Full name | St George Football Club |
---|---|
Nickname(s) | Saints |
Founded | 1950 |
Ground | St George Stadium |
Capacity | 15,000 |
President | Ross Gardiner |
Head Coach | Terry Palapanis |
League | NPLNSW2 |
Website | Club home page |
St George FC, commonly called St George Saints or just Saints, is a semi-professional Australian association football club based in the St George district in the south of Sydney, New South Wales. The club was founded by Hungarian immigrants in 1957 as Budapest Club and by 1965 was renamed to St. George-Budapest Club.
One of the top clubs of Australia from the 1960s to the 1980s. St George currently competes in the second-highest tier of Australian association football, the NSW National Premier League Men's 1 after achieving promotion in 2013 from the NSW Super League. Their home ground is the St George Stadium.The club returned in 2015 to the PS4 NPLNSW Men's 2 competition.
The club was formed shortly after the end of World War II by Hungarian Immigrants and was originally known as Budapest. In the 1960s, led by pioneering football administrator Alex Pongrass, it became one of the first ethnic clubs in NSW to search for a district to call home and it chose the St George district. It later became known as St George-Budapest before shortening its name to St George some years later. They opened a licensed club, named Soccer House, in the suburb of Mortdale in 1968. In 1969 Frank Arok, the first full-time coach in Australia was appointed, serving two stints as coach, the last ending in 1983 when he left to coach the Socceroos. In between Arok's two stints as coach, Rale Rasic was coach, coaching the club at the same time as he was coaching the Socceroos. In 1972 the club was invited to an international club tournament in Tokyo, Japan. It won and remained the highest ever international achievement by an Australian club side, until the Western Sydney Wanderers 2014 victory in the Asian Champions League.