The rise of Auckland FC: Bill Foley, NBA's Steven Adams and Golden Knights inspiration

New York Times

21-06-2025

As the owner of several vineyards around the world, Bill Foley knows a thing or two about a successful vintage.
Older vines with deeper roots tend to produce more distinguished, coveted wines. And you've got to be patient. If you nurture the grapes properly, results will follow down the line.
But Foley also has a knack for overturning conventional logic, whether in business or sports.
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So when the billionaire owner of Premier League club AFC Bournemouth launched a new football club in Auckland, New Zealand, a country traditionally dominated by rugby, success might have been considered a long-term dream.
Instead, Auckland FC, which competes in the Australian top flight, won the league stage in its first year at a canter, and only narrowly missed out on lifting the A-League Champions trophy through the play-offs.
Along the way, they made history by smashing a string of records for an expansion team — including the league's highest average attendances, winning its six opening games, and the longest run of clean sheets in Australian national league history. Add to that the highest domestic crowd record for a regular season football match in New Zealand.
It is not the first time Foley's clubs — others are French Ligue 1 side Lorient and Scottish Premier League club Hibernian — have defied expectations. In 2017, he launched a new National Hockey League (NHL) club in, of all places, the Nevada desert.
He caused surprise, and even prompted derision, by vowing that his new team, the Vegas Golden Knights, would lift the Stanley Cup within their first six seasons. But the Golden Knights did it, and although Auckland only just failed to repeat the trick within a single campaign, they appear to have uncorked something special in New Zealand.
'I was totally confident,' says Foley, reflecting on Auckland's audacious debut season. 'We should have won everything.'
There was a defining moment in the play-off semi-final first leg win against Melbourne Victory (the team Brighton owner Tony Bloom has a minority share) when Auckland, winning 1-0 away, launched a counter-attack in which forward Neyder Moreno's shot hit the post, rebounded onto the other post then dropped into the arms of Victory goalkeeper Jack Duncan.
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'I had that sinking feeling of, 'Uh oh, I hope that doesn't come back to haunt us,'' Foley says. 'Of course it did.'
That first leg ended 1-0 — a slim aggregate lead — and in the second leg back on Kiwi soil, the Australians won 2-0 with one of their goals a cruel deflection. The new boys were unlucky, then, in the manner they missed out on ultimate glory. But it was less good fortune than savvy planning and vision that led to their rapid ascent.
The first thing was sensing a weakening in rugby union's grasp on Auckland. Partly due to safety concerns around concussions and injury, but also a complacency, which Auckland FC's chief executive Nick Becker, who was born and bred in the city and played high school rugby, noticed when he returned home after living in England (including working for Manchester City).
Becker was tasked with building Foley's football club from the ground up and used his local knowledge, plus 20 years of experience in the UK, to ensure this venture would work. 'There is a famous rugby club in Auckland called Ponsonby,' he says. 'One of the oldest in New Zealand and effectively an All Black factory.
'When I left to move to England in 2003, it probably had two or three thousand kids playing there. Next door to it is a football club called Western Springs, which then had a handful of kids playing at it, at the most 50.
'When I returned, it had flipped on its head: Western Springs has over 3,000 kids and Ponsonby has 400 at the most. It's a generational shift. Rugby is the national game and I still love it, but it has kind of taken its feet off the pulse of the nation.
'They've done a bad job in connecting with communities while football has grown and grown with the success of the Premier League, La Liga and even MLS with Lionel Messi.'
Becker connected with as many of Auckland's growing list of amateur football clubs as he could, while Foley demanded the same community focus that made the Golden Knights a success.
'In Vegas, we gave tickets to firemen, policemen, first responders, nurses, doctors, lawyers and teachers,' says Foley. 'We did a study that said there were around 150,000 avid hockey fans in Las Vegas all from somewhere else; whether it was Calgary, Minneapolis or Vancouver.
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'We made sure we got involved intimately with the community and there were similarities with Auckland. Vegas is not a hockey town. At first, we got a lot of feedback saying we were crazy, you can't skate on the sand, you can't do this and that. Well, if I'm told I can't do something, then I get really serious about accomplishing it.
'Auckland is a vibrant, multi-cultural city and has more in terms of families. We knew ticket prices had to be fairly accessible and drive traffic to the games, get our players involved with local teams and develop an academy-like structure.'
At their 27,000-seater Go Media stadium, the club have developed a terrace culture. A section of fans have nicknamed themselves The Port, after the city's port area, growing into a noisy mix of locals and British ex-pats, of whom many bring their children to try and emulate the atmosphere of matches back home.
There are also supporters from the city's Latino and Indian communities. Matchdays are family-oriented with an emphasis on keeping supporters at the ground before and after games, based on Foley's experience with U.S. sport.
