The 2026-27 A-League season. That's when Western United intends to move into a newly constructed, purpose-built stadium in Melbourne's west.
"Hold me to that," United chairman Jason Sourasis says in an exclusive interview with ESPN.
The declaration comes at the end of a lengthy conversation, one where he has gone to great lengths to emphasise that, after the challenges of the previous years -- the COVID pandemic chief among them -- he and the club are itching to move into the western Melbourne suburb of Tarneit as soon as possible. Touting that United are building just the second and third A-League standard rectangular stadiums in Victoria, he declares that moving to the West is not simply a preference for the club, but a matter of urgency.
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Ending a half-decade of nomadic existence and properly commencing efforts to capture the hearts and minds of a region labelled the fastest growing in Australia is the pre-eminent reason for United's haste. Moving away from playing games at sparsely attended venues in Ballarat and central Melbourne that aren't fit for purpose or help the club to grow is another, with the 30,000-seat capacity at the latter far in excess of what the club's nascent supporter base currently demands.
There's also shedding the costs associated with renting these ill-suited venues for fixtures, with it presently more expensive for United to play home games at AAMI Park than it does to take matches down to Tasmania.
The target for laying the foundations of the stadium, per the chairman, is mid-to-late 2024. And the 2026-27 season timeline is one he absolutely intends to keep.
But this, of course, isn't the first time commitments have been made on this front: A tweet sent out by the then West Melbourne Group (WMG) bid in October 2018, boldly stating: "Our stadium building partner guarantees a construction time of 20 months. We will be playing in our privately funded and owned stadium by Season 3!"
It's a declaration that has haunted Western United ever since; an anchor around the club's neck that taints any accomplishment; their own words ensuring that until a stadium is built, the club can never become what it promised to be.
"I think it was naive," Sourasis acknowledges. "Two years to build a stadium? Yes, it will take Probuild, at that stage, two years to build a stadium [Probuild collapsed in 2022 amidst long building delays and significant debts, adding delays to the stadium project].
"That assumes that you have planning approval. That assumes the land you're building on has water, electricity, gas, and services. We had none of that. So naive is probably the word that I [would] use.
"That's been our journey for the last four years and now we've actually got everything approved and ticked off where I can make statements and say by 2026-27 we are playing out of there. A date that we'll stick to because all the ducks we had to get lined up before we can start constructing are now done."
Season 2026-27, however, is still a long time away. There are pressing matters in the more immediate term to attend to, especially for a club that needs to arrest a phenomenon that saw its crowds go from an average of 3,616 in its championship-winning 2021-22 campaign, to 3,168 in 2022-23 to 2,448 so far in 2023-24 -- a figure weighed down by three "home" games in Ballarat.
Scepticism from the broader footballing public accompanies pretty much any move the club makes these days and in recent weeks the club's fans were left fuming over reports from Channel 10's Robbie Thomson that "[United] players were paid late."
The acronym TBC dominates Western United's mens and womens fixtures from late January onwards and the club has yet to appoint a replacement for now-former chief executive Chris Pehlivanis following his departure to lead Football Victoria. With the men's side languishing in bottom position on the A-League Men ladder, pressure has also mounted on coach John Aloisi.
A United spokesperson confirmed to ESPN that while there had been a delay in player payments for the men's side in November, it was less than a 24-hour aberration and it had since been resolved, with the women's side unaffected. Players union the PFA concurred, saying that player wage and superannuation payments were now current.
"The reason for late payment was an unexpected delay in the clearing of funds due to banking transfer limits being exceeded," the spokesperson said.
"The club does not anticipate players being paid late in future months, as this was the only time this has occurred and subsequent payments have been made on schedule."
Sourasis envisions appointing a new chief executive in the first quarter of 2024 and has backed Aloisi to the hilt, praising the former Socceroos star's character and the work he has done for the club in bringing them a maiden title in 2021-22. Short of disaster, he wants the coach to "lead them into Tarneit".
Cognisant that several delays have already struck the project and that external stakeholders are involved, he was hesitant to provide an exact date for when the club would make the move into their new training base, but said the ambition for A-League Men and A-League Women's games to be played out of that venue before both team's seasons ended remained the goal. In the nearer term, it's understood that ground availability issues mean United's mens home game against Adelaide United on Jan. 20 is likely to be postponed. Subsequent home fixtures are believed to have venues secured.
"We want to play [at the training base] as soon as possible because it costs us a lot of money to not be playing there," Sourasis says.
Whenever it does open, United's vision for that training base remains that of an intimate, 5,000-capacity venue that will allow it to begin to build an atmosphere and connection with the local community that, eventually, will lead to demand to attend games exceeding supply.
The venue -- currently the subject of a vote to determine a name -- won't replace the stadium, from a licencing perspective or otherwise, and Sourasis confirmed that it wouldn't be allowed to in the future, but it at least gets the club into Melbourne's west. Two-and-a-half thousand temporary seats have been purchased for installation, and steps are ongoing to complete the infrastructure -- parking, roads, and shuttles from nearby public transport centres and so on -- for access.
"The temporary facility is so we're not nomads, travelling to Tassie or Geelong or Ballarat to play games because there's nowhere else to play," Sourasis continues. "We'll be in Tarneit and controlling our own destiny and building our relationship in the west.
"But it's also about packing it. The experience of 5,000 people in a 5,000-seat stadium... the noise of actually packing out a stadium is better than 15,000 in a 50,000-seat stadium.
"The whole idea is that it creates the atmosphere that makes people want to come back, that builds a brand empathy so when we've got the main stadium ready there's demand. Rather than trying to get people to come to something that isn't a good experience."
Modelled on PayPal Park in the United States, that main stadium serves as the centrepiece of what Sourasis describes as a new city in Melbourne's west; a residential, retail, entertainment and sporting precinct that WMG, now Western United's parent company, wants to construct across 63 hectares in a public-private partnership with Wyndham City Council.
On Friday, WMG will announce that Australian property developers YourLand and American conglomerate Johnson Controls are investing in the AU$2 billion development of the precinct. Cynacism on any United claims around the stadium until probably the first game is played there but the arrival of these new investors -- investors that will be expecting a return -- show signs of movement on the precinct being built.
Sourasis says 3,000 people will live there upon its completion, 6,000 jobs will be created during construction, and, if population growth holds, there will eventually be approximately 100,000 people living within a two-kilometre radius.
"If we can't convert 10% of those people to be Western United supporters ... then we've done something wrong," Sourasis says, adamant that the project cannot be completed without the construction of the stadium.
"[The investors] are coming in to build a city with us. They all add skill sets throughout the precinct.
"So we've got the right team, both globally renowned and are some of the biggest in Australia.
"That's been a journey to lock them in as well. But we're at the stage where we're about to start the exciting piece of the exciting part of this journey."