MELBOURNE, Australia -- Of course it was South Melbourne.
A club from outside the A-League finally breaking through and winning the Australia Cup had been coming. This year marked the third final, and the second in a row, in which a team from the National Premier Leagues (NPL) had reached the decider, and "Cupset" wins had gone from a trickle to a torrent in recent iterations. Driven by a wave of austerity that has hit the competition since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and helped by increasing professionalism from below and the shift of the Cup to an in-NPL-season model, the gap between the A-League and the tiers below has never been smaller. The noisy neighbours were peeking ever more boldly over the top-flight's fence each campaign.
But even if common sense suggested it was going to happen at some point, that it was South Melbourne that were the ones to do it felt apt. Hellas' banishment from the top-flight over two decades ago and the ill-feeling and undiminished ambition that lingered were covered exhaustively in the build-up to Saturday's decider, ensuring that when South Melbourne's history-making penalty shootout win over Melbourne Victory was secured, the resonance of what had been accomplished was only magnified.
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Few clubs can claim to have dragged Australian football further from the ring-fenced outlook that accompanied the exile South Melbourne and clubs like them experienced 22 years ago, nor pressed the case for what these clubs can contribute in the future. They're not the only ones to have done so, of course, and one mustn't allow hyperbole to overshadow a collective effort staged across many years by clubs from across Australia, but few observers would object to the sentiment that, yeah, of course the footballing gods would pick Hellas as the ones to do this.
Just what the full ramifications from Saturday cannot be known yet. But tangibly, in winning the Cup, South has secured qualification for next year's Asian Champions League Two competition. And while we can't know what the AFC will have to say about it, that means that, in theory and despite being locked out of the top-flight, they'll be representing Australia at both an Asian and Oceanian level in 2027, with their second OFC Pro League campaign set to kick off next January.
Nearly 60 games into their 2026 campaign -- more than double that of an A-League Men regular season -- South Melbourne will need to transition from celebrating winning the Australia Cup to preparing to defend their Australian Championship crown, with a game against rising NPL NSW side Sutherland Sharks FC first up next Saturday. They'll also need to let us know who will be in the dugout at Seymour Shaw, with coach Siniša Cohadzić heavily linked with Avondale and batting away questions on his future on Saturday evening. It's a good thing that South players don't consider themselves to be semiprofessionals, because their workload certainly isn't.
Much of the focus, understandably, will be on South Melbourne's longstanding ambitions to secure entry to the A-League. Cohadzić and his players are adamant that the club is ready to make that leap and, when examining everything that the club has done over the past 18 months and their ready-made ability to field both A-League Men and A-League Women teams, it's hard to argue they could do much more from a footballing side of things to justify it. There's even a painless timeline: South women could enter the A-League Women in 2027-28, removing byes from the competition, before the men could join in 2028-29 alongside Canberra United, avoiding byes there too.
Yet in the A-League, growth strategies aren't governed by what happens on the pitch. In fact, one of the defining features of the competition is that its expansion priorities have been dictated by market sizes, growth corridors, TV ratings, and various other metrics that probably sound very important to financial types. Australian Professional Leagues (APL) chief executive Steve Rosich has been taking a deliberately reserved tone on expansion ahead of the new A-League year, placing focus on existing franchises rather than adding more teams.
There are also questions about South's ability to pay what's believed to be a $15 million asking price for a licence to the top flight, as well as what type of "growth metrics" they'd be able to offer the league over new entities in new markets.
But if the APL were to look at the scenes on Saturday night and decide South Melbourne weren't worth adding to the A-League, they'd be sending a very clear signal. It doesn't matter what you do on the field; it doesn't matter if you create one of the most memorable atmospheres in the history of the domestic game and set an AAMI Park and Australia Cup record with a sell-out crowd of 29,911; and it doesn't matter if you make people feel things, good and bad, and make them care if you win or lose. Computer says no.
For a league that is desperately trying to build emotional resonance and establish an authentic identity after a torrid half-decade, whose metric-driven expansion efforts are, at best, hit and miss, can they look at Saturday night and think they're in a position to turn it down?
What good is it to know the price of everything, and the value of nothing?
"We have the facilities. We have the fans. We have the talent, we have the squad," goal-scorer Max Mikkola said. "I don't know what more we can do to put our name forward for the A-League."
However, at a time when the game, on all fronts, is trying to chart a path forward -- 2026 also looms as a huge year for the Australian Championship, with Football Australia urgently needing to lay out a path forward for its growth -- the ramifications of Saturday shouldn't just stop at South's A-League ambitions.
While Hellas broke one glass ceiling in securing the Australia Cup, the one that separates the A-League from the rest of the Australian system -- the lack of promotion and relegation -- remains in place. And even if the APL were to relent and admit South to their ranks, they wouldn't be breaking their way in in that scenario, as much as being begrudgingly allowed in.
This "problem" for the A-League, however, is not going to go away. South Melbourne are the first team from outside the A-League to win the Australia Cup, but they won't be the last. And at a time when ambition has never been higher across the NPL, Hellas won't be the last to put together a compelling case as to why they should be in the top flight. What happens, then, when we're back here in five, 10, or 15 years, with an APIA Leichardt, Gold Coast Knights, Preston Lions, MetroStars, Adelaide City, Lions FC, Marconi, Melbourne Knights, Bayswater City, or anyone else?
Perhaps an apt way to look at it would be to say that, in winning the Australia Cup, South Melbourne have made the biggest crack yet in Australian football's glass ceiling. It's still in place, but everyone can see there's a fracture. You could put another layer of glass down to consolidate things, but that wouldn't prevent the new crack from being visible.
South Melbourne's win in the Australia Cup final has reiterated that not only is there life outside the A-League, but there's strength. A strength that can be harnessed by the top-flight for the betterment of all. And while nobody's expecting or demanding a completely laissez-faire opening of the pyramid tomorrow -- standards and requirements for ascension exist in every league all over the world -- it shows the merit in finding a way for the 766 other clubs that started this year's Australia Cup to be all they can be, contribute all they can contribute, too.