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When Melbourne City made its A-League Women debut back in 2015, its arrival was widely regarded as a “rising tide lifts all boats” moment for Australian women’s football.

Backed by the deep pockets of the City Football Group, the club cast a wide net ahead of its first season, poaching some of the world’s best players like Kim Little, Jess Fishlock, Jen Beattie, Steph Catley, Rebekah Stott, Laura Alleway, Aivi Luik, and Lisa De Vanna from other clubs to form a team of titans.

It worked. City swept through the entire competition in its inaugural campaign, winning all twelve games with a goal difference of +34 before claiming the Premiership-Championship double in the grand final.

In the space of four months, City’s ALW team became Australian football’s new standard-bearers; the model all other clubs should follow if they wanted to bridge the gap that City had single-handedly created between “the best” and “the rest”.

But as the women’s game became more globalised and other nations began to invest in their domestic leagues, Melbourne City’s approach of stacking their team with stars collapsed.

Unable to match the wages, playing time, or competitiveness of overseas competitions, many big names who helped City create history soon departed, leaving the club with an identity crisis.

With no local pathway or women’s academy to draw from, and the core of their squad off to greener pastures, the club had to rebuild itself backwards, scrambling to find a new generation of players and suffering at ALW level as a result.

Mark Torcaso watched the rise and fall of Melbourne City closer than most.

As a goalkeeper coach with Melbourne Victory between 2012 and 2015, he saw his cross-town rivals take the competition by storm, including poaching a number of players (and their head coach, Joe Montemurro) that he’d worked with previously.

He also saw what happened once they’d all left.

The next year, when Torcaso was picked to lead the senior team of a brand-new all-women’s football club in Victoria, Calder United, he wanted to do things differently.

Branching off from the already-existing Keilor Park Soccer Club in 2016, Calder was created to take part in the inaugural National Premier League Women’s competition. In the seven years that have followed, it has become one of Victoria’s most successful NPLW clubs, winning two premierships and three championships and becoming five-time winners of a separate Cup competition.

And it was all based on a different principle to that which City adopted in its early years: developing homegrown talent.

Right from the very beginning, Torcaso and Calder’s back-room staff wanted to bridge the gaps he’d witnessed emerging in women’s football, not just at the ALW level but also between the state and national competitions. Instead of going top-down, they wanted to build from the ground up.

“The conversation about an A-League Women set-up started properly in about 2017 when Calder was in its second year,” Torcaso told ABC.

“In our strategic plan, we had a vision that by 2024, we’d have an A-League team or be part of the A-League in some capacity as Calder.

“I said that was absolutely impossible because we were an NPL club. The only way to get there was to be affiliated or attach ourselves to someone else.”

In 2018, someone else came along: Western United, a new franchise aimed at representing Melbourne’s western suburbs, was granted an A-League Men license.

Calder’s management team immediately reached out to United’s director of football, Steve Horvat, to start the conversation.

“From their entry into the A-League Men, [Western] was very, very vocal in saying, ‘The second we can have a women’s team, we want one’.

“So myself and the former president [Eric Psarianos] went to them and said, ‘We’ve got this fantastic organisation in Calder; it’s a unique elite pathway that was already producing players for the A-League; what do you think?’

“We didn’t fall into their lap — but we did fall in love, let’s call it that.”

Western’s ALW license was rejected in the first round of applications, with priority instead given to the Wellington Phoenix. That rejection, though, only gave it more time to prepare: to bring its players, resources, and facilities up to speed with what was expected from the top-flight competition, so that when it was accepted, it could hit the ground running.

Western created a women’s academy program that ran one morning per week as an additional elite training environment to complement the three nights Calder already ran.

Torcaso seamlessly transitioned between both, drawing on his previous experience with Melbourne Victory to implement programs and coordinate with the new A-Leagues club for access to staff and resources. Then, in 2020, they were finally granted their wish; the door to the national league had opened.

The previous years’ work meant that Western became just the third ALW club to have a full development pathway from NPLW through to the national competition, following Canberra United and the Newcastle Jets.

Eleven of the players Torcaso recruited in his first season as head coach of Western were brought straight in from his Calder team, with four others snapped up from other NPL clubs in Victoria and NSW. Current Calder president Amanda Stella also signed on as United’s first-ever women’s football manager and has been a key force behind the scenes in knitting the two clubs together.

Assistant coach Helen Winterburn came from the same universe, too, joining Torcaso after winning 2022 NPLW Victoria Coach of the Year for her work with the state’s national training centre: the hothouse for emerging Victorian talent.

The familiarity Torcaso already had with his playing group, as well as access to resources and more training time together, has been invaluable in where the club is now: sitting second on the ladder with a spot in finals on the horizon.

“The connection between myself, having been a coach at Calder for many years, and understanding the female football landscape here in Victoria — knowing the players well enough, understanding how we can get the best out of each other — was really important for the transition,” he said.

“I had every confidence in any player we selected that they would transition from NPL into the A-League. That was definitely a big advantage.

“We’ve finally got a third team in a state that has always needed to give players more opportunities.”

