Leaving behind one of the most controversial periods in the club’s long history, Perth Glory — the oldest club in the A League — is bringing its Western Australian fan base along for a wild ride to the top, more than doubling its crowd numbers to 14,500 and meeting targets to become Australia’s greatest football club, on and off the field.
A new era in the club’s long, rich history
The man steering the club to its new direction is CEO Peter Filopoulos. He joined Perth Glory 12 months ago, bringing two decades of sports experience to the role. One of Peter’s first actions was to unveil an inspirational new four-year plan: ‘The Perth Glory Way’.
“We’ve set ourselves a vision and a direction of where we want to head and what sort of milestones we want to achieve,” says Peter. “The vision for the club is to be the leading football club in Australia, on and off the field. We also want to be a club that all Western Australians are proud of. We are going achieve that through The Perth Glory Way — promoting an exciting environment by making bigger things happen on and off the pitch so our people are successful and bound for glory.”
Peter is not intimidated by the lofty targets he’s set, because he is inspired by the people around him — including his leadership team, the coaching staff, support staff, and the entire playing squad.
If you’re going to be involved in a club you need to be passionate. You need to be strategic and you need to be visionary. My biggest job every day is to unite everybody on the one path, aiming for the one outcome. I think we’ve got that now. What we’ve been able to do is really put a strategy together that incorporates everybody so that we can all strive for something, and we all know what we are aiming for and what the target is. Some of the goals are aspirational, but I don’t mind aspirational because we have more of a chance of getting to those goals than if we didn’t have any aspirations at all.
Sourcing talent close to home
Next year, Perth Glory will be playing to its greatest strength: local talent. Out of a playing squad of 23 players, 14 will be Western Australian players who have been picked and developed within the club’s home state.
“There’s no other club that can boast as many home-grown players as we do. And given our focus on the Western Australian community, I think that’s a major advantage over our competitors. We are developing talent from the grassroots and getting them up through the categories and into our first team. And these players are all of an outstanding quality.”
For the Perth Glory fans
Being committed to developing talent within Western Australia is also about making a commitment to winning back the loyal Perth Glory fans who were disheartened before Peter came in to clear up a salary cap scandal, which saw the club disqualified from the finals during a winning season.
“We worked hard to improve the sentiment and we were able to win back a lot of our fans. We’ve been able to instill belief back into our fans and it is resonating and even continues through the off-season. Our membership campaign has started off strongly and already, if you look at the same time as last year, our membership numbers have doubled,” Peter says.
Perth Glory Football Club key facts
- Company name: Perth Glory Football Club
- Headquarters: Perth, Australia
- Key partnerships: QBE Insurance is a principal partner
- Industry: Sport & Recreation