At one end of the stadium, Auckland have installed a huge inflatable slide which goes down a grassy hill — a big hit with young fans — and next to it is an inland beach area, which is another popular feature with the A-League season running through the Southern Hemisphere summer.
'We have the hardcore fans who sing for 90 minutes, then the family dynamic,' says Becker. 'It's really captured the imagination of Auckland.'
Becker acknowledges that the speed of starting the club in the space of a year was, at times, daunting. 'I arrived back in Auckland in January 2024 and we played our first game 10 months later,' he recalls.
'At that point, all we had was a football director, our head coach and a commercial director, so there were four of us crowded around two desks at an office in one of Bill's other businesses. It was kind of mad how it all came together so well.'
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Foley was in constant contact offering advice and steadying any nerves. As a graduate of U.S. military academy West Point, who had a successful career in his country's air force, he values his clubs' staff as he once did the men who served under him.
'He gave us solid direction,' adds Becker. 'One of the main things he said was: 'You'll go a lot further if you get good people'. So when we hired people across the club, and even players, it wasn't just, 'How good are they?' It was also: 'Are they a good human being?'
'There were nervy times when you're like: 'F***, is this going to work?' Whether it's walking out of boardrooms where they just haven't got it, or missing out on players because they didn't believe in what we wanted to do. It was a real start-up experience — and there are always moments when you question yourself.'
It has helped that Auckland have won so many home games. 'We didn't forget the football side,' says Foley. 'We made sure we had a very competitive team.'
Former Northern Ireland international Terry McFlynn, who had a successful playing career in Australia with Sydney FC and was running Perth Glory's academy, was hired as their director of football. In turn, he recruited his former Sydney team-mate Steve Corica to become Auckland's first-team manager.
The club's popularity has resulted in commercial interest, with 35 deals signed already, including two with ANZ and Anchor, the country's biggest names in banking and commercial dairy, respectively. An embedded TV crew have followed their first season for a documentary out later this year.
There is a boardroom star factor too. As with Bournemouth, where Foley brought Hollywood actor Michael B Jordan on board as an investor, he has compiled a who's who of famous Kiwis: former All Black Ali Williams, AllBirds footwear billionaire Tim Brown, Zuru Toys founder Anna Mowbray, and ex-West Ham defender Winston Reid.
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There is even an NBA star onboard: Houston Rockets centre Steven Adams, who is from New Zealand. And the 31-year-old is not just lending his famous name to the club; he is invested in its success on both levels.
'I was attracted by the group itself,' he says. 'And by the Kiwi sportsmen who are successful, who know how to win, and have had winning experiences. I would say I am a football fan — not necessarily knowledgeable about all the tactics and whatnot, but I appreciate any form of physical expression.'
Adams has been pleased to see his homeland respond so enthusiastically. 'It's been great to see the strong support,' he says. 'There is the sports side, obviously, but there's the whole experience: seeing families and kids out there, enjoying themselves.
'My hope is to win championships and also, the grassroots piece is really important. To create pathways for kids that give them more opportunities for school and their career.'
Curiously, there is an Auckland football team competing back in the U.S. at the moment — but it isn't the one Adams has bought into. Auckland City, who made headlines by losing 10-0 to Bayern Munich on Sunday, are a semi-professional side who are there by virtue of being the champions of Oceania, or winners of the OFC Champions League.
Because they compete in Australia, and Football Australia is affiliated with the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), Auckland FC and Wellington Phoenix cannot take part in the OFC Champions League. So no limelight in his homeland this summer then, but Foley's focus is increasingly laser-like on the sporting part of his business.
'I'm at the stage now of basically limiting most of my public company positions,' he explains. 'I have resigned as chairman of Alight (a health and wealth management company). Then I stepped down as chairman and CEO of Cannae, which is one of the investors in Black Knight Football Club.
'Now I'm the vice chairman and just responsible for football operations. That's all I want to do.'
But after such a remarkable rise, is there a risk Auckland's second season might not live up to the first?
'Now the players have been to the semi-finals, and the group has stayed together, they know what it is like to be there and lose at that stage,' says Becker. 'They won't want that feeling again. The next step is to win it, and that's our motivation for next season.
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'The bigger risk might have been to go through and win it all. Then the motivation for next season would have been a different challenge, but now we have unfinished business.'
The last word goes to Foley, with a smile but also a dash of that old military steel behind his eyes: 'If anyone sits on their laurels, they won't be playing for Auckland FC,' he says.
'Period.'