Less than 24 hours after the Central Coast Mariners made national headlines celebrating their historic treble of titles, a documentary was quietly released on SBS that told a similar, but arguably more remarkable, football story that has been all but wiped from the collective memory of Australian sports fans.

In 2014, just two years after they were founded, the Western Sydney Wanderers won the biggest club competition that Australia could participate in at the time: the AFC Champions League.

They did it in front of 11 of their own fans and 63,000 furious Saudi Arabians, having navigated bus crashes, hotel raids, public sledgings, lasers in the eyes, and so much more on their journey there. But the Wanderers persevered, becoming the first Australian club to win the biggest continental trophy on offer in just over two years of existence.

And yet, this story seems to have slipped away into the dusty history books, barely mentioned in bigger conversations about the key moments or memories that have come to shape Australian sport.

Why?

This is the question that journalist Marc Fennell (The Feed, Mastermind, Stuff The British Stole) wanted to answer in a new film titled Came From Nowhere: a documentary about the founding and early success of one of Australia’s most interesting — and now most problematic — football clubs.

“What became very apparent very quickly, and what interested me, were two things,” Fennell told ABC Sport.

“One was this truly incredible, Hollywood-esque, fairytale arc of a team that literally went from no name, no players, nowhere to play, nowhere to train, no coach … to winning the highest championship you can as an Australian club, within about three years.

“Certainly people within football know this story, but it struck me that it didn’t have the same level of mythological status as some other sporting stories in Australia.

“Then there was the other side, which was that the active support group had gotten lots of coverage. The RBB [Red and Black Bloc], there were reams and reams of news and footage of them. And I felt like those two things were linked somehow, and they were both stories worth telling, but we were trying to work out: how did they intersect?”

The film follows these two narrative threads, providing an oral history of the founding of the club and the way in which it emerged, almost organically, from the city and the community that it has come to represent.

As one of the historical hotbeds of football in Australia, Sydney’s west was one of the few major centres that wasn’t represented by the new A-League competition that launched in 2005.

The area had been a thriving football ecosystem for decades, with multiple Socceroos emerging through clubs like Marconi, Blacktown, Parramatta, and Sydney United in the old National Soccer League.

However, it would take another seven years for Football Federation Australia (FFA, who ran the A-League until 2021) to permit a western Sydney team, in part because of the “one city, one team” policy that was introduced with the new competition, with Sydney FC taking the city’s first and only spot for the first five years.

In 2012, after the Clive Palmer-run Gold Coast United folded, the Wanderers had their shot. FFA needed 10 teams for their upcoming television rights negotiations, but struggled to find a financial backer to get the team up and running in time for the 2012-13 season. So the FFA did it themselves, securing a $4 million government grant to help create a professional football club in Sydney’s west, effectively from scratch.

After hosting several community forums and fan surveys across the region, where topics from club colours to playing style to home grounds to club values to proposed names were discussed and debated, on June 25, it was announced that the club’s official name would be the Western Sydney Wanderers — a homage to the first ever registered football club in Australia, Wanderers FC, in 1880 — while their colours would be red and black.

Led by first-time head coach and fellow western Sydney boy Tony Popovic, the squad that began to be built featuring players like Mark Bridge, Ante Covic, Aaron Mooy, Tarek Elrich, Nikolai Topor-Stanley, and Shannon Cole was reflective of the hard-working underdog values of the area.

Or as the documentary describes: “Offcuts and misfits, players who weren’t the first-choice picks at other clubs; the rejects, Unwanted FC.”

Player trials were hastily organised at a local sports ground with missing registrations and wheelie bins for ice baths and a change-room that members of the public could accidentally walk into. But, as the film so often reminds us, “a club born out of desperation … learned to thrive in hardship.”

At their first pre-season match in the suburb of St Marys, 4,500 people showed up, with a small group gathering on one grassy hill to practise a few songs that had been written in the preceding four months. This was the bones of the Red and Black Bloc, the active supporter’s group that is as much a part of this club’s story as the players are.

Six months after they were founded, the Wanderers played their first A-League Men game at the old Parramatta Stadium: an “agricultural” 0-0 draw against the Central Coast Mariners.

But for the fans who stood singing behind a banner that read “Football comes home,” the scoreline didn’t matter. What mattered is they finally had a club to call their own.

“Very early on, I came to the view that this is a love story,” Fennell said.

“This is a love story between a town and its team; between football and its fans. And every love story has ebbs and flows: it has moments of high euphoria, and then it has bickering and tempestuous fighting.

