Underdog Stories / Football history

Why Was Melbourne Croatia Renamed Melbourne Knights?

Why was Melbourne Croatia renamed Melbourne Knights? A 1993 federation rule against ethnic names forced it, and the club's identity outlasted it.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · August 17, 2026

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Melbourne Reds. Melbourne Central. Melbourne Red Knights. Melbourne Knights.

That was the shortlist. In August 1993 the Australian Soccer Federation made one of the country's best clubs write a list of new names for itself, like a kid told to pick a punishment.

Melbourne Croatia was renamed Melbourne Knights because the federation was trying to remove ethnic names from the National Soccer League. The club had already trimmed itself to Melbourne CSC. The federation ruled that was still too Croatian, so a new name had to go on the fixture list.

Why was Melbourne Croatia renamed Melbourne Knights in 1993?

Chris Horwedel sets it up on Why We Love This Club in the episode "Melbourne Knights FC — The Club Australia Tried to Rename". Administrators wanted the crowds, grounds and volunteers that migrant communities supplied. They also worried that the identities behind those crowds were holding the sport back from the mainstream.

Horwedel says the worry wasn't invented from nothing. Australian soccer had seen crowd trouble and political rows with roots outside Australia. The fix, in his words, was blunt. It treated heritage itself as the problem, even though heritage had supplied the money and the labour.

The club did not go quietly. One account says it threatened to pull out of the NSL if the federation didn't back down. It lost that argument. The change took effect before the 1993-94 season.

The new name has a back-story. According to a 2023 academic paper, one committee member suggested "Reds", but younger committee members refused because of the word's pro-communist associations. That makes sense. Many of the club's supporters had left Yugoslavia, and "Reds" was not a name they wanted.

The same paper says the club treated "Knights" as an acronym for a Croatian phrase meaning roughly "football club where Croatians battle with heart". I'd call that a very good story. Nobody has produced a signed letter showing it was planned in 1993, and a backronym is easy to make up afterwards. Even so, it is the kind of joke a club would make at a federation's expense.

Who started the club, and why did it matter so much?

Go back to April 1953. A small group of Croatian immigrants in a weatherboard house in Footscray decided their occasional social games should be a proper club. They called it Soccer Klub Croatia.

They had little money and not many players. So they recruited wherever they could. They went to Geelong and to the migrant camp at Bonegilla, and they met arriving ships at Station Pier. Horwedel describes the scouting as wonderfully efficient. They asked two questions: "Where are you from?" and "Can you play?" A convincing answer to the second, he says, might put you in a team before you'd finished unpacking.

A church service blessed the club on 9 April 1953, and the first game followed the next day.

The football was only half of it. The club gave newcomers food, language, music and people who understood what they'd left. Croatia was then a republic inside socialist Yugoslavia, so a Croatian badge could mean culture, politics, homesickness and hope all at once. Horwedel calls it a public claim that you could build a life in Australia without dissolving the identity you brought with you.

How good were the Knights when the name was taken away?

Very good, and a bit unlucky. The club joined the National Soccer League in 1984 after years of lobbying. By 1993 it had lost two grand finals on penalties, to South Melbourne in 1991 and to Adelaide City in 1992. The first, a 1-1 draw before 23,318 people, was a Victorian record for a national league crowd.

Horwedel's line is that three grand final defeats in four seasons can make a club feel cursed. The third came in 1994, a 1-0 loss to Adelaide again.

Then came Mark Viduka. At 18 he scored 17 goals in 20 appearances and won the Johnny Warren Medal. He took the player of the year, under-21 player of the year and Golden Boot awards in both 1994 and 1995.

Did the Knights win the NSL under the new name?

“On paper, Melbourne Croatia became Melbourne Knights. In the stands, Croatia never left.”
— Chris Horwedel, on Why We Love This Club

They did, twice, which is the funniest part of the whole story. The federation's cleaned-up name came with a pair of national titles.

The 1995 grand final was played at Hindmarsh Stadium in Adelaide on 7 May 1995. Andrew Marth and Joe Spiteri scored in a 2-0 win, and the Knights became the first team to win the NSL treble. That meant the championship, the minor premiership and the cup.

Viduka left for Dinamo Zagreb. The Knights won again without him. In 1996 they beat Marconi 2-1 at Olympic Park, with Marth and Adrian Cervinski scoring. Nine of that side's players went on to play for Australia. Josip Simunic was not one of them. He played for Croatia at two World Cups.

Viduka went further than anyone. He played for Celtic, Leeds United, Middlesbrough and Newcastle United, and he captained Australia at the 2006 World Cup. Horwedel points out the irony. One of Australia's best-known footballers came from a club the national administrators thought not Australian enough.

The renaming also didn't stop at the name. For 1996-97 the federation pushed further and had clubs remove ethnic symbols from their emblems, so the Knights lost the Croatian coat of arms they'd carried since 1953. The checkerboard stayed on the shield held by the knight on the badge.

Why did the Knights build Summer Street themselves?

The club had been renting, and the rent kept rising. Other sites fell through. So the club moved to its home in Sunshine North in 1989 after buying the Summer Street land in 1984. Horwedel says it sold land elsewhere to help pay the loan, then ran a fundraising drive that lasted more than a decade.

The result is a 12-acre complex with three pitches and room for about 15,000. It is now sponsored as TOPSET Stadium. Donations and volunteer labour from the local community built most of it.

In 1990, more than 12,500 people packed the unfinished ground for a friendly against Hajduk Split. Horwedel's description is hard to improve on. The crowd was watching a visitor from Croatia inside a stadium Australian Croatians were building for themselves.

This matters for the rename because the club owns the ground. It is a member-owned, not-for-profit organisation, run on one member, one vote. A federation can change what goes on a fixture list. It can't easily change what a community has poured concrete on.

Did Melbourne Knights ever get the Croatia name back?

In a way, yes. The policy came back in 2014 as a national club policy on names, colours and symbols. It was widely criticised as discriminatory, and it stopped the Knights using the Melbourne Croatia social club as their FFA Cup shirt sponsor. Football Australia dropped it in 2019 after clubs and supporters argued it was erasing the communities that built the game.

Three years later, the club announced that the name Melbourne Croatia would be back on the front of its playing kits for the first time since 1993. The sponsor was the Melbourne Croatia Soccer Club, the community body behind the sporting side. Horwedel's summary is neat. The old name moved from the badge to the crowd, then from the crowd back onto the shirt.

It also never really left conversation. Inside the community the club is still called Croatia, or Kroatija. Horwedel says the supporters took the letters the federation put on the table and kept the old name and its songs.

Where do Melbourne Knights play now?

The renaming turned out to be a small loss next to what came later. The NSL was disbanded in 2004 to make way for the A-League. The Knights were blocked from the 2004 state league season, spent a year out of competition and lost their whole squad. They came back through the Victorian state system.

According to Horwedel's episode, in 2026 the senior men play semi-professionally in the Victoria Premier League, the second level of the state system. That is a former champion of Australia, two levels below the A-League. There is still no automatic route up. The Australian Championship, a separate national competition, gave its first-round places to other clubs. Entry for the Knights still depends on selection.

Cup football sometimes opens the door for a night. In 2023 the Knights reached the Australia Cup semi-final after two stoppage-time goals beat Heidelberg United 3-2 in the quarter-final. Brisbane Roar won the semi 1-0 at Summer Street. For one evening an A-League side had to come to western Melbourne and play on a ground the fans built.

If you want the story in Horwedel's voice, the episode of Why We Love This Club is the place to start. The shirt, though, tells you most of it. Look at the front.