‘There’s almost no way this can happen’: This is Australia’s answer to Welcome to Wrexham

2 days ago 3

Australia’s answer to Welcome to Wrexham has arrived, with a few important caveats.

For starters, we don’t know exactly where we’re being welcomed. The new web series Breaking Barriers, the first episode of which will be available on YouTube and Football360.com.au on Wednesday, purposely withholds the identity of the soccer club which is about to be transformed to build suspense and intrigue.

Comedian Ed Kavalee and former journalist Matt Windley are behind Breaking Barriers, the Australian answer to Welcome to Wrexham.

There is a celebrity connection, but hold your horses: instead of a mega-rich Hollywood type such as Ryan Reynolds, we’ll have to settle for comedian Ed Kavalee.

And no, he’s not putting his own money into this.

“How dare you? I work for Channel 10,” Kavalee, a long-time soccer tragic and Row Z FC podcaster, said.

“[Reynolds] works for Disney. He can put in many millions of dollars. I’m working for Fruit Roll-Ups.

Wrexham co-owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.

“Make no mistake: I am fully intending to sell my share to the first petrochemical sovereign wealth fund or former Soviet republic military strongman that comes my way.”

The other important thing to know is that the very concept of “doing a Wrexham” – taking over a small club in the lower leagues and steering it to the top flight – is impossible in Australia, but they’re going to try to do one anyway.

Which is kind of the whole point.

Breaking Barriers has a simple premise: select an unspectacular grassroots soccer club and attempt to guide them up the Australian soccer pyramid, all the way to the top. But the promotion mechanism in English soccer, which lends Welcome to Wrexham its romantic core, is not and has not been in place in relation to the A-League – and may never be.

Can a humble grassroots club plot a course all the way to the A-League?

There are many good, sensible and prudent reasons why the A-League is a “closed shop” competition: financial sustainability, broadcaster certainty, investor protections and the need to shield clubs from the boom-and-bust cycle that has haunted Australian football for decades.

But that has never stopped people from taking sides in the never-ending, highly contentious and emotive debate within the game about the merits and practicality of introducing promotion and relegation to the A-League, and the extent to which it will lack credibility until it enables clubs with ambition to win their way in and punishes those who drag the chain.

Breaking Barriers is what happens when all of those conversations are taken to their logical extremes by a posse of earnest football romantics.

For Kavalee, it all brings to mind the Sydney BridgeClimb, which once faced similar conceptual hurdles.

‘There’s almost no way this can happen, which is why it’s a great idea.’

Comedian Ed Kavalee

“When you go and do the BridgeClimb, the best bit is at the start when they take you through the 99 reasons that the guy who had the idea for BridgeClimb was told that it couldn’t be possible,” he says. “He just went through and knocked out those 99 reasons one at a time – and then the next thing you know, there’s John Travolta in the blue overalls giving a thumbs up at the top of the bridge, and it’s glory everlasting.”

The other key figure in Breaking Barriers, and the person who roped Kavalee into this madness, is Matt Windley, a former News Corp soccer journalist who, eight years ago, spearheaded the Team 11 A-League expansion bid in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs. (They were beaten by Western United, who were booted out of the A-League this season.)

Windley works for Bruce Media, the Melbourne-based production house behind the show. The company is describing its association with the to-be-identified club as a “partnership”, not a takeover. Windley has become their vice-president, and Bruce Media will be taking over their social media channels and supporting their sponsorship, marketing and events initiatives.

A classic Australian soccer dreamer, Windley says they intend to do such a good job of growing the club that the A-League and Football Australia will eventually have no choice but to let them in.

An artist's impression of the proposed new stadium in Dandenong, from Team 11's failed A-League bid.

“He’s the worst type of insane, in that he looks calm,” Kavalee says of Windley. “I describe him as a mixture of Copernicus and Ted Bundy, but the good bits.

“When Matt came to me, all I could think was of all the reasons why this could never take place - and that’s what, to me, is perfect about it. There’s no real hard and fast reasons as to why a club can’t reach the top tier in Australia – except they’re everywhere, and everyone who’s involved knows exactly what they are.

“What’s really nice about it is that the club that has joined with Matt to do this has all the things that when people decry modern football, and the sort of multi-club ownership, Saudi Arabia, Red Bull Leipzig of it all ... those things are not present in what this small club in Australia is trying to do. It has a genuine local passionate following. There is no reason for it not to be in the top flight, apart from the amorphous reasons that we’ll soon find out. And they’re really keen to try. What could be more Australian than that?”

In lieu of financial investment, Kavalee is an official ambassador, lending Windley his insights and guidance from his time in the broader media industry – plus his observations from watching, reading and listening to football and football-adjacent content.

Should the club kick on as intended and reach professional status, he could become a part-owner via “sweat equity”, but there’s a long way to go.

“Pent up inside all of us is, ‘What would happen if I ran a football club?’ That evil lives in all of us,” he says.

”Season zero” of Breaking Barriers is a five-episode run that essentially sets the table for the series proper (to be aired this year) by exploring the central conceit in more depth, and by documenting the search for a suitable club and the associated partnership process.

At some point after that, the hope is that the show will be picked up by a streaming service.

Though Wrexham is the most obvious shorthand available to help explain Breaking Barriers, Kavalee is not in love with the comparison.

This, he quite rightly argues, is a different thing altogether – one that he hopes will spark ambition at other clubs and stress test the accepted realities of Australian soccer.

“You want to be closer to World Series Cricket than you do to Welcome to Wrexham,” he says.

“I understand the comparison, but this is more along the lines of Burke and Wills heading off into the bush. There’s almost no way this can happen, which is why it’s a great idea. At the very least, this is going to be a really interesting way of flushing out the reasons as to why things don’t happen.”