In 2019, when the Central Coast Mariners were handed their third consecutive wooden spoon for finishing last in the A-League Men, it felt like the death-knell of one of Australia’s most important and successful professional football clubs.

When they first entered the league as one of its founding clubs in 2005, few people expected the little club from Gosford to achieve very much at all. 

Sandwiched between the two bigger population centres of Sydney and Newcastle, and with a community of barely over 300,000 people, financial sustainability and fan engagement were two of their biggest concerns from day dot.

But the club had something that made them unique: they were the only team representing a regional area in the league, and with no other professional sporting teams from other codes to compete against, had clear reign in terms of capturing the heart of their community.

Led by inaugural head coach Lawrie McKinna, engaging with their regional base was at the heart of everything the Mariners did. Their first ever signing was a local boy, Damien Brown, who helped steer the club towards a core of young Australian talent, while a cash injection from local businessman John Singleton eased some of the club’s financial anxieties.

That solid off-field foundation immediately created success on it. The Mariners shocked everybody in the league’s inaugural season, finishing runners-up to premiers Sydney FC and their star signing, Dwight Yorke, and even reached the first ever grand final, losing out to Sydney 1-0.

Their first decade in the ALM panned out in the same winning ways, with the club finishing inside the top four in seven of their first nine seasons: a period that included two premierships and a championship trophy. Dozens of Socceroos were developed along the way, with the club positioning itself as one of Australia’s best local youth development pipelines in tandem with its blossoming academy system.

Not only did future national team players such as Alex Wilkinson, Mat Ryan, Mitch Duke, Danny Vukovic, Mile Jedinak, Trent Sainsbury, Andrew Redmayne, and Tom Rogic all pass through the Mariners’ ranks at one point or another, but the club was also arguably the launch-pad for future Socceroos coach Graham Arnold, who won two titles with the club before moving to Sydney FC and then on to Australia.

It was around 2013, when they were at their peak, that the club began its slow slide from the peak of the domestic game down into its doldrums. Following a period of financial instability, with the club spending beyond its means on things such as player wages and a snowballing investment in a Centre of Excellence facility in Tuggerah, English businessman Mike Charlesworth bought a controlling stake in the Mariners to rescue it from potential bankruptcy.

But the 10 years that followed were not much better. In an attempt to expand its revenue base, Charlesworth made decisions that frustrated local fans and moved away from the community-first focus the club was founded on, including moving Central Coast games to Canberra and North Sydney, barely scraping over the salary floor required for playing budgets, and focusing less on developing young local players to the point of securing overseas transfers, which had raked in millions of dollars in previous seasons.

His leadership was divisive for locals: while some were grateful for Charlesworth stepping in to keep the club afloat (particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic), others criticised him for running the club on a shoestring budget, investing only as much as what would keep the Mariners alive, but not enough to allow it to thrive. Under Charlesworth, the men’s team finished last four times in seven seasons, with just one finals appearance scattered in amongst it.

So significant had been the club’s fall from grace between 2013 and 2019 that the Mariners had largely become fodder for memes and jokes on social media, their club name used as a moniker to describe the worst team in other sports.

Many believed it was only a matter of time before they folded entirely.

After sustained pressure from fans and the wider football community, Charlesworth officially put the club up for sale in 2020. It would take two years before a new buyer came along, and true to the Central Coast’s founding principles, it came from a local connection.

Richard Peil, a businessman who moved to Australia from England when he was young, first learned about the Mariners’ situation in 2022 after his son won a place at the club’s youth academy.

Born in Leeds, and on the books with both Huddersfield and Luton Town in his early 20s, Peil’s playing career ended early through injury, so he moved back to Australia and immediately bought a gym, which has now turned into the multi-million-dollar franchise, Anytime Fitness.

He got to know some of the club’s key figures, including former coach Nick Montgomery and CEO Shaun Mielekamp. The more he listened and learned, the more he realised the potential that the ailing club had.

“The more I looked at the Central Coast situation, the more I realised it was pretty unique to have 300,000+ people with only one code,” he said a few years ago, having also considered investing in a Canberra A-League Men’s expansion bid around the same time.

“It’s always [been] a dream of one day being involved in the ownership of a club and I’m lucky enough to have done well enough in business … so it’s time to put something back into the game.

“In the short term, it’s putting some very solid sports science systems in place, things that, from what I’m hearing, really aren’t being utilised anywhere in the Australian football landscape.

“Then there’s securing the coaches that are there for the long-term. I’m not a fan of this year-by-year situation.

Originally negotiated as a three-year deal, Peil said he’s in the club for the long haul, with his 10-year vision including making the club one of the only profitable outfits in the competition by the half-way mark of his tenure.

But he and his wife won’t take any profits themselves: it will all apparently be donated to his wife’s charity, the Young Boys Foundation, which helps educate and support survivors of child sexual abuse and invests in local sport in the region, ensuring that the club continues to have a pool of young players to draw from for years down the line.

Instead of big-name, sugar-hit marquee players (like Charlesworth’s failed Usain Bolt experiment), Peil has instead poured more resources into the club’s youth academy, producing players that can then help the senior side win titles and, ideally, be sold to overseas clubs. The only player he said he’d ever make an exception for, apparently, is Leeds legend James Milner.

By combining the club’s community-driven, youth development past with the game’s science and data-driven future, Peil has managed to return the Mariners back to the summit of the Australian game, with the club now standing on the brink of something no other team in the country has done before.

Having secured both the 2023-24 ALM premiership and the AFC Cup (Asia’s second-tier club competition), the Mariners could add a second consecutive ALM championship to their reinvigorated trophy cabinet, becoming the first club to hold these three titles simultaneously.

Their achievements over the past year have been all the more remarkable given the departure of five key players, as well as head coach Nick Montgomery, after their championship-winning season last year, in addition to their bumpy start to the current season (where they lost four games in a row) and the extraordinary travel they’ve had to do to take part in the AFC Cup, covering over 100,000km — all in economy class — on their way to Monday morning’s final in Muscat.

But as with their earliest golden years, their work off the field has created a solid foundation for sustained success on it. They’ve uncovered young gems such as Alou and Garang Kuol, Josh Nisbet, Kye Rowles, Sam Silvera, Max Balard, Lewis Miller, and Jacob Farrell, and re-launched the careers of older players such as Jason Cummings, Danny Vukovic, Oliver Bozanic, Storm Roux, and Mark Birighitti.

And their coaches, from Nick Montgomery to Mark Jackson, have got them playing a brand of exciting, creative, attacking football that not only brings out the best in their players, but also connects with and excites their fans.

This, coupled with the re-introduction of the A-League Women’s team, has seen increasingly healthy crowds attracted to all their home games at the iconic Central Coast Stadium. As per Peil’s vision, they are now competing in the top four of both senior competitions, with their success shown in their recent Club Championship win, awarded to the most successful overall club in the A-Leagues.

But they haven’t done it with a bloated budget or lavish marquee signings. They haven’t done it with bizarre initiatives or dismissive strategies that ignore their local market. Instead, to borrow a footballing term, the Mariners have done the simple things well: leaned into their youth, engaged with their fans, embraced a style of football that wakes people up, and not spent beyond their means in order to play it.

In doing so, the club has served as a reminder of what is possible in Australian professional football, busting the very same myths that the Australian game often repeats to itself about its place and its potential: that Australian clubs can never compete in Asia, that you need huge budgets to win titles, that our young local players aren’t good enough, that small regions can’t financially support professional teams, or that the A-Leagues can’t be sustainable in the long-term if it has the right people, processes, and principles in place.

Most importantly of all, perhaps, the Central Coast Mariners have shown us how quickly a club can revive itself, so long as it starts from the right place.