The 20th season of the Isuzu UTE A-League is in the books, following Melbourne City’s Grand Final triumph over Melbourne Victory on Saturday night.
City’s second Championship followed Auckland FC’s Premiership triumph in the club’s first-ever season; Saturday’s historic Melbourne Derby Grand Final played out in front of 29,902 fans – an attendance record for a sporting event at AAMI Park – in a fitting end to the first two decades of the Isuzu UTE A-League.
As the dust settles on the season that was, aleagues.com.au presents five things we learned from the 2024-25 Isuzu UTE A-League campaign.
CITY ARE CHAMPIONS! Historic Melbourne Derby Grand Final ends in heartbreak for Victory
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The future is here: Young guns take centre stage
What a special season it was for young players in the Isuzu UTE A-League.
By the end of the regular season, four Australians under the age of 23 sat on top of the goalscoring leaderboard, with Archie Goodwin and Adrian Segecic (both 20) claiming an equal share of the Golden Boot with 13 goals apiece.
At 20 years and 178 days, Goodwin became the youngest ever winner of the Isuzu UTE A-League Golden Boot while Segecic, who turned 21 on June 1, moved into third on the all-time list at 20 years and 337 days at the time the Golden Boot race came to its conclusion.
Noah Botic and Nicolas Milanovic (both 23) finished equal second with 12 goals; Botic then added another four goals to his season tally in the Finals Series to end the campaign with 16 to his name – more than any player in the league.
Milanovic, meanwhile, capped off his stellar season at the Wanderers with the illustrious Johnny Warren Medal awarded to the competition’s best player.
READ MORE: Nicolas Milanovic wins Johnny Warren Medal after breakout campaign with the Wanderers
But the exciting narrative of young players breaking out in 2024-25 stretches well beyond the league’s four top scorers.
Western United centre-back Dylan Leonard is just 17 years of age, and ended the season as one of the competition’s best-performing defenders in a team that finished third. Eli Adams (23) and Clayton Taylor (21) starred for Newcastle Jets; Adams scored nine goals, while Taylor, who bagged seven from midfield, finished fifth in the Johnny Warren Medal count.
Jaylan Pearman impressed for Perth Glory in his debut season for the club at just 18 years of age, while 23-year-old Melbourne Victory’s Ryan Teague continued his rapid rise as one of the league’s best central midfielders, and debuted for the Socceroos.
Champions Melbourne City leant on academy talent through an injury-impacted regular season with the likes of Lawrence Wong (17), Zane Schreiber (19), Max Caputo (19), Medin Memeti (17) and Harry Politidis (22) all contributing significantly to City clinching a second-place finish en route to the club’s Grand Final triumph over Victory.
In February, the Young Socceroos convened in China for the Under-20 Asian Cup, and the squad featuring 17 rising stars from the A-Leagues won the nation’s third-ever piece of silverware on the continent.
This was a season defined by the emergence of young talent both in the Isuzu UTE A-League and on the international stage.
Goals galore in our unpredictable league
The 2024-25 Isuzu UTE A-League season was all-action from beginning to end, with 573 goals scored across the campaign at a rate of 3.26 goals per game.
It’s the most goals scored in a single season in the competition’s 20-year history, with the average of 3.26 goals per game eclipsed only by last season’s total of 3.29.
The 2024-25 goalfest was highlighted by three incredible high-scoring rounds. In Round 23, a record-breaking 33 goals were scored across six games in the single highest-scoring round in Isuzu UTE A-League history. In Round 24, 29 goals hit the back of the net – the fourth-most of all-time, while the 26-goal total in Round 27 jumped to eighth on the all-time leaderboard.
It was a season that featured several of the highest-scoring games in history, highlighted by a 5-4 win to Macarthur over Adelaide in Round 23, a 4-4 draw between Macarthur and Brisbane Roar in Round 6, a 5-3 win for Melbourne Victory over Adelaide United in Round 24, and a 4-4 draw between Auckland and the Reds in Round 21.
Auckland FC are the real deal
Season 2024-25 saw the birth of the Black Knights, and their entrance into the competition was a roaring success, highlighted by huge crowds and on-field performances.
