For a variety of reasons, club produced match programs have never really been one of Australian soccer's strong points. To be fair, this is not just a soccer thing - Australian sporting culture as a whole tends to not produce club specific programs, instead preffering official league propaganda in the form of things like the AFL's Footy Record.
I reckon that a club-produced match program has to perform at least one
of two functions. One is to engender a sense of community around a club,
especially its senior team(s). This will probably mean that the content
is probably more informal, and materially cheaper. This works (or
worked) better at lower level clubs, where a dedicated volunteer was
responsible for doing most of the work, which they would see as a hobby;
such program production mostly lives and dies on how long that
volunteer can keep doing that job.
The other option is to project a sense of professionalism, as an
extension of the broader match day experience. Thus you get a glossy
program, one that, apart from being much obviously an official news
organ of a particular club rather than an individual, is also tasked
with promoting sponsors and the club's image as a professionally run
organisation.
Australian soccer club produced match programs were at their peak during the NSL years, albeit not at all times (1990s were strongest), and certainly not at all clubs (the 1984-1986 split division era was not great). Since the dissolution of the NSL, things have gone downhill. That's understandable on a number of fronts. In the A-League, the uniformity (and conformity) of purpose meant that match programs took on the guise of league endorsed programs. Below the A-League, clubs decided that finite money and volunteer efforts were better spent on other things. This coincided with arrival of the full-blown internet. No longer did you need to wait a week (or a fortnight) for news and write-ups on your team. It was all there on a website, and eventually even that became subservient to social media, at least at those clubs that bothered to update them.
Having said that, 2025 was still a poor year on the Victorian top tier front so far as match program production was concerned. Already an endangered species, with only two clubs regularly producing programs from 2019 onward, this year we got down to just one; that being Green Gully and its cheap (free) and cheerful production, as Melbourne Knights all but ceased producing its long running glossy ($5 in 2025) product. Knights produced a program for their well-attended home match against Preston, but otherwise it seems like that was the last hurrah, for whatever reason - cost, lack of volunteers, lack of interest, or even just being a victim of the internal strife that club went through in 2025.
Football Victoria also managed to produce match programs for the Dockerty and Nike FC Cup finals this year, albeit not available in print form; which is nevertheless an expansion on their efforts in 2024 (NPL and NPLW grand finals), and the years before that (nothing that I'm aware of). That's all a slightly long-winded way of saying that I have uploaded the three match programs related to South Melbourne that I'm aware of this year - Gully away, and the Dockerty and Nike FC Cup final programs.
