Perth Glory midfielder Brandon O’Neill has opened up on his unexpected split from Perth Glory in 2022, explaining how the grief of losing his father to cancer played its role in both his sudden exit, and return to the club for the 2024-25 Isuzu UTE A-League season.
O’Neill began his professional career at Perth Glory, his hometown Isuzu UTE A-League club, and returned to Western Australia for a second stint in purple and orange in 2021.
He signed a three-year deal with Perth and was named captain ahead of the 2021-22 campaign, but just one year into his contract, he was granted an early release from the club.
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O’Neill joined Newcastle Jets from Perth ahead of the 2022-23 season and spent two years in Novocastria before returning home to Glory for the current campaign – his third stint at the club.
The special guest on this week’s episode of Perth Glory’s official podcast, Glory Stories, O’Neill provided a candid and emotional explanation for his departure in 2022, expressing how losing his “best friend” and father, Myles O’Neill, to lung cancer caused an overwhelming feeling of grief that impacted the initial months of his Glory homecoming.
“The last time I was here a lot of life things happened so quickly, in such a short period, ultimately changing me forever,” O’Neill said. “I can actually hand on heart say that now.
“At the start of it, probably the worst thing I did with my dad’s death was try to turn it into something that was going to be the best thing to ever happen to me.
“That might be weird to say, but I remember in the homily I did in his funeral, I remember standing up in front of everyone and saying that he’s going to be the reason why I get back into the Socceroos, and he was going to be the reason why I might potentially go to a World Cup… I look back now and go: what were you doing? You just lost your best mate.
“For some people, that could drive them to be better. Probably the worst thing I did was, I swept it all under the rug and I tried to use that event as a fire awakened inside me to get me going.
“I lost my best friend, and I didn’t even deal with it.
“It’s something I’ve never spoken openly (about), but when that was happening there was a decision to be made on my professional life. I think anyone who’s gone through grief, when you’re making big decisions, let alone your body being in the place that you’re currently at, your mind is nowhere.
“All I knew my gut was saying is: you have to be home. You have to be home. You’ve got to go through this properly. And I didn’t know what that meant or what that felt like.
“We made the decision to stay home, and when we made that decision I put my footballer hat on saying this was going to be the best thing to happen to my career, because I’d be doing a, b, c, d and e. But I remember halfway through the season, completely and utterly just breaking down.
“When I was here in my second stint I had the huge honour of being named captain. I had the amazing life moment of my daughter being born, and we had just bought our absolute dream forever home here in Perth. And I’d wake up in the morning, and I wouldn’t even know my name, let alone how I was going to kick a ball, let alone how I was going to father, whether I was going to pay bills – and I was meant to lead a team. I was meant to be the person people looked up to.
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“It was probably the most difficult part of my life to date because I couldn’t even brush my teeth in the morning. As terrible as it sounds, an injury actually made me sit down with Nicole, my family. I did my AC joint that year and I had eight weeks to the end of the season, and I was pretty much out then – I had to recover.
“I sat down with Nicole and I was very close to just saying: ‘That’s me. That’s me done’. And the amazing person, the amazing woman that she is, she was going to accept that. Whatever was going to happen to make me feel better, she was going to accept that.
“In a nutshell, the grief that still is here to this day, I still have days where I come in and, for whatever reason, I just feel not the best or not at the races that day. For anyone out there going through such a traumatic thing like that, I think they understand and they get it.
“I just want to talk to people of the club, fans and members to say, from the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry for what you perceived in that moment to think I wasn’t connected to the club, or I wasn’t here for the right reasons, or I left because I wanted to play football somewhere else.
“It was a mad time in my life, and I’m so thankful to be able to be given a second chance to be making it right, now. And I’ll be forever thankful for doing that. Because my dad, getting back to my dad, he was the one constant in my football from early on to right until he passed away.
“I’m sorry that I had to go away from home. I’ve often apologised to Nicole, my in-laws, my Mum and everything. Because I just felt I needed to go away, to do the work and to grieve properly, to be able to come back now and be able to be in a position that we’re in.”
You can listen to Brandon O’Neill’s full interview on the Glory Stories podcast below.
For anyone dealing with the issues raised in the podcast, free professional help is available here: https://wa.lifeline.org.au/services/counselling-services/counselling/
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