But while the core of Western’s 2022/23 squad is made up of Victorians plucked from the NPLW, Torcaso still had a strategy around hand-picking particular international players who he felt could bring something different to the mix.

Originally, the club had targeted Brazil superstar Marta as their first-ever marquee signing, but that plan was abandoned when the forward tore her ACL last year.

Women’s World Cup winner Jess McDonald was next on the list, with Torcaso having met the United States international during their time together at Victory. Matildas midfielder Chloe Logarzo came next, wanting to ease her way back into playing following her own ACL injury, while American striker Hannah Keane, goalkeeper Hillary Beall, and defender Sydney Cummings fleshed out their international quota.

And while McDonald and Logarzo were only part of the squad for a short time, recalled to their NWSL sides before the end of the season, their greatest impact is what they contributed off the pitch.

“It was all the qualities that I knew [McDonald] would bring to the group in regards to leadership, the experience of being a World Cup winner, and having worked in so many amazing different professional environments throughout her career,” Torcaso said.

“Working in a professional environment more and more, you see the difference of having the qualities of players like Jess McDonald and Chloe Logarzo — these players who come from professional environments, coming into our club, and setting different standards in regards to the quality of training and resources.

“We try to bridge the gap by the environment we set, which isn’t just about facilities and resources, but also the way players interact and communicate with each other. We make sure no one ever feels more important than anyone else.”

It’s the team culture that midfielder Emma Robers, who was part of the core of Calder players brought up from the NPL, that has made Western a formidable side this season.

While their football may not have been the prettiest at times, it’s their attitude, their grit, and their commitment to work hard for each other that has often got them over the line.

“We were the underdogs,” Robers told ABC. “No one expected anything from us; they saw our signings and were like, ‘Oh, a lot of local girls, good luck to them’. Then we came out in round one and beat Melbourne Victory, the reigning champions from the previous season. We made a statement early.

“We grasped that underdog story and that mentality and ran with it. It might not have been the best football, but we’re out there fighting for each other. We know how each other plays; we came in having more chemistry than what most other new teams would have.

“I do credit it to the fact that a lot of us have played together for years. We have this bond, this culture, which has honestly laid the foundation of this team in terms of who we are. We’re the epitome of unity and support.

“It’s like a pack of playing cards — we have all these different numbers, all these different cards, different players, but at the end of the day, our strength is when we’re all together.”

Western United’s entry into the ALW was a sliding-doors moment for Robers, along with many of her teammates.

At 25 years old, having never fully cracked into a regular starting spot during previous spells with Melbourne Victory due to a mix of injury and coaching selections, the midfielder was considering resigning herself to social football, defeated by the lack of opportunities at the national level and increasingly conscious that she was getting older.

“If you ask any professional player, when you’re not getting the minutes that you want, it’s really hard,” she said.

“It gets to a point where you’re feeling really good and feel like you’re performing, but you’re just not getting any game-time. I almost didn’t realise how hard I found that season [with Victory] until coming to Western, where I’m playing every week and enjoying it so much.

“But this is the nature of sport. Different coaches have different styles and see different things, so we have to build that mental toughness to get through moments like that. So that helped me coming into this season.

While it may seem, from the outside, that the gap between the ALW and NPL is growing, Robers believes the success of Western in its first season actually proves the opposite: that the jump from state to national football is not as great as what it appears, so long as players are given the appropriate resources and environments to make the transition as smooth as possible.

“The thing that’s surprised me about the competition is that anyone can do it,” she said.

“Everyone here has played the sport since we were little. We know how to play the game. We’ve done it for years. We know we’re good enough.

“The biggest thing I’ve learned is about mindset and getting myself in that space where I’m ready to compete. I have this belief in myself because I know that my teammates and staff back me to put me on the field, that I deserve to be here, and I can do this.

“Whether you’re in the starting XI or on the bench, not picked that week, whether you’re a train-on: everyone plays a role. Now that I’ve been in almost every position in that way — from not playing at all to getting a few minutes off the bench to now being a regular starter — it’s so much clearer to me that every single person in a squad matters.

Just like Melbourne City’s inaugural season, Western is currently sitting first on the ladder with the Premiership and Championship trophies squarely in its sights.

But instead of following the top-down City model, the club has utilised Australia’s already-existing pipelines to create something that will arguably be more sustainable — and more successful for the domestic game overall — for years to come.

By partnering with a club that already has its own development pathway, and simply providing it with greater investment and resources to get it up to speed with the expectations and standards of the national league, Western United is a proof-of-concept for how the competition can, or should, approach expansion moving forward.

“This could be a blueprint of what clubs should be looking at and saying, ‘Well, this is an opportunity’,” Torcaso said.

“It also should get people to act in regards to making sure that other teams do the same thing, whether they create their own pathways through their A-League teams on their own or if they connect with another NPL club.

“If we don’t set the example — if we just come in as a mediocre team who’s just happy to claim they’re participating — then it doesn’t set the tone for anyone else.

“For us, if we do well this year, it should propel other teams to pull their fingers out and say, ‘We’re going to invest more, we’re going to bring in more marquee players, we’re going to give this more of our time and energy’. That makes our league much better overall as a result.

“I think it should work this way for more and more clubs around Australia.”

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