The first fully Greek football team in Australia is now official!
Olympiacos Piraeus, the team that has known the most success in Greece and is widely regarded to stand among the European elite, is now coming to Melbourne and will be offering young players the opportunity to showcase their skills and participate in top level competitions.
The agreement will also see the formation of a new senior level team taking part in the Victorian State Leagues from the upcoming season, tentatively titled “Glenroy Lions”.
The club is planning to host a special launch event at the Coburg Town Hall on the 15 December, with some former stars of Olympiacos attending the event, such as 98′-99′ hero Sinisa Gogic, veteran goalkeeper Panagiotis Kelesidis and Christos Kaltsas.
The official announcement was made a few weeks ago, with the agreement being signed between the club’s academy officials and the people behind the highly successful Melbourne youth academy program, Mr Frank Michalopoulos and Mr Steve Papadopoulos.
The two men spoke to Neos Kosmos regarding this agreement and how it came to pass and also for their future aspirations now that the Olympiacos academies have been established in Melbourne.
“The program we have worked on has been going for 14 years”, says Mr Michalopoulos.
“It went as far as the A-League when one of our players, Wade Dekker, made it into the Melbourne City youth, so we knew it was good enough for there. It was only natural then to test it overseas.
Having played there myself back in ’88 for Kalamata, I visited some former teammates who are now coaches and told them what we were doing.
I was trying to test our program on the European level, to see if it was good enough or, if not, what we needed to tweak.
As I was talking to a couple of my contacts there, they said ‘these are pretty good results you’ve achieved, you should go and talk to Olympiacos about it’.
I was willing to keep that as a third option but then I thought ‘let’s do it’. I was mainly interested in establishing a senior player relationship with them.
They had a look at it and reviewed it and loved the fact that we’re running it five days a week all year. I don’t think they would’ve been interested if we weren’t.
They then extended an invitation towards us to become part of their international school network with the ability to recommend 5-15 year-old’s to be assessed.
Which then is great because it gives us the opportunity to send over anyone at that age once we decide they’re ready for it.”
Young players who attend the academy’s programs (there are two options: five days and only Saturday) will have eyes of scouts from all over the world watching them very closely, as the Olympiacos in Melbourne pathway will associate with some of the top-level European clubs, such as Bayern Munich, Sevilla and Borussia Dortmund.
Yet it may take some time to reach that level, according to Michalopoulos:
“Realistically, our players profiles are not good enough for those clubs. If you want to play there as a 19-year-old, you need to have minimum national team experience.
Even Olympiacos told me that. So what we tend to do when we see a player that doesn’t have that is to pass them on to our sister clubs. Get them to increase their profile, have a look at them and bring them back.
These clubs invest so much money in their brand and they want to protect it in case they’re wrong.
Right now, Greece is a hot spot for football, because it allows an NPL player or any junior player that’s been developed properly to showcase their ability in a senior environment.
If they can sustain that and reach the starting eleven, they then become a European profile player.”
As for the club itself, while it is still in its infancy, the name is getting out there and people are slowly becoming aware of it says PR manager Steve Papadopoulos:
“We’ve had a couple of people sign up for the scout camps, which is great, but we seem to be getting a lot of traction with our social media.
Facebook is just one of our pages and a recent post got over 160 likes. Instagram has about 30 and all I’ve been doing is using the club’s logo.
And we’re starting to see players now actually using our links in their bios. So we’re seeing this now which is very exciting.
I’m not expecting this to blow up overnight but the fact that we’re seeing the people share our news items, it’s quite promising!”
In working with the people from Olympiacos in Greece and everyone at the Rentis training facilities, there’s one thing Mr Michalopoulos came to understand:
“The one word that i heard consistently at Renti was “family”. The whole team, from the cleaner, to the receptionist, to the players, are family, “ikogenia” and now we’ve become part of it.
The one thing that we said to Olympiacos is that our facilities are nowhere near your standards. Before we sign the agreement I need you to know that.
They said ‘we’ll work with you every step of the way. We don’t care where you are’. And it was very pleasing and reassuring to hear those words.”
Along with the pride of being welcomed into this big family however, comes a great sense of responsibility towards Mr Michalopoulos and his associates to produce results worthy of the club’s name.
But he seems to have complete faith in the youth development program: “It has been tested for 14 years, we have full confidence in it, it works. We’ll soon begin to see the results.”
If you want to know more about the club and its programs, you can visit www.olympiacos.com.au