The Adelaide Copts United Football Club Inc. “The Falcons” is a South Australian grassroots football (soccer) club. Our key objective is to create a community and family orientated environment in which our players, members and supporters can actively partake. We strongly believe that the measure of our success, as a community and family orientated sporting club, is to serve the needs of our players, members and supporters to the highest quality and provide them with the real sense that the Falcons is ‘their’ club. We aspire to create a professionally administered club which promotes excellence in football through a culture of passion, pride, success and a united community spirit.
Our roots date back to 2001 when a few young Coptic football enthusiasts decided to make a team for the Copts of Adelaide and the Adelaide Coptic Knights were born in February 2001. On 21 April 2001, the Adelaide Coptic Knights played their first ever match against the Ethiopian Community Team at the Adelaide High School and over 150 Copts cheered their team on to a first ever win. The Adelaide Coptic Knights went on to participate in the South Australian African Nations Cups which were held between 2001 and 2005 where we won Silver and Bronze Medals. It was not until 7 August 2008, when those same football enthusiasts met and made the decision to formally establish a football club for the Coptic Community of South Australia.
At the time of our inception, we had to remind ourselves of who we are and where we have come from. Our Coptic Orthodox Church is one of the oldest Apostolic Churches in the world and is more than 2,000 years old. We, the Copts are the native Christians of Egypt and the direct descendents of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, a people with perhaps the longest recorded history. The Copts around the world are a proud people and why not, we are the direct decedents of the one of the richest civilisations in existence and we have much to be proud of – our history, our culture and our traditions have lived on for centuries and have defied the very boundaries of time. The history of the Copts here in South Australia is like many other communities and is closely associated with migration of its people. Coptic families started to arrive in Adelaide in the early 1960’s and in 1982 the St Mary & St Bishoy Coptic Orthodox Church was established in Cowandilla where it remains today as the home of the Coptic Church in South Australia.
We are a Member Club of the South Australian Amateur Soccer League Inc. (“SAASL”) where we compete and which is the major organisational body for non-professional soccer in South Australia and is the State’s largest management body for senior level Amateur Soccer. In 2009, our year of inception, the Falcons fielded two (2) men’s teams - a Senior Team and a Reserves Team which saw some 35 players representing the club. However, our club is ambitious and we hope in years to come to establish additional men’s teams, junior teams, senior women’s teams and perhaps an over 35’s team.
The Falcons is the primary sporting and social club for the Adelaide Coptic Community and we aim to ensure that this club grows and expands for many years to come.