Melbourne City Head Coach, Aurelio Vidmar, has reflected on his first season in charge, as he looks forward to an exciting 2024/25 campaign.
An exciting opportunity and challenge awaits…
“The reason I’m here is because I totally, 100%, believe in the philosophy. We want to be aggressive going forward, we want to create a lot of chances, we want to win the ball back as quickly as possible,” Vidmar said.
“We also need the help of the fans, the fans have always been there for us and I know potentially at some stages it could’ve been frustrating, you saw our absolute highs and our absolute lows so we’re definitely trying to bridge that gap but we can’t do it without the fans and we need them to help push us back to where we should belong, which is in the top two positions on the ladder.”
City stars re-commit…
“I’m excited to announce that we have extended the contract of Mathew Leckie for an extra two years and also Andrew Nabbout for two years,” Vidmar confirmed.
“Andy’s had a really tough season with two operations on both Achilles, just the other day he started running and jogging and ready to go 100 miles an hour in typical Andy Nabbout style – he should be joining us on the first day of pre-season.
“And obviously Mat, we know what he produced in the past and he produced that in the last four games of the season as well, and we certainly missed that throughout the course of the year.”
Speaking on the contract extensions of Leckie and Nabbout, Melbourne City Director of Football, Michael Petrillo said:
“They bring leadership, they bring experience that’s invaluable, they know what it takes to win because they’ve been here during the period where we’ve been very successful and I think they add enormous value, particularly when we have our youngsters coming in during the next year or two.
They’re going to need those types of people around them to help guide them along the journey to becoming elite players.
On the Club’s success…
“If you look back at the success the Club’s had over the last couple of years, most of those players were here for two to three years, so it’s easy to click your fingers and say everything’s going to happen but unfortunately in football it does take time,” Vidmar said.
We’re in a rush obviously, especially after a season that we’ve had, just popping into the six is unacceptable for us.
“We had lots of ups and downs through the course of the season, we had some great games and played some great football but then we had some games which were below par, and that’s something that we really want to fix going into next season.”
