Keen-eyed observers might have thought something was afoot when random comments spruiking Victoria’s credentials as a paragon of football’s democracy began appearing all over football’s social media.

The comments were typified by this