Imagine if you had to take time off from your day job to travel to the United States and face off with Harry Kane and Bayern Munich in the FIFA Club World Cup. For Auckland City FC, an amateur team from New Zealand, that is their reality as their players balance unique circumstances to be the only amateur side to participate this summer.
They’re no strangers to this competition, having dominated Oceania, winning the OFC Men’s Champions League 13 times to be the most successful team in the region, but the expansion of the CWC ahead of this year’s tournament in the United States will give them a chance to make something special happen. This doesn’t happen without having a well-drilled list of players who play for each other, but like their sporting director Gordon Watson said, this is a family and a tight-knit one at that.
“The feeling of getting to the stage where we get to compete on this level gets better and better every time we win the O League or any match for me. It’s quite a big feeling because it’s a culmination of all the hard work that the players and the team [have] put in not only for this year but for the last four years, for the last 10 years. I go to work, I work a 40-hour week, I train, I gotta go through an hour and a half to two hours of traffic just to get to training,” goalkeeper Conor Tracey said. “I train for about two hours, sometimes I’m late, so it may only be an hour, but I miss out on a lot of my personal time because of this football.”
Start your day with the perfect blend of news and analysis from the world’s game with the Morning Footy podcast. Download and follow Morning Footy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts!
For American soccer fans, an equivalent would be if the Des Moines Menace, who took the U.S. Open Cup by storm, won the Concacaf Champions League and qualified for the Club World Cup. Just being at this tournament is a major accomplishment for Auckland City FC, but it’s one that may not set in until they’ve played their matches and returned home. Placed in Group C alongside Bayern Munich, Benfica, and Boca Juniors, even getting a point would be an accomplishment for Auckland, but you come to these tournaments to square off against the best players in the world, and they’ll do just that.
But even to get to this point, the balance needed to get to this stage is something impressive, showing the commitment that each player has to the club. Even in chatting to put this together, Tracey had to leave the interview early to avoid going over on his lunch break to get back to work on time.
“The spare time that I do have is not a lot, especially coming into this weekend, I’ve got work on Sunday, just as an example. Even with work, my work cuts into a lot of my own time and football time. Each one has, like, grown into my personal time, and coming into the weekend, Friday night I’m going to try and see my girlfriend,” Tracey said. “I’ll probably get an hour with her before I need to go to bed, and in the morning, I have about two hours to go get a coffee with her before I need to start getting ready for the game. All those tiny little moments you try to organize in the week leading up, so before you even get to Friday, your whole weekend is already taken up with a whole schedule.”
“Every single moment is highly treasured. We don’t get a lot of time, I don’t get a lot of time but wrapping back into it being a choice … that’s what separates us as a team from everyone else because everyone in our team has that choice to either do what we do which is working full time, having this huge football schedule and really eating into your own personal time, not being able to spend as much time with your friends or family as the normal person, or you can live the normal life of someone else. It’s still tough for anyone else, but they don’t have the 16-18 hours of football in the week on top of a 40-hour work week.”
Being the only amateur club in this tournament, there’s a unique perspective that Auckland City FC bring to this tournament, and it’s a highly relatable one, as people in the stands will be able to understand these choices between professional and personal endeavors. Everyone has something that they’re striving for, and sometimes, to reach goals, it can come with sacrifices.
At the Te Atatū Intermediate School, Auckland City right back Jordan Vale works his day job as a teacher. Soccer isn’t the dominant sport in New Zealand, with rugby leading the charge, which makes it even more impressive the sacrifices that these players are making in order to pull off playing in this tournament.
With the Club World Cup taking place in the United States, Auckland City FC players have had to balance taking time off of work to make this trip, and Vale even contemplated quitting his job to make things work but was able to move into a substitute role instead to provide more flexibility for his soccer commitments. Even staff-wise, personal circumstances will keep head coach Paul Rosa from heading to the United States with the team for the initial phase of the tournament, where the Navy Blues will be led by a group of Adria Casals, Ivan Vicelich, Daewook Kim, and Jonas Hoffmann.
