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While Alessandro Del Piero was perhaps the most watchable player in the league for the last two seasons, the collective was less impressive, swinging from the sublime to the bleak with no seeming ability to swing back the other way. At times they were amusingly bad. At other times, they destroyed football.
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Last season
A-League: 5th
Finals: 2-1 Elimination Final loss against Melbourne Victory
Started slow and bordered on competency towards the end of the season, scraping a finals spot only to fall at the first hurdle, despite the best efforts of Alessandro Del Piero and the 25 other players who weren't Alessandro Del Piero.
They'll win the league because...
They're Sydney FC, damn it. They've signed three international strikers, have Graham "Pedigree" Arnold at the helm and have been relieved of the undying duty to pass to Del Piero at every opportunity. Everything Sydney did went through the Italian last season and among the goals, he had a tendency to slow their play down where faster transitions were needed. Arnold has brought in Bernie Ibini, on loan from Shanghai East Asia, for wide pace, Shane Smeltz and Alex Brosque for forward depth and Austria captain Marc Janko to fill the position of team European in Del Piero's absence, and now, if you squint your eyes, Sydney looks capable of winning as many matches as any other team in the competition. Isn't that what you need to take out the A-League?
They'll be cellar dwellers because...
They're Sydney FC, damn it. Last season, when Del Piero wasn't scoring goals and looking good doing it, Sydney was uninspired and uninspiring. They haven't been adverse to playing some seriously soul-destroying football over the last couple of years and they seem to have finally learned that bad football usually begets bad results. Heads dropped and attendances followed suit, dipping to as low as 10,000 when the Wanderers weren't visiting. They should be challenging for the league year in, year out, but when a crisis sets in at Sydney, it usually doesn't disappear until something big happens; hitting the bottom of the table seemed to do it last season. The first four weeks of the season will be crucial to the re-shaped squad's confidence, and a failure to make an impact in that time could send Sydney into a spin.
Talk around the water cooler... look smart in front of your colleagues with this valuable piece of information.
There's no "i" in "team," and there's also no "i" in Sydney. There's no "i" in football, either, but I could go on about words that don't have the letter "i" in them for ages – the point is that Sydney are going to look very different this season. With Del Piero gone and a swathe of internationals flown in from exotic locations like Saudi Arabia and Perth, a greater emphasis on using all 10 outfield players should see a return to a pre-2011 brand of football with less individual brilliance, but more collective swagger. However, if Sydney can't bring sexy football to the pitch, you can always sit back and imagine Graham Arnold stripped down and oiled up, glistening in the sun as move after move breaks down in midfield – it's sexy football all the same, just not as we know it.
The off-season brought...
Nine wins from 12 games, and with them an optimism that only pre-season success can dish out – Sydney's first four games, against Melbourne City, the Wanderers, Brisbane Roar and the Central Coast Mariners, will test an impressive off-season against reality. It also brought, as mentioned, three shiny new strikers and the exciting left back Alex Gersbach to the side, plus Bernie Ibini – they're not wanting for attacking players. They managed a weird 3-1 win over West Ham in Wellington, overcame Melbourne Victory in extra time in the FFA Cup and took out the Townsville Football Cup (they've wanted that one for years). It's pre-season – I'm not sure how much you can really take from it.
Key player
Can I say Graham Arnold? Sydney's indestructible reliance on one player over the last two seasons limited much of their play to getting Del Piero on the ball, then standing back, but they can't do that now. You can blame just about everyone for that tacticl Del Piero grew visibly frustrated when he didn't have possession, everyone else panicked while trying to give it to him, Frank Farina shook his head on the sideline and things fell apart. Arnold floundered in Japan and will be keen to rebuild his reputation by taking charge of a big team with a few reputation issues of its own. The chance to come straight back into the A-League, with one of the better squads too, isn't one he'll take for granted, and Arnold will be keen to turn Sydney into the force it should always have been with all kinds of tactics, and substitutions, and motivation – y'know, managerial stuff.
So that picking Arnold doesn't feel like too much of a cop-out, it's not unimaginable that Bernie Ibini could be instrumental to Sydney's success. He's in line to debut for the Socceroos later this week and will be driven by the opportunity to sneak into Ange Postecoglou's Asian Cup squad with a strong start to the season. He's still raw, like Tommy Oar used to be, but he's edging towards the age where you can tell if he's doomed to fall into a perma-raw state of under-development – a bit like Tommy Oar today – or he can become more than just someone fast to aim at on the wing. In a sense, Ibini epitomises a new Sydney FC: young, exciting and full of potential; the right kind of encouragement from Arnold will be key to the development of both individual and team.
One to watch
Nicky Carle, the perennial midfield prodigy who seems to have been 27 for almost a decade but is actually 32, and in 2006 was in the kind of stellar form that saw him miss out on lifting the World Cup by only four wins, a starting spot, and a place in Guus Hiddink's squad, could be set for a vintage year. One of the stars of the fledging A-League, he'll be sliding around behind perhaps the strongest forward line in the competition and will be hoping to impress as a creative replacement for Del Piero after things went awry under Frank Farina towards the back end of last season. Whether we see something near to a return to 2006-07 Nicky Carle playing well, or 2006-07 Nicky Carle playing badly, expect him to be entertaining in one form or another.
Full squad list
1. Ivan NECEVSKI (GK), 2. Sebastian RYALL, 3. Sasa OGNENOVSKI (C), 4. Pedj BOJIC, 5. Matthew JURMAN, 6. Nikola PETKOVIC, 7. Corey GAMEIRO, 8. Milos DIMITRIJEVIC, 9. Shane SMELTZ, 11. Bernie IBINI-ISEI, 12. Hagi GLIGOR, 13. Alex GERSBACH, 14. Alex BROSQUE, 16. Chris NAUMOFF, 17. Terry Antonis, 18. Peter TRIANTIS, 19. Nick Carle, 20. Vedran JANJETOVIC (GK), 21. Marc JANKO, 22. Ali ABBAS, 23. Rhyan GRANT, 30. Anthony BOUZANIS (GK)