about one without the other. Stajcic has lived and breathed the domestic game since he was born in the football heartland of western Sydney in 1973, about a week before Jimmy Mackay scored his stunner to qualify the Socceroos for the 1974 World Cup.

His coaching style is probably best described as authoritarian, authentic and deeply caring, of a similar ilk to Ange Postecoglou (the pair ended up as Australian national team coaches at the same time). Stajcic is also similar to Postecoglou in that he is an unapologetic advocate for football, almost missionary-like in the manner with which he carries the responsibility. It’s the mentality that sparked his post-derby, “Let’s talk about the spectacle” rant, and one cemented at NSWIS working with elite athletes from Australia’s Olympic gold medal sports such as basketball, water polo and hockey.

“If you live in the football world and talk to people in the football world, just qualifying for a World Cup was an achievement,” he says. “But for them it was always about winning medals and being on podiums and that kind of language. It really hit a raw nerve with me that we don’t have that vocab in football and never did have, and the 10 years I spent at the Institute of Sport was really great for that side of the psyche.”