“Coming into this season, at the end of last year and having done it for about six years, I was getting mentally a bit exhausted, my workload plus football, those sacrifices were kind of catching up to me,” Vale said. “Our season, if you’re including preseason, goes from January to December, so we only get three or four weeks off until we’re back into preseason, so I was getting quite overworked in my position and I was trying to think, how am I going to juggle and make this work this year?
“So what I had decided was to make a decent sacrifice and try to be a reliever (substitute). And I did that and resigned last year. However, my principal came to me a few days later and said, we don’t want to lose you, we’re happy with those times [that will be needed off] for the Club World Cup and I’ve got this flexible [position] … which has been a massive deloading in work where I’ve been able to find a bit more of those precious times, a bit more free time, and mentally that’s allowed me to refoucs on football and still give 100% into my work.”
That prioritization isn’t for everyone, but when playing for this team, which is so tight-knit, plenty of players would do this even though it means plenty of unpaid leave will be required for work. When Auckland are looking to build a competitive team while also finding players willing to shuffle their schedules to make things like this tournament work, it narrows down the pool of available players, but when Watson is looking to build a successful team, having strong characters like Vale and goalkeeper Tracey in the team is absolutely critical. Players will even change jobs to ensure they can get the time off required for a demanding soccer season, which shows the commitment that each player has to the Navy Blues.
“There are tough choices. When I hear them making these decisions, there’s a parental part of me that goes, ‘Oh my god, don’t do that.’ I did it and it’s not nice, like it’s tough, but again it’s a choice, and when you reflect back on your own life as a middle-aged man … it brings back all the sacrifice, the heartache, the disappointment, “Watson said. “There’s no guarantee you’ll get picked. You can be grumpy around your family or grumpy around your girlfriend because that’s not going well. Plus, you’re doing your job. You only get one shot at this in life, one shot, one Club World Cup, one game with Bayern Munich, one game with Benfica, one with Boca Juniors. Is it worth it? I think that’s a very personal choice, but I’m in awe of them.”
These are games that will see Auckland play for a massive audience, and it could also give some of these players a chance at establishing themselves in a fully professional soccer league as the club returns to the competition, excited to participate in the first one with 32 teams.
There’s a well-worn path of transferring from Auckland City FC in New Zealand to teams in the Australian A League, but good performances in this tournament could end up being life-changing ones. Even if results don’t go the way that Auckland would like, there are still plenty of chances for memorable once-in-a-lifetime moments, like what is helping create soccer waves at Vale’s school.
“At the start of this year, I really wanted to encourage kids playing football at our school, and I think we’ve been quite successful. We got maybe 100 boys to sign up for trials, and we had about 80 girls sign up, so it was actually really successful. The one way we did it was I was working with the PE teacher, and he set up a big poster of just football photos from a couple of tournaments last year, but I asked him to take a few pictures from the Club World Cup of [Karim] Benzema. I think there’s a couple of [me] shaking his hand or seeing him after [the game], so a student had came up to me, and he had drawn us together because he loved Benzema, and he kept quizzing me on the time there, and he found out that at the end of the game you randomly get drug tested and so my name got drawn.”
While usually players don’t want to go to those drug tests because they can take hours, this was one that would have quite an impact on Vale.
“I walked into the room, and there was Benzema and Fabinho, who had also been randomly selected,” Vale said. “So we got to sit in this quite cramped room and just have a chat for an hour, which for me and Cameron [Harper], because we’re both Liverpool fans, it was really awesome to see Fabinho, but also Benzema. It was amazing, and so that kid had found out about that story and was just quizzing me, but now it’s about Harry Kane. ‘Will you be able to tackle him?'”
Vale and Auckland City will soon find out the answer to that question when they take the pitch against Bayern Munich on June 15 to kick off their Club World Cup journey, but who knows, they could be in the process of inspiring the next generation of the Navy Blues as soccer contiues to grow in New Zealand. Sharing the pitch with global soccer legends is a special experience, where competing against their heroes can make them ones back home.
