Graham Arnold interview: 'Sydney FC were a toxic club'

Toxic. Very toxic, in fact. That’s how Graham Arnold describes the Sydney FC he inherited in the off-season.

Even from someone as frank as Arnold – he once described Sheffield United as ‘prehistoric’ – it’s a bit of a shock to hear such strong language used about his own club. A shock, but maybe not a surprise, given the soap opera that was the Sky Blues last season. There were fan revolts, dissenting players and a flat-track bully of a side that picked up just four points in nine games against the A-League’s best.

“When players walked in the training facility, they pretty much didn’t want to be there,” says Arnold. “It was very fragmented and very toxic.”

Before he was a professional footballer playing in the Dutch Eredivisie, Japan’s J-League and the Belgian top flight, Arnold was a builder, and he sees extensive parallels with the work he’s doing at Moore Park and the career he left behind as a young man.

What he’s done since May is set about re-laying the foundations of a squad he says was built on sand, where a certain marquee player – though he doesn’t use his name – did little for the collective good.

“What I’ve tried to work hard on since I’ve been here is building a culture. I had to put the footings down before I could even think about putting the slab down and then putting the walls up and then putting the roof on and then the roof tiles on.”

For Arnold, a good foundation is based on good relationships. They were seemingly non-existent at Sydney last season, but it was something his old club, Central Coast, had in spades. The Mariners’ relative isolation and small-town vibe (most players lived within walking distance of each other) meant camaraderie developed automatically; at Sydney, it’s something Arnold has had to foster.

He started with a family day for the players, the first in the club’s history. Similar functions are now held after games, and the players have started organising events themselves. For purely football reasons, he wants his players to have fun and be friends.

“No one who is unhappy can perform, so one of my big jobs at the start was just to make people happy,” says Arnold. “[We had] a group of individuals that were brought together that had no friendship or relationships. You could say, ‘We’ve got to go out and fight for each other’, but there was no reason to fight for each other.

“The number one thing has to be Sydney FC [and the last thing] the individual, and maybe that was around the other way. Maybe the marquee was number one. If the marquee is number one, then how do you fit the rest of the players around that? You don’t have a team, you’ve got a fragmented group [where players] are treated differently, and in my view, in a football team, you can’t treat anyone differently. Everyone has to know that if they do well, they will play.”

Until Arnold came on board, names like Didier Drogba and Diego Forlan were being thrown around as the potential heir to Alessandro Del Piero’s lucrative marquee spot.

Instead, the club went with Marc Janko: the Austria captain, for sure, but a name unfamiliar to all but the biggest football nerds. In fact, the team whose flashy imports helped earn it the nickname Bling FC now has fewer visa players than anyone else in the competition, just three.

It’s trademark ‘Arnie’. Forever the builder, he’s as passionate about developing young Australian players at Sydney as he was at the Mariners, where his alumni includes Mathew Ryan (Club Brugge), Tom Rogic (Celtic), Oliver Bozanic (FC Luzern) and Mustafa Amini (Borussia Dortmund). “That won’t change, whatever size of club it is.”

But it’s an older player he nominates when asked which of his current squad could best help the struggling Socceroos: the versatile and charismatic Alex Brosque. Arnold says he had no hesitation handing the captaincy to the 31-year-old, who has returned from a stint in Asia in better touch than ever.

“He’s become wiser,” says Arnold. “He’s a top guy, he’s top-fit and he’s at the peak of his form. He can play anywhere across the frontline: he knows how to score goals, and he knows how to create. I’d never tell Ange [Postecoglou] who to pick, but if I was looking around thinking, ‘We’ll, I’ve got a lot of young kids, I could do with an experienced player or two’, Alex Brosque is there waiting.”

Of course, Arnold knows a thing or two about coaching the national side. He took the Olyroos to Beijing and was assistant to Guus Hiddink and Pim Verbeek at consecutive World Cups. The stain on his CV though is his time in charge at the 2007 Asian Cup.

“I was forced into an interim position [the FFA thought it was about to secure Dick Advocaat] and told to keep the playing group happy. After Guus Hiddink, that was impossible. There’s no one out there that probably feels more for Ange Postecoglou than I do, because I know exactly what he’s going through.”

From the highs of the 2006 World Cup, Australia have sunk to a new low of 94th in the world. “The FFA were warned. I warned them seven years ago,” he says.

So what’s gone wrong? He puts it down to a change of focus at the Australian Institute of Sport after Ron Smith departed. Smith, who now works for Mike Mulvey at the Brisbane Roar, elevated athleticism above technical skills.

“We didn’t get lucky [with the golden generation]. He built the golden generation. They could run all day and that was his philosophy,” says Arnold. “If you look at the World Cup that just went by, the most athletic teams were the ones who were the best. Teams that can back up every three or four days. Every German player that won that World Cup could have represented Germany in track and field at the Olympics.

“We’ve probably gone away from that. We’ve taken our eye off the ball.”

Hard work, good fun and a meritocratic team with a strong local flavour. It’s the Arnie way. Having gone from the most-stable coaching role in the competition to the least-secure though, he may not have long to roll out his changes.

For now at least, it’s working. Sydney are undefeated and second – but level on points with Melbourne Victory – on the A-League ladder. In stark contrast to last season, they’ve easily accounted for Western Sydney, Brisbane and Central Coast. They even helped send David Villa from these shores without a win.

All that, and the season is just four rounds old.