Heading into Friday night’s historic Isuzu UTE A-League Elimination Final, Western United head coach John Aloisi sits down with aleagues.com.au for an in-depth chat that covers living away from family, fatherhood, weekly advice from his father, perception and the future.
Sitting down with John Aloisi inside a quiet room that overlooks Ironbark Fields as groundsmen prepare the pitch markings for Friday night’s blockbuster, the topic of family and fatherhood is discussed.
There is John Aloisi the coach – an icon of Australian football – the man who scored that penalty to end 32 years of pain for the Socceroos and Aussie fans.
There is also John Aloisi the husband and dad.
“Family is everything” to him.
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But for the past three-and-a-half years, the Western United head coach has been away from his three daughters in Brisbane, where they have resided since his Roar coaching days. Up until recently, Aloisi’s wife Angela had also been living up north.
“It’s not easy, because we’re a close family, and you want to spend that time with them as well,” Aloisi told aleagues.com.au ahead of the Elimination Final against Adelaide United – Western’s first Isuzu UTE A-League finals fixture at Ironbark Fields.
“My wife has been through ups, downs, good, bad times, and she’s been really supportive, and the girls are the same, even though we’re not there together every day, they still will FaceTime.”
It was only in January that Aloisi’s wife moved back down to Melbourne.
Angela and the couple’s three daughters – who were all born in Spain – had been settled in Victoria during Aloisi’s time in charge of Melbourne Heart (now known as Melbourne City) before making the move to Brisbane when Aloisi took the Roar role.
With the kids still in school at the time of his Western United appointment in 2021, they could not make the move again down south.
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“It has been a massive, massive help for me because sometimes talking on the phone is not the same as talking face to face. She can actually see if I need to be left alone or if I need some sort of support,” the 49-year-old said in the midst of a history-making season with Western.
“It’s the same with her, what she might be going through. I don’t want to be too selfish and go, it’s all about me. It’s also she has things going on with the kids, and then I can actually be there to support her and that does take my mind a little bit off of football.
“Because if not, you can actually be thinking 24/7 about football, and sometimes you just need to switch off.”
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With Angela in Melbourne, she’s even be able to influence Aloisi’s football in Tarneit.
“You know what, she’s very good,” he said. “She’s watched so much football over the years that she can see if someone’s feeling good, confident, and sometimes I can bounce off her.
“She doesn’t watch a lot of the games on TV because she reckons gets too nervous watching it on TV, but when she comes to a live game, after the game I can actually discuss football with her.
“Sometimes I’ll find myself in front of the computer, and I’ll say, come and have a look at this. Or I’ll be watching football on TV and I’ll go have a look at this. She knows enough about it to sometimes, doesn’t necessarily give me tactical advice, but sometimes about individuals or whatever, and in how they might be feeling in certain situations, because she remembers how I felt.”
As a father of three daughters – or what people commonly refer to as a Girl Dad in 2025, the former Australia international’s eyes glisten when talking about his children.
Fatherhood has also shaped Aloisi’s coaching style.
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“What it has taught me a lot is that I’ve got three girls all virtually being brought up the same, but you have to talk and deal with all of them differently,” Aloisi said.
“You still have your, we call them behaviour guidelines, because that’s what I call them in a sporting and team environment.
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“We’ve got our guidelines, ‘girls, we want you home like this time, or girls, this or whatever’ but they all have to be treated a little bit different, because they’re different, and so that helps me when I’m coaching.
“I’m treating everyone as they’re part of my family but I know I have to treat each one of them differently because they’re not all the same. So being a dad does help you a lot with that side of things.
“And the emotional connection that I have with them really teaches the emotional intelligence that you have to understand what people might be going through in their life, because at the end of the day I’m a coach and yes, I need to make coaching decisions which are really important.
“Sometimes tough decisions that people might not understand, but that’s always for the best of the team or for the best of the club. But also, I know they’re human beings. I know they’re people just like I am. They might not always understand, and I totally get it it’s never anything personal against anyone.”
