It’s hard to say how different the local football landscape would be now if Australia was readying itself to host a World Cup. Football wouldn’t be working any differently to how it does now and the A-League would still be struggling this year like it was last year and the year before that, but, I suppose, there would be a better vibe.
Why? I’m not sure.
It’s never been adequately explained how hosting a World Cup was ever going benefit football here, aside from the usual carry-on about it being the biggest sporting event in the world and throwing one’s arms in the air to emphasise its incomparable hugeness.
That such hyperbolic nonsense was still coming from Australians ten years after the Sydney Olympics is the greater mystery.
It’s as if we haven’t twigged yet that the busloads of world-class 400-metre runners that were predicted at the time haven’t materialised; not a single one.
Yes, the tourism and hospitality sectors certainly enjoyed the Olympics, although Melbourne has overtaken Sydney as the tourism capital in the meantime and the AFL is certainly enjoying Homebush.
Track and field? It’s still living in a welfare state.
That was always the underlying absurdity of Lowy’s World Cup dream.
Whichever way it panned out, how would it impact football here? What where the rewards and what were the risks?
Realistically, had the bid succeeded, it wasn’t going to deliver much beyond a dozen years of chest-beating about football taking over here followed by the inevitable crash as the reality hit home as it has for our Olympic sports.
A few weeks of enthralling television does not make for a grassroots revolution.
And if the World Cup bid didn’t succeed, it risked snuffing out what little optimism there was around the game and killing off the A-League in the process, which now looks to be the case.
That’s the gamble Lowy took, and justified or not, the A-League is now suffering for it.
FFA doesn’t have any rabbits up its sleeve, nor do the A-League owners or the league’s supporters.
It is a dire situation.
There are plenty of football supporters in Australia but until someone can adequately explain why 90 per cent of the football community turns its back on 90 per cent of football, there is nothing here to work with.
After the football community’s bickering about what’s authentic football culture and what’s not, after the puerile debates about whether it ought to be called football or soccer, the repellent arguments about where ethnic clubs belong and why, and hate-mongers in the social media attempting to destroy every attempt at reasonable discussion and building an inclusive culture, if you can still manage to get a tenth of a tenth of the football community along to your party you’ve done very well indeed.
The A-League has done very well indeed – it hinted at what was possible when a national league is done half-right.
But with Lowy’s regime on borrowed time and “real football people” from the states, as some describe them, ready to assume control of FFA, the A-League is all but dead in the water now.
Anyone with real money at stake will be doing the maths and they simply don’t check out. It’s all risk, and as much to their reputations as the bank.
That’s not to say there won’t be a seventh A-League season, but if there is, it will only be because businesspeople are gamblers by nature and not as quick on the uptake as some might think.
That, after all, is why FFA is where it is now, having gambled it all on a long-shot artificialities like hosting a World Cup or indeed, the A-League itself.
Hope often prevails over good sense.
We can point the finger at the A-League’s business model or whoever we like including the wicked AFL and the soccerphobics and pretend the football culture doesn’t have some serious head troubles of its own that have contributed to the fall.
Ultimately, Lowy and Buckley and the A-League are just the latest in the long line of victims of a deeply divided, impossibly confused and extremely dysfunctional football culture.
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