Mount Eliza Soccer Club receive new pitch and lighting upgrades from Victorian Government

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Mount Eliza Soccer Club have been the beneficiaries of a recent funding grant from the Victorian Government, with a new pitch and improved lighting to be introduced at the club’s home of Emil Madsen Reserve.

Mount Eliza was one of the eleven projects selected for the World Game Facilities Fund program in 2021, splitting an overall total of $3.8 million in funding.

President of the Mount Eliza Soccer Club, Justin Sheppard, explained to Soccerscene that the upgrades are part of a holistic plan to improve the club’s ground and amenities areas.

“We run our club out of two sites, a local secondary college which is our summer base and the reserve in Mt Eliza which is our home base with two full pitches,” he said.

“We’ve got around 500 members, so running out of the current two pitches at Emil Madsen Reserve was very difficult.

“We’ve been pushing very hard for a third pitch and a pavilion for the past 5 years. We were lucky enough to receive the recent World Game funding for that third pitch, which gives us a fully lit pitch which is fenced around and gives us one more area to play on. It’s a wonderful development.”

Sheppard stated that the main works on site are set to start by October, but the pitch has already been flattened and is “shovel ready”.

He expanded on the benefits that the upgrades will provide for the club in the short and long term.

“Firstly, it allows more kids access to training,” he stated.

“It gives us a huge amount of ability to now train more teams, run more specialised training programs and give teams the opportunity to train two times a week (only been offered one day a week in the past).

“Weekend matchdays will also just be phenomenal. All of a sudden, we will have a purpose-built soccer pitch which makes it really nice for us and gives us the chance to play more home games at our venue, as opposed to using the secondary college.

“We’re hoping it’s a 12-month facility for us. It gives us a great ability to get our members active.”

The local community will also have a chance to experience the new upgrades and use them for their own purposes.

“It’s positively affecting the wider community as well,” Sheppard said.

“When we run our training program now 70% come from our membership base but the remaining 30% come from other local clubs. This new pitch will give us the scope to go wider with that. It’s not about revenue making for the club, it’s just about getting people to play more.

“If you’re going down to the park with a kick with mates that’s one thing, but playing on a proper surface with goals set up all year round, it’s a different story. On the weekends, with no football on, there’s kids playing in the community everywhere across those pitches. We hope things like this will grow further with the upgrades.”

The club itself has grown in certain areas in the past couple years, including the development of further female teams.

“We’ve had a huge growth in the girls’ numbers, we’ve gone from four teams to eight teams this year,” Sheppard said.

“We plan on reaching ten teams next year. It’s been a massive increase; with girls we want the facilities to continue to improve and be great for them.”

The club, while grateful for the recently announced upgrades, hopes to announce the formation of a clubhouse in the coming months, which will become the club’s home at Emil Madsen Reserve.

“The pavilion is actually sitting with the local council at the moment,” Sheppard said.

“It’s been costed, is in the advanced drawings phase and almost shovel ready.

“We are now waiting for council funding on its approval, that’s sitting with our local member.

“They’re working very hard to get that through for all the sporting clubs on Emil Madsen Reserve. We haven’t got a clubroom, so this will be our first clubroom their and our home base, which is very exciting for the future.”

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Victorian Labor commits $500,000 to Thornbury Football Facility as State Election Advocacy Intensifies

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Image Credit: Kat Theophanous MP Facebook

The Victorian Labor Party has confirmed $500,000 in 2026-27 State Budget funding to upgrade facilities at Mayer Park in Thornbury, with Northcote MP Kat Theophanous joining Darebin United juniors for a training session earlier this month to mark the commitment. The funding follows a public campaign by Football Victoria highlighting the ground’s deteriorating conditions, and lands within an escalating advocacy effort by the sport ahead of the next Victorian election.

The money will go toward upgrading the playing surface and planning a new pavilion at a ground that has received no infrastructure investment in over a decade, according to Football Victoria, despite participation at Darebin United more than quadrupling in that time. The club fielded five teams in 2021. It now fields more than 20, with over 300 players including more than 130 children under 12 and over 70 female players.

That growth has collided directly with the limits of the ground itself. Mayer Park has no drainage and no synthetic surface, and Football Victoria reported that Darebin United lost 23 training sessions in 2024 alone due to unsafe, waterlogged conditions. Club President Michael Slaughter described a pitch that was uneven and at times dangerous, particularly for junior and female players.

“I have been there for six years, and the club is at a stage now that we need something new,” Slaughter said in comments to Football Victoria earlier this year. “There’s only so many training sessions you can cancel, and then there’s the cost of finding alternative grounds indoors or outdoors, which isn’t ideal.”

A campaign that found its target

Football Victoria published a dedicated article in March calling on Darebin City Council to urgently prioritise redevelopment of Mayer Park, explicitly linking the club’s case to its broader Level the Playing Field campaign. Three months later, the funding arrived, not from council, but from the state government, attached to the local member’s name and delivered with a photo opportunity on the training pitch.

A club’s need becomes visible through governing body advocacy, a local member adopts the cause, and the funding is announced as a direct response to community need rather than as a line item in a broader budget process. Theophanous’s own account of the announcement makes the local framing explicit, describing the investment alongside free public transport, school upgrades and registration discounts as part of what she has billed as “easier, safer and more affordable” support for Northcote.