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Family is a common theme throughout the interview. Aloisi’s has left their mark on him as a human and as a coach.
Another example being his father Rocky – a prominent figure in South Australian football having coached the likes of Adelaide City and Campbelltown City.
Rocky is a mentor, coach and father. He also speaks to John after every game.
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“I get a lot of feedback from my dad, sometimes negative. Sometimes he’s brutal,” Aloisi smiled.
“He coached a lot of years. He’s run a business too, so he knows how to lead people in his way. So he can sometimes see certain things that maybe I might not be able to.
“He’s very honest in what he says and then sometimes you have to also understand that he’s seeing it from afar. Sometimes it’s a different voice and I know that he understands the game.
“He’s really enjoyed this season, probably the most out of all the seasons that he’s watched me coach or even play, because he just senses that with this young group, the energy they’re bringing, and what they’re doing he just loves watching it, but he also can be quite direct.”
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In this in-depth chat, the conversation then turns to belief and perception.
Western United are preparing for their first finals game since winning the 2022 Isuzu UTE A-League Championship.
That was Aloisi’s first season after three years in the coaching wilderness. It was also the Green and Black’s maiden title in their first ever Grand Final appearance just three years after the club launched.
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Yet, it could be said that Aloisi is still underrated. Unlike some of his counterparts, the former Osasuna, Alaves and Portsmouth striker goes under the radar as a coaching prospect in Australia.
Is it perception?
“I don’t know what the perception is of me, but the perception I think is that no one talks about tactically or how my teams play, or whatever else. No no one ever mentions that,” Aloisi said.
“I know that tactically, I’ve got my teams in a certain way to play a certain style, and it’s very clear.
“Because I don’t always go on about it or talk about it, that’s just not who I am, people don’t talk about the tactical side. People sometimes see me as – and it’s not bad thing at all – is that is he too nice? Is he too nice to be a coach, or is he a nice guy? I don’t know.
“That’s what maybe people might think. But I know that I’m very clear in the way that I want my group, our group, our club, to be, and the way that we want to play. Sometimes it doesn’t always come off.
“When you talk about coaches, you hear that they go, ‘Oh he’s tactically really great’. But how do they know that he is tactically really great? Where are they seeing that? Is it because he talks about it, or talks in riddles a little bit that it fools people?
“But I’m not going to talk in riddles, because I’ve been in media to know that you just have to be clear in your message. That’s the way that I see it anyway.”
Aloisi has never let external noise trickle through into his psyche. It’s not who he is after previous stints with Melbourne City and Brisbane Roar.
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During his three years in Brisbane, the Roar played finals football. They were one win away from the Premiers Plate in Aloisi’s first season, while they featured in the Semi-Finals twice. That tenure included the wild 5-4 defeat to Western Sydney Wanderers in the 2016 semis.
It came in trying circumstances in the Sunshine State, after a difficult first senior coaching role with Melbourne Heart in 2012-13.
“I think that with everything you do, there always can be doubt at some periods of your career, whether you’re a player, whether you’re a coach,” he reflected.
“I think it’s also understanding that can be the case, but there’s never any (time) that I don’t believe in what I’m doing.
“I look at it as experiences. My Melbourne Heart experience was a good experience, even though it was negative in terms of results and didn’t actually get what I believed that I could have got out of that situation. But I felt that it was a positive experience, because I was able to deal with certain scenarios, deal with certain situations.
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“I thought, okay, I know that I can coach, and I know that I can lead a team and lead people, and they will buy into what I’m trying to get the team (to do) and how to play. There was a lot of things that were out of my control in that period.
“The next role at Brisbane Roar, I learned how to deal with the things totally not in my control, but how I can help the group get through that because at Melbourne Heart, I had times that we had no training ground, the training ground was flooded, and went to go here, there and everywhere.