Head coach Steve Corica assembled a formidable squad for Auckland’s debut campaign in the competition and seven straight wins to begin the season set the A-Leagues newcomers on the path to a Premiership triumph by the season’s end.
Go Media Stadium was a fortress for Auckland with The Port, the club’s active support, bringing colour and energy to every single home game, and setting a tone that the rest of the stadium responded to in kind. Auckland attracted an average attendance of 18,890 fans across their 14 home games in 2024-25, with the total attendance of 264,464 at Go Media Stadium across those 14 games, the most of any club by nearly 70,000.
The club pulled out all the stops throughout the 2024-25 season to engage the local support, installing an inflatable slide, a ferris wheel, and New Zealand’s biggest inland beach in the family fun zone on the north side of the stadium.
Nearly 30,000 fans packed into Go Media Stadium for Auckland’s first-ever Finals Series game in May and although the club failed to make it through to the Grand Final, their debut season will live long in the memory as a special starting point for a club that has well and truly made its mark on the competition.
Clear route forming from the A-Leagues to the international stage
The 2024-25 Isuzu UTE A-League season not only saw several players from the domestic league receive senior international call-ups for the very first time, but also return to the selection fold with their respective nations.
Melbourne Victory duo Ryan Teague and Nishan Velupillay both made their international debuts for Australia this season under their former club head coach and now Socceroos boss Tony Popovic – as did Sydney FC’s Luke Brattan, Macarthur Bulls midfielder Luke Brattan and Hayden Matthews, who made his Socceroos bow before his transfer from Sydney FC to English club Portsmouth.
This season also saw Victory winger Daniel Arzani return to the Socceroos fold; the 26-year-old made one appearance for the Socceroos in 2024, ending a six-year absence from the senior international squad.
It was a similar story for Auckland FC defender Francis De Vries this season, after his early form for the Black Knights saw the New Zealand international return to All Whites duty after two-and-a-half years.
There could be further senior international debuts this month, with nine Isuzu UTE A-League players selected in Popovic’s Socceroos squad to face Japan and Saudi Arabia in a pair of crucial 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup qualifiers.
Melbourne City defender Kai Trewin and Melbourne Victory full-back Kasey Bos are two uncapped squad members selected alongside seven fellow A-Leagues stars: Aziz Behich, Caceres, Teague, Arzani, Brandon Borrello, Adam Taggart and Marco Tilio.
Big fees for young players: a growing trend
The 2024-25 Isuzu UTE A-League season saw several clubs recoup substantial transfer fees for players sold to overseas clubs in a trend occurring with greater regularity in recent years.
In January, highly-rated Brisbane Roar striker Thomas Waddingham was sold to English club Portsmouth, while Macarthur Bulls recouped transfer fees for young forward Jed Drew (TSV Hartberg) and Ariath Piol (Real Salt Lake).
Hayden Matthews’ mid-season move from Sydney FC to Portsmouth was a multi-million dollar move, and a club record fee for the Sky Blues; more recently, Johnny Warren Medallist Nicolas Milanovic moved from the Wanderers to Aberdeen and, like Sydney FC, Western Sydney also received a club-record transfer fee for the sale of the 23-year-old.
In the last off-season alone, Adelaide United sold Nestory Irankunda to German Giants Bayern Munich, Musa Toure to Clermont Foot 63 and Giuseppe Bovalina to Vancouver Whitecaps. Central Coast Mariners sold Jacob Farrell to Portsmouth, and Max Balard to Dutch club NAC Breda. Macarthur sold Raphael Borges Rodrigues to Coventry City in England, while Jake Girdwood-Reich left Sydney FC for MLS side St Louis City for what was the club’s record transfer fee at the time, while Alex Paulsen’s move from Wellington Phoenix to AFC Bournemouth also smashed Wellington’s club-record transfer sum.
The interest from overseas in the young talent being produced in the Isuzu UTE A-League is at a level never before seen in the competition’s 20-year history, as clubs cash in on their homegrown products and usher in new waves of youngsters into their first-team squads to replace them.
