I know it’s heretical, but, I haven’t heard anything a soft spot for them and the particular group of fans I know in Melbourne - certainly more-so than fans of other teams.
Out of the nominal “big 6”, they’re the team I dislike the least… actually, I could almost expand that out to the entire EPL is there weren’t so many vanilla teams that trigger no feelings whatsoever.
In a previous job, I dealt with lots of different supporter groups - Spurs where one of the best.