The Australian Championship a second chance for 'heartbeat' of football

Paul Mavroudis's love affair with football began when he was a little boy.

In the early 90s, he remembers travelling to the old Middle Park Stadium to see his beloved South Melbourne play.

He first became a South Melbourne fan while channel surfing in 1991, when he saw the National Soccer League (NSL) grand final on the ABC.

The team triumphed, beating bitter rivals Melbourne Knights.

The fans were diehard. The colours were bright. It wasn't Aussie rules, he says. It was its own thing.

But it all came to a crashing halt when the NSL ended in 2005.

Overnight, Mr Mavroudis's treasured team no longer had a place in Australian football's top division.

"The whole thing about the club was just surviving," Mr Mavroudis tells the ABC.

"We felt, as South Melbourne fans, that we're in kind of no man's land … and of course, a lot of the rhetoric at the time was that clubs like mine had nothing to offer Australian soccer anymore.

But now, about two decades on from the end of the NSL, a second chance has emerged for fans like Mr Mavroudis.

The inaugural Australian Championship is the first national second division for any football code, including Australian Rules and rugby, in the country.

It is the first step that Football Australia hopes will lead to a sustainable promotion and relegation system.

The new competition will include a total of 16 teams split into four groups, ending in a final series that will conclude in December.

Football Australia CEO Heather Garriock said last month "the Australian Championship is about more than fixtures and results".

New football meets old soccer

Back in 2005, as the A-League formed, fans of the old NSL were reminded that Australian football was entering a new age, or perhaps a new dawn.

It preceded the changing of the game's governing body's official name from Soccer Australia to Football Federation Australia, and soon after, the phrase "from old soccer to new football" was born.

During its inception, a quote attributed to a Melbourne Victory official caused alarm and was later featured in The Death and Life of Australian Soccer by Joe Gorman.

"The days of wogball and the pumpkin seed eaters are over," the quote reads.

Australian football's governing body is now called Football Australia.

And the game is embarking on a new era, but this time it includes some of the oldest football clubs in the country.

One of the clubs is Preston Lions, whose now-coach Louie Acevski played for in the 1990s.

He hopes to return the club to its glory days before it was relegated from the NSL.

He started going to games with his father during the old NSL when he was about five.

The club became a hub for Melbourne's Macedonian community, he says.

It was the meeting ground to see friends and family "you wouldn't regularly see" otherwise.

"They've always tried to, how should I say, minimise the ethnicity in football, but we shouldn't be minimising anything in football," Mr Acevski tells the ABC.

"If it's not a culture, if it's not a nationality, it's a region from where you're from, where you've grown up, where you've lived your whole life.

"I went to primary school, I went to high school there, or that's where I grew up … There's a meaning behind it."

He later played for the club, but only after Preston was out of the old NSL and playing in Victorian state league football.

"Once the club got relegated from the National Soccer League, a void, a massive hole was left in my system," he says.

Mr Acevski sees the new Australian Championship as an opportunity for a second chance.

He gets goosebumps thinking about walking out for the first home game.

Hope and uncertainty about the game's future

There is no road map announced for when the Australian Championship will include promotion and relegation in line with the A-League Men.

But that doesn't matter so much for Wests APIA FC striker Jack Stewart.

Five years ago, he thought his chance at making it in professional football was over.

The former Western Sydney Wanderers and Sydney FC youth player had packed his bags and travelled to the US for an opportunity to make it to Major League Soccer (MLS) through the college system.

Then the world shut down during the coronavirus pandemic.

"Everything was kind of closed, so I just thought I'm going to have to kind of start again."

Half a decade on, the now-high school teacher still longs for a grander stage.

The 27-year-old says he's gotten glimpses of it playing with Wests APIA in the Australia Cup, but the new second division feels different.

"This is a totally new thing," he says.

"Some of my mates are starting to have their own family, so their football is starting to slow down.

"I don't have that long either … I've got to enjoy these moments because you don't know how many chances I'm going to get at this."

In South Melbourne, Mr Mavroudis is still afraid to have hope this new second division may see his club return to a bigger stage.

It feels dangerous.

"It makes you endure all the other miseries again, that's the frightening thing about it.

"You get used to something and then something just comes up and it's changed."

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