“Community sporting clubs bring Northcote locals together,” Theophanous said in her budget statement. “Through our Get Active Kids voucher program, we’re making sure the cost of fees and equipment doesn’t keep kids from playing the sport they love. And we’re also investing to make local clubs even stronger.”

Earlier this year, Avondale FC secured $500,000 for lighting at Avenger Park and Hume City FC received $250,000 for upgrades at Nasiol Stadium, both delivered through the same budget cycle and both paired with local member announcements. Mayer Park follows the same pipeline, a state government commitment, a local seat, a community club whose growth has outpaced its facilities, and a governing body using the win as evidence in a larger campaign.

The equity dimension

What distinguishes the Mayer Park case is the explicit role gender and accessibility played in Football Victoria’s advocacy. The governing body noted that unsafe pitch conditions were particularly dangerous for junior and female players, and highlighted that Darebin United maintains 40% female representation on its committee with seven female coaches, alongside its status as one of Darebin’s first 2-Star Club Changer accredited clubs, a Football Victoria program recognising clubs that actively remove barriers to female participation.

A club building one of the more credible female participation pathways in the municipality was, until this announcement, doing so on a ground its own administrators described as unsafe. Infrastructure investment of this kind does not simply improve playing conditions. It determines whether programs explicitly designed to grow women’s and girls’ football can function as intended, or whether they remain constrained by the same ageing facilities that have shaped community football for a decade.

What it means for the campaign ahead

Football Victoria has framed the Mayer Park outcome as one data point within its Level the Playing Field campaign, which continues to call for more equitable government investment in football relative to other codes. The organisation has indicated further football-related announcements are expected from the 2026-27 Victorian State Budget, with the upcoming state election positioned as the decisive moment for the sport’s broader infrastructure future.

For Slaughter, the immediate outcome is more concrete. “The funding is extremely important,” he said. “It allows us to deliver our football program and to grow. This will give them a place to come, to have fun and to enjoy their soccer”.

Whether that template, governing body advocacy, local political adoption, budget announcement, repeats consistently enough to address the scale of Victoria’s grassroots facilities gap remains the open question Football Victoria’s campaign is designed to keep in front of both major parties as the election approaches.

How Australian Support for the World Cup Has Changed Since 2022

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Federation Square 2022; Image Credit: AFR

Sodden, rowdy and 7,000-strong, the crowd that gathered at Federation Square before dawn on Saturday for Australia’s clash with the United States offered a vivid illustration of how much, and how little, has changed in Australian football support since Qatar 2022.

The scenes themselves were familiar: fans queuing from 2am, flares lit during the anthem, a barrier breach as the precinct hit capacity within minutes of opening. But the fact the screening happened at all says something about the shifting institutional weight football now carries in Australia.

Just this May, the Melbourne’s Arts Precinct had decided not to screen Socceroos matches at Fed Square this tournament, citing crowd damage and arrests during a 2022 World Cup screening. Football Australia publicly pushed back, and the Victorian Government ultimately overturned the decision, with security and police presence increased to manage the risk. That a state government intervened to guarantee a public screening reflects how central these gatherings have become to football’s standing in Australia, not just as a peripheral fan event but a piece of cultural infrastructure worth a premier’s political capital.

A Tournament Inherited, Not Just Attended

The scale of public interest now sits on a different foundation than it did in 2022. Football Australia’s most recent National Participation Report recorded an 11% increase in total participation to 1,911,539 people, with women and girls’ participation rising 16% to 221,436. Industry analysis attributes much of that growth to the “Matildas effect” following the home Women’s World Cup in 2023, projecting 407,000 new junior participants by 2027 on the back of that tournament and Football Australia’s broader infrastructure strategy. Whatever happens to the Socceroos in the United States, the crowd at Fed Square this year is drawn from a participation base substantially larger than the one watching from lounge rooms and pubs in Qatar.

That shift shows up in how fans say they’ll engage with this tournament regardless of results. New industry research found 79% of intended Australian viewers plan to keep watching the World Cup even if the Socceroos are eliminated, an 11-point increase on 2022, suggesting interest is becoming less tied to the national team’s results than it once was. The same research found television remains dominant, with 88% of viewers planning to watch on TV, rising above 90 per cent for evening and weekend matches, even as audiences increasingly split their attention across streaming and second screens.

Crowd Behaviour as the Unresolved Question

What hasn’t shifted is the tension over crowd conduct at public screenings, and what it costs football’s civic standing when things go wrong. The Melbourne Arts Precinct’s chief executive was explicit in 2026 that damage and behaviour during 2022 screenings were the basis for initially declining to host watch parties this time, despite trouble-free crowds during the 2023 Women’s World Cup.

Saturday’s flares and barrier breach will likely feed that same debate going into the knockout stages, even as the broader numbers tell a story of a sport with a far deeper public footing than it had four years ago. The Fed Square images from 2022 prompted other Australian cities to scramble together live sites once the Socceroos reached the knockout rounds, reflecting a pattern likely to repeat if Australia progresses from Group D, with Friday’s match against Paraguay now carrying outsized weight for a campaign that began with what fans, by their own description, considered horrible refereeing and a result short of expectations.

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