Pacific Time

Oceania's first ever professional league takes shape in an empty stadium, hoping to attract the world's eyes.

Knife-edge strings and stampeding drums give way to opulent horns, a widescreen orchestra to match the cinematic drone footage of roiling waves, traditional dances, and glass-fronted cityscapes. Crescendo follows crescendo until the music snaps to silence and the montage ends with the flag of Papua New Guinea rippling over rugged hills.

Inside the National Football Stadium in Port Moresby, sunshine beats down on fifteen-thousand empty plastic seats. The carpet-green turf is marbled with little patches of parched earth, and a metallic tannoy voice rolls out across the vacant grandstand and into the nearby hills. It is 11.30 a.m. local time on a Friday, thirty degrees and humid. The players wait patiently for a ten-second pre-match countdown to mercifully reach its end. The FIFA+ stream beaming out today’s game between Auckland FC and Solomon Kings is incongruously slick: two commentators, multiple cameras, cutaways to live shots of the dugouts. The OFC Professional League’s debut season is only a few weeks old, but the on-screen product is that of a well-established competition.

As the game kicks off, today’s commentators, Jeremy Mogi and former PNG international Reggie Davani, describe this game as a clash of styles, the swashbuckling Auckland FC from New Zealand’s North Island against a defensively resolute and stubborn Solomon Kings, from the Solomon Islands. The league table backs that up: Auckland have won five from five so far, conceding just one goal; Solomon Kings are squarely mid-table, with one win, one loss, two draws, and a goal difference of zero.

Their domination so far is no surprise. Since Australia left the Oceania Football Confederation in 2006 in search of a more consistent challenge, New Zealand have been the prohibitive favourite for every regional tournament in the Pacific, and they’ve exported players to leagues all around the world. Pacific Islander footballers, meanwhile, are rarely seen even in Australia or New Zealand, let alone Asia or Europe.

The OFC Pro League is supposed to change that. “It is very difficult for our players to break into Australian, Asian, and European leagues,” OFC Vice-President John Kapi Nato said when the league was first proposed in 2019, before the pandemic delayed its launch. “We have to create our own league and then leagues from Australia, Asia, and Europe can look at ours and pick the best.”

Oceania’s first-ever full-time professional league is built around five circuits: all eight teams move to a host city for three games each, then move on to the next. Local channels in each represented country—Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tahiti, Vanuatu, Australia, and New Zealand—have picked up the local rights. FIFA+ beams it out to the world, and the league’s Instagram page is prolific.

Auckland FC finished top of the A-League’s regular season last year, and their squad was already made up of professionals before joining the OFCPL. Their squad for this competition, then, is an age-restricted reserve lineup, providing a pathway for younger and less experienced players from New Zealand’s North Island. Solomon Kings, though, are solely devoted to this competition. They’re built for purpose. They’ve signed the bulk of the Solomon Islands’ national team, only adding two foreign players: midfielder Jez Lofthouse from sister club Wynnum Wolves in Australia, and Sota Higashide, a complete unknown brought in on a free transfer from Gainare Tottori in the Japanese third division. There’s no need to squint to see this as a team representing its homeland.

The first twenty minutes of today’s game confound the commentators’ pre-match narratives. Straight away Kings probe down the right wing, creating overloads, patient and calm and committed to their style even if they’re a little loose. They’re staggeringly calm inside their own box, particularly the goalkeeper, Philip Mango, who routinely feints and dummies at pressing attackers in the way that would make any fan have a heart attack. The defenders take his lead, impossibly calm on the ball, dropping shoulders and shadow passing to confound the press. This is the type of football that’s easier to play in an empty stadium, without a few thousand anxious fans to terrify you through osmosis.

Soon enough the pressure starts to tell. Higashide is the catalyst. He’s brilliant to watch: five-foot-four, busy but elegant, technically exceptional and able to dance through tiny spaces while making even sharp defenders look lead-footed. For the twenty minutes either side of half time he is in complete control of the game. First he wins a tight penalty for handball, flicking the ball onto the arm of a defender flailing to keep up, and steps up himself to slot calmly down the middle.

They get another just before half time, and this one’s a better reflection of the Kings’ on-ball domination. Javin Wae cooly intercepts a hurried clearance and lays it off for William Komasi, and the two of them tease their opponents, passing side-to-side, eventually drawing an impatient press. That allows Komasi to step forward and spread the ball out to the right, where Junior David bides his time before playing a slide-rule pass to Higashide. He darts towards the byline and slots a first-time pass square to an onrushing Bobby Leslie to poke home. It’s patient, precise, and practically unstoppable.

It’s odd how familiar this all feels. Top-level European football is obviously way faster and stronger, the technical level much higher. But the patterns of play here are eerily recognizable. Solomon Kings build up so patiently across the midfield: left to right, always probing, little triangles forming and runners breaking through. Even their choreography at corners seems to have been borrowed from Arsenal, as players crowd the keeper and the ball hangs above the six-yard box.

No doubt some of this is down to Ben Cahn, Solomon Kings’ South London-born head coach. This is the type of free-flowing, possession football he talked about on his way up through the Australian leagues before taking over at Brisbane Roar two years ago. His progress was halted when he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer just five games in; this is his first job since getting the all-clear.

He’s found a natural home for his brand of football. The Solomon Islands national team call themselves “The Brazil of the Pacific” only partly in jest. They play in the Seleção’s yellow shirts and blue shorts, and their football has, in the national footballing imagination, always been a sort of Pacific Island joga bonito. They’re currently outside the top 150 in the FIFA men’s rankings, and they’ve never been higher than 120th. But despite their size they are, like Brazil, the most successful nation on their continent at beach soccer and futsal, qualifying for World Cups in both. Technical skill isn’t a problem. As ever, infighting and mismanagement at federation level, and a lack of resources at club level, are typically blamed for the inability to break through at the top level.

The hope is that playing attractive and technical football on a slick FIFA+ broadcast will circumvent that. Fans in the stadium will arrive eventually, but showing it to viewers on the other side of the world is at least as important. The OFC is funding operating costs like travel and accommodation for now, but these newly professional teams are already pulling in money from broadcasters and advertisers at home. Training facilities will improve; the next generation of players will have opportunities that the last generation couldn’t have imagined. The league hasn’t published any viewership figures yet, but the audience will surely be exponentially bigger than any game in, say, last season’s domestic Solomon Islands S-League. This is a chance for Oceanian players to be noticed.

Today, though, it’s impossible to ignore Higashide. He creates the Kings’ third with a delicious chipped pass into Lofthouse on the corner of the six-yard box, leaving the Australian to smash home from short range. With an hour gone, Higashide hits the inside of the post from twenty-five yards, a heat-check of a shot. He’s so much fun, anticipating movement, finding unlikely angles, applying precise spin and weight to each pass like a showboating pool shark. Auckland pull a goal back, but it’s only a consolation. They’re well beaten.

In a post-match interview on the field, Cahn reveals that a virus has hit his squad in the days leading up to the game; they were almost unable to field a proper team. “They pushed through and they gave everything because they care so much about their team and their country,” he says. His players take selfies with the few dozen Solomonese fans who’ve moved to the front rows of the National Football Stadium, leaving the empty chairs behind them. The OFC Professional League’s social team captures it all and beams it back out to the world.

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