“Then the budgets were cut (in) all these situations. That was my first role in experiencing that. Then when I went to Brisbane Roar, I knew what to expect and how to expect it, because the same thing happened there.
“At Brisbane Roar, I thought that it was some of the best football that I’ve coached, especially early on. We were scoring so many goals, playing some great football. We were very, very close to winning, very close to doing it.
“I’ve always had that belief and also adapted to situations. Sometimes it’s it’s more the outside people that might think that when you go through a bad spell, oh he’s not a good coach.
“That doesn’t bother me so much. The only thing that bothers me is when it might affect the people that might give you a role, or players that might stop believing in you, or whatever else, but in terms of the way that I felt that I’ve coached over the years, I’ve learned from every experience that I’ve been in.”
While Aloisi has always believed, he did concede one thing.
“I didn’t know if I was going to get another role in Australia,” he said.
Aloisi was recalling his exit from the Roar and being in the coaching wilderness for three years. It was a similar story after leaving Melbourne in 2013 – he went two years without coaching before getting the nod in Brisbane.
Advice from trailblazer Ange Postecoglou, who was Socceroos boss at the time, helped.
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“He sat down with me quite a few times. I got to speak to him about certain situations, setbacks and maybe not being able to get a job,” Aloisi said of Postecoglou, who overcame his own obstacles before going on to coach Celtic and Tottenham.
“That’s when I first then started to go, okay, what what did he do? He spoke to me about working in media, and then I got to understand the media side, and so again you’re evolving and improving not just your coaching on the pitch, but how you deal with media, how you deal with a board and all those things.”
In fact, Aloisi interviewed for two A-Leagues jobs prior to replacing Marko Rudan at Western United four years ago.
He sat down with Newcastle Jets and Melbourne Victory and he got down to the final stages but without success.
“Then you go, why is it happening? What’s the perception of who I am as a coach? I know I’m not going to change who I am as a person, because that’s who I am,” Aloisi said.
“What you’re going to get with me, and in terms of the way that I talk in a job interview, that’s what you’re going to get. I’m not going to tell them what they want to hear, and then do something completely different. This is how I work, this is how I want to work, this is how I want to play football.
“Alright, I can adapt to certain situations. Because, again, when I signed at Western United, I had a team and a club that wanted to win straight away with a lot of older, experienced players, but they weren’t necessarily all mobile.
“So I had to adapt the way I coached, because I knew that this was a good opportunity to maybe win something with a team with full of experienced players, but adapt the football that I had to play to get that, achieve that outcome.”
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Aloisi referenced adaption; there have been examples of it at Melbourne City, Brisbane Roar and Western United.
This season’s Western United is built in the mould of an Aloisi team – young, quick, high scoring and fun to watch.
They have emerged as genuine Championship contenders in 2024-25, after narrowly missing out on second spot and a lucrative AFC Champions League Elite berth.
While something special is brewing this season, Aloisi’s future beyond June is still up in the air.
The 55-time Socceroo is out of contract but he is in talks after KAM Melbourne’s acquisition of a controlling stake in the club.
It is an exciting time for Western United, though Aloisi has made no secret of his ambition to coach abroad.
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“I’m in talks with the new investors and I know that they would love me to stay. We’re trying to work (out) how that’s going to look,” Aloisi revealed.
“I’ve always loved the vision. I’ve been through so much with the club but it’s always been about the vision of where the club wants to go, and the direction and the road that it’s going on. There’s been a lot of ups and downs within that, but you can see the light, not only what we’re doing on the pitch, but what’s happening off the pitch.
“In terms of my own coaching career, eventually, when that is, I don’t know, but eventually, I’d like to go abroad. That could be another year, two years, three years, four years, I don’t know. Its the right opportunity, the right environment to go.
“I would love to do that, and I’ve been pretty open about that, but while I’m at a club, I’ll always do best for the club to try and, improve the club in general, but also achieve success in terms of getting trophies.”
