Gold Coast Knights

The Croatian Sports Centre sits on Nerang Broadbeach Road in Carrara, a ground built by the people who founded the club rather than handed to them, and it still holds only 1,000 spectators, a reminder that this was raised as a community facility long before it hosted top-flight football. The land was bought in 1982, a few years after the club itself began life, and the building on it carried the same purpose through several name changes since.

That founding group were Croatian immigrants who registered the side in 1978 as St. Anthony's Soccer Club, with the first team taking the field the following year. The Croatian identity stayed fixed to the ground even as the club's own name moved on, becoming Gold Coast Knights in 1999.

The step up came in 2019, when the Knights reached the Queensland NPL, the top tier of the state game, and beat Brisbane Olympic 2-1 in the Grand Final in their first season there, with Panetta and Dillon scoring the goals. They went back to back in the play-offs less often than that single result suggests — the next title arrived in 2022, against Olympic FC, in a season where the Knights had actually finished second in the regular table and won the championship anyway through the finals series. In 2023 they added a third Championship, beating Moreton Bay United, and paired it with the Premiership itself, the regular-season title that had eluded them the year before.

Beyond the state league, the Australia Cup gave the club its widest audience: a run to the round of 32 in 2018 ended against Newcastle Jets, and in 2021 they went further still, taking Melbourne Victory to the round of 16 before losing 2-1.

None of it moved the club far from Carrara. The ground the founders bought in 1982 is still where the Knights play.