Our history
Founded in 1928 at Fawkner Park, and still playing on the same ground almost a century later.
South Yarra Soccer Club began with a few people kicking a football in Fawkner Park, on their way home from a fishing trip.
The late Sandy Duff saw them, and his father William Duff wasted no time. He organised a timber yard in Chapel Street to build some goal posts, marked out lines on the ground with sawdust, and started putting teams together. By the following week, in 1928, South Yarra Soccer Club was in operation.
Many of those first players wore the red and white striped uniform of Hartwell Soccer Club in Scotland. Those became South Yarra’s colours, and red and white remain the club’s colours to this day. Three generations of the Duff family are among the club’s life members.
Almost a century at Fawkner Park
The early years
One of the earliest surviving squad photographs held by the club, the players in dark jerseys carrying the club’s lettering. Football in Victoria was an amateur game played on public parkland then, much as it still is at Fawkner Park.
On the front page, 1950
The cover of Soccer News, the official paper of the Victorian Amateur Soccer Football Association, from Saturday 20 May 1950. The photograph shows a high centre from South Yarra’s left winger Bobby Sharman being pushed away by an opponent.
Red and white
A later South Yarra side in the red the club has worn since its first season. The strip has changed shape over the decades, but not its colours.
Every season since 1931
The OzFootball archive holds South Yarra’s results season by season and grade by grade, going back to 1931.
South Yarra Soccer Club
A short film about the club, made by Emma Field.
Be part of the next chapter
The club that started with sawdust lines in Fawkner Park now fields more than 20 teams, from MiniRoos through to the Over 45s. There is a place here for players, coaches and volunteers.