For the fifth time in his coaching career, Kevin Muscat is a champion. The former Australia international led Shanghai Port to their second successive title on the final day of the Chinese Super League last weekend, lifting the trophy after securing a 1-0 away win over Dalian Yingbo. Another feather in an increasingly plumaged cap.
With a pair of Chinese titles to add to his J1 League crown with Yokohama F Marinos and a pair of A-League Men championships with Melbourne Victory, this 2025 crown reinforces Muscat as one of Australia’s most successful coaches. Ever. Very few Australians strike out abroad, or are afforded the opportunity to, and even fewer go on to lift silverware, let alone lift silverware in two of Asia’s strongest leagues.
And after creating one of the fiercest attacking units on the planet last season, Muscat had to adjust and work for another title in 2025 — anything other than victory over Dalian would have seen Port’s city rivals, Shanghai Shenhua, take the title instead. Both Brazilian star Oscar and former Argentina international Matias Vargas departed before the campaign, and, combined with injuries to star Chinese forward Wu Lei that restricted him to just six appearances and one goal, Muscat was left without a trio that had accounted for 56 of the 96 goals Shanghai netted in 2024.
Nonetheless, despite the numbers dipping, Shanghai Port still led the Chinese Super League with 72 goals this season and had more of the ball than any side not named Beijing Guoan throughout the campaign. Given the only thing harder than getting to the top of the mountain is staying there, it’s a heck of an achievement.
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But the celebrations have hardly had any kind of time to subside before speculation again started mounting about what Muscat might do next. Such is the nature of the beast that is football. It doesn’t matter that he has a contract in Shanghai that takes him through to the end of the 2026 season, nor that he and his family, as he told the Sydney Morning Herald, are happy in China. Nor does it count much that he’s on a pretty good wicket at the Pudong Football Stadium, or that he’s got something in the way of unfinished business in the Asian Champions League Elite (Shanghai have underperformed in the competition during his tenure). Such is the insatiable demand for more news, more narrative and constant perceived progress in the modern game.
And it’s understandable. The way that the Australian footballing public rallied around Ange Postecoglou at Celtic, Tottenham Hotspur and then, briefly, at Nottingham Forest, spoke to the hunger that those Down Under have to see one of their own succeed at the highest level: for an Australian to prove wrong those who would dismiss them and their achievements as being lesser accomplishments. To demonstrate that one isn’t simply a “proper coach” with “proper tactics” because the fortune of one’s birth saw them born in Chelsea, London, rather than Chelsea, Melbourne. And Muscat has now demonstrated over multiple seasons that he’s best placed in the men’s game to make the jump.
And for a coach such as Muscat — himself a former assistant to Postecoglou, who succeeded him at Victory and Yokohama, and who has been backed to succeed by his mentor — who possesses a fierce ambition to challenge himself and continue to develop as a coach, swimming with the sharks in the deepest ocean in football will inevitably call. The one-time Sunshine George Cross junior spent almost a decade playing in Britain before returning home to serve as one of the foundational pieces of the new A-League, and he has often been linked with coaching vacancies at his former clubs — recently coming close to taking the Rangers job and, almost immediately after that fell through, being floated as a potential boss at Wolverhampton Wanderers following the sacking of Vitor Pereira.
That the 52-year-old came so close to taking over at the Ibrox — talks collapsed late in the process and the role ultimately went to Danny Röhl — only feeds speculation about an impending move to Europe. Muscat himself clearly would be willing to make a move if the circumstances were right; it’s just a matter of finding a situation that works for both him and his club.
And situation is important. Given his inglorious six-month stint at Belgian outfit Sint-Truidense back in 2020, the former defender has a chastening education in the cutthroat nature of European football already on hos résumé, as well as the knowledge of not just taking a job that lands one on the continent. Now, having adjusted to two very different cultures and delivered silverware in both, as well as often being linked with high-profile openings in Britain, Muscat earned a right — one he’s already exercised in the face of previous inquiries — to be somewhat selective with his next destination, ensuring that he finds an opening where the club is aligned with his vision and committed to backing him sufficiently.
Inevitably, finding a situation like this is easier said than done. Speculation about a role and actually being considered for it are two very different things. And perfect can’t be the enemy of good; if a situation at a club was optimal, then they probably wouldn’t have an opening in the first place. And while Muscat will be afforded more grace than some other coaches coming from Asia — he’s a white man with English as his native tongue, who hails from a nation that, though playing in Asia, is perceived as being Western — he still has a … somewhat colorful reputation in Britain.
Almost 15 years after retirement, Muscat is still renowned for a physicality that too often strayed towards brutality; his Rangers links greeted by the Daily Mail headline: “How Aussie hardman Kevin Muscat became ‘the most hated man in football.'” It doesn’t matter that the Melburnian is a very different person post-retirement — convivial, eloquent, and consistently forging strong dressing rooms — nor that he sets his sides up to play a free-flowing, attacking brand. The legacy of vicious tackles on the likes of Matty Holmes, Christophe Dugarry, and Adrian Zahra lingers and, the aforementioned unconscious (and sometimes conscious) bias confronting Australian and Asian coaches remains. They’ll only be overcome by what his side does on the pitch.
Of course, that’s if his next move is even in clubland. Muscat leapt to the forefront of Football Australia’s thinking when Graham Arnold informed them of his surprise decision to step down from the Socceroos role but remained in Shanghai, leading to the job going to Tony Popovic. After turning around Australia’s qualification campaign and securing their passage to a sixth-straight World Cup, Popovic’s contract will conclude after next year’s tournament. Given Football Australia’s record, any kind of success in North America would likely augur a new contract if Popovic wants it, but Muscat would have to be considered a prohibitive front-runner for a Socceroos vacancy, ostensibly under more auspicious circumstances at the start of a new cycle, if he were interested.
Regardless of what he decides to do next, though, Muscat will do so from a position of strength. There will be challenges to be overcome, of course, and success cannot be taken for granted. But Muscat has once again proven himself a winner. And that counts for a lot.
