Full name | Melbourne City Football Club |
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Nickname(s) | City, Heart |
Short name | MCFC |
Founded | 12 June 2009 | , as Melbourne Heart
Ground | AAMI Park |
Capacity | 30,050 |
Owner | City Football Group |
Chairman | Khaldoon Al Mubarak |
Manager | Michael Valkanis |
League | A-League |
2016–17 | A-League, 4th |
Website | Club home page |
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Football (Men's) | Football Reserves (Men's) | |
Football Youth (Men's) | Football (Women's) |
Melbourne City Football Club is an Australian professional soccer club based in Melbourne, Victoria. It competes in the country's premier competition, the A-League, under licence from Football Federation Australia.
Founded in 2009 as Melbourne Heart, the club competed under that name from its inaugural 2010–11 season until it was acquired and subsequently rebranded in mid-2014 by the City Football Group, in partnership with Holding M.S. Australia. In August 2015, City Football Group bought out the Holding M.S. Australia consortium to acquire 100% ownership of the club.
The club is run from the City Football Academy, a facility based at Melbourne's La Trobe University. The club plays home matches at Melbourne Rectangular Stadium, commercially known as AAMI Park, a 30,050 seat multi-use venue in Melbourne's City Centre. The club also has an affiliated youth team which competes in the National Youth League, a NPL team which competes in the National Premier Leagues and a senior women's team which competes in the W-League.
After the dissolution of the National Soccer League in 2003, brought about by the Crawford Report, plans were drawn up for a new revamped national competition to begin the following season. Despite the calls for the new football competition to feature two clubs from Melbourne, in 2004 Football Federation Australia, opting for a "one city, one team" policy, announced that the Melbourne Victory had won the licence to be the only Melbourne club to compete in the new national competition, known as the A-League. A 5-year moratorium was also established preventing any other expansion sides from the eight original A-league teams' areas entering the competition until the 2010–11 season, allowing Victory five seasons to establish itself in the Melbourne market.