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It’s hard to resist getting swept up in the fairy tale of Western Sydney Wanderers’ first season in the A-League.
Just five rounds out from the end of the regular season and the new-born club shares joint-favouritism for the Premiers’ Plate.
Nobody in their wildest dreams could have predicted this when the club was announced in April last year.
Off the field, the Western Sydney gamble has exceeded all expectations.
Suggestions that the club would fail miserably after it was cobbled together in haste following Gold Coast United’s closure now seem ridiculous.
The Wanderers are in rude health. Give it time (and an actual owner, of course) and the club will surely evolve into one of the A-League’s true power clubs.
But how did we get here? Well, the FFA nursed Western Sydney into this world.
It had to. Despite searching high and low for investors, nobody else was going to put in – so the federation had to spend its own money, and a little bit from the taxpayer too, in order to make it happen.
This meant the Wanderers simply could not be stuffed up.
From the early fan forums that saw football’s ‘heartland’ tell the federation exactly what it wanted the club to be, to the generous allowance of seven visa players, to the funding of a marquee player who is the talisman of Tony Popovic’s system – Western Sydney has been given every advantage.
Rightfully so, given the importance of the club to the A-League’s strategic plan and the short timeframe in which everything had to be sorted.
But contrast this to the way that North Queensland, Gold Coast United and Melbourne Heart came to be, and there’s a difference that now feels beyond startling.
Retrospectively it’s an absolute disgrace this kind of effort wasn’t made for the clubs in the first wave of expansion.
The Fury and Gold Coast were plonked in non-traditional football areas and all the key decisions were left to owners who were new to the game.
No fan forums, no help with marketing, branding or identity, no on-field advantages to help forge early success.
We know how that worked out.
What made football fans in those areas any less important than those who now wear red and black hoops?
At least we still have the Heart – but even then, they’re a club who can’t quite figure out who they are just yet. They’ll get there, but shouldn’t they have had this existential crisis sorted from day one?
Imagine now if the FFA rolled out clubs in these areas with the same gusto and precision as Western Sydney.
They might not end up Wanderers-level successful but they wouldn’t be unmitigated disasters like the two Queensland clubs were.
David Gallop talks about ‘fishing where the fish are’, but there’s no point in fishing anywhere without the right bait.
Here’s the takeaway – just because it’s not federation money bankrolling a club, doesn’t mean the FFA should show any less love to future expansion clubs as they did to Western Sydney.
The FFA had a responsibility to look after North Queensland and Gold Coast. It failed miserably. But the mistakes of the past have not been made with Western Sydney.
Is this purely because Western Sydney is the FFA’s war chest-funded baby, or because there is now a realisation that launching a new club is a delicate task that needs to be done right?
Let’s hope the latter.
Let’s hope the next expansion clubs – whenever they come – are given every advantage the Wanderers have enjoyed.
Every new club must receive a helping hand from the FFA to make sure every box is ticked, and ticked right.
And those two extra visa spots shouldn’t be a one-off.
They might skew the competition a little but they have helped Western Sydney succeed, and that helps attract fans to a club in its formative years – which, in turn, has breathed fresh air into the whole competition.
The Wanderers have been a raging success. But the A-League will struggle to grow if the FFA fail to learn from the template that has made it so.
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