“If you look at the arc, you’ve got the arc of the team and this really incredible love story between its fans, who were clearly dying for a club to exist, but at the same time, when it came to fruition, it became a lightning-rod for so many issues that divide Sydney.

“We always talk about Sydney as a city of villages because we don’t really interact with each other. But it’s true: there’s a divide in how Sydney and western Sydney are talked about, and this was just a really interesting prism through which to look at the city, through this team that went on this incredible run.”

The film then follows the team’s inaugural season in 2012-13, which began without a goal or a win in its first month before quickly gathering pace. They went on to record 10 straight wins — a league record — on their charge up the ladder, competing with some of the league’s biggest and most successful clubs, including their now cross-town and derby rivals, Sydney FC.

As the wins piled up, so did their fans, with 10,000 Wanderers supporters travelling to Newcastle for their final game of the regular season. Two goals to Mark Bridge helped the side to a 3-0 win and their first ever Premier’s Plate, hoisted in their first time of asking.

Or, they would have hoisted it, had FFA thought to bring the trophy to Newcastle for the game. Instead, the players celebrated using a giant silver platter that one of the fans had used to transport cevapi and sausages to the pre-game fan barbecue: becoming, in its own way, a perfect metaphor for the Wanderers’ cultural and community foundations.

The club was expected to take out the ALM Championship, too, but fell at the final hurdle to the Mariners. And while it felt like the end for some, for Popovic and his players, it was just the beginning of an even bigger journey they were about to embark on through Asia, having qualified for the Asian Champions League as Australia’s premiers.

It’s here that the film picks up its second major thread, the club’s fanbase, and the growing tensions that were forming between its active supporters and the authorities.

Some sections of the RBB were causing problems for the local police, with violence, property damage, intimidation, and flare-throwing some of the reasons cited as why their presence began to swell at home games. At times, over 100 police were deployed for Wanderers matches, including mounted police, dog squads, and riot squads.

The RBB’s traditional pre-match march through Parramatta was banned, alongside flares, megaphones, banners, and even the use of expletives. For some, it was about keeping the community safe. For others, it was “destroying the very thing that makes [football] special,” with fans feeling betrayed that league administrators were doing little to defend or support them.

The tension spilled over in 2015 when former News Corp journalist Rebecca Wilson published the names of 198 A-League fans — nearly half of whom were from the Wanderers — who were on the league’s “banned” list. It caused a fracture between the club, the league, its fans, and the media that, even to this day, hasn’t quite been fully repaired.

Some of the tension arguably stemmed from the fact that the Wanderers have blurred the line between what writer Joe Gorman once described as the “de-ethnicised” A-League — which wiped clean the old NSL in order to “Australianise” the world game, making it less ethnic so it could appeal to mainstream Australia — and the ethnic, multicultural of Sydney’s west from which the Wanderers evolved.

They were the first A-League club to deliberately lean into the more complex identities of its fanbase, embracing the class and culture divides that separated Sydney into “east” and “west”, harking back not just to the NSL but to the traditions and narratives of the even older European game, whose clubs emerged from and are still deeply intertwined with the specific, contextualised communities of their immediate area.

Maybe that is why the A-League has struggled to sustain itself in its latest decade: still trying to engineer the organic magic of “old soccer,” where a club and a community were one and the same.

It is also, perhaps, why the way in which its fanbase has engaged with the sport — the tifos, the flares, the chanting, the marches, the smoke — has been roundly criticised by a mainstream media in Australia that is not as familiar or comfortable with the cultures and traditions of a working-class migrant sport that does not look or sound or act like them.

“It’s hard not to look at it through the prism of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’,” Fennell said. “I’m always wary of bringing class warfare into these conversations, but it’s hard not to, right?

“That was really interesting to me because that’s when it became about a sense of belonging, being part of the community, being part of something bigger than yourself. This is part of you and you are part of it and you are part of this collective.

“It’s the human part of it that we need to make sense for people. Especially for people who didn’t grow up with it, who don’t understand it. It’s about you being part of something bigger and riding the wave and the crashes of that and what it means for people and for their community, both good and bad, and when that is attacked — by police, by the media, by whoever — it’s a different kind of personal sense of assault that you feel. That is felt collectively.

“And, you know, there are some things in the film that some people will say, ‘hey, that’s not okay.’ And it’s undeniable. How does that feel when you’re part of this community? Do you feel like you have to defend it? All that territory is really intriguing: when a team is from the community, by the community, but also then is under siege, what does that do to your sense of self?”