A local club
since 1896.
Dudley Redhead United Football Club has been part of the local community for 130 years. Same colours, same committee, same set of families turning up every Saturday for generations.
The club was founded in 1896, in the middle of the Lake Macquarie coal-mining era. The Fernleigh Track that runs behind Liles Oval was a working railway back then — the Belmont coal line, hauling coal from these suburbs out to the port at Newcastle. The miners spent their Saturdays at the footy. Many of the founding club families came out of those pits.
One hundred and thirty years on, the trains are gone but the club stays. Coal miners, teachers, surfers, nurses, kids, parents, apprentices — all in the same set of black and white, season after season.
Today the club plays out of Liles Oval in Redhead — community league football from MiniRoos (age 6) through to All Age, plus a girls' and women's program that has grown since 2016. Same colours, same families, season after season.
Known around the grounds as “the Thistles” — Home of the Thistles — Dudley Redhead has always been a family club first. Every year since 2014, Old Boys Night brings past players and families back to the club to share a beer and a story or two.
Plenty of local juniors have gone a long way in the game. Emily van Egmond first kicked a ball at Dudley Redhead aged five and went all the way to the Matildas — in 2026 she became Australia’s most-capped footballer of all time; Taylor Regan and Nigel Boogaard both went on to captain the Newcastle Jets — Nigel now serves as the Jets’ General Manager of Football; and Tessa Tamplin represented Australia as a Junior Matilda — all after playing their grassroots football in the black and white. The club’s recent ambassadors, Newcastle Jets players Josie Allan and Will Dobson, keep that connection to the professional game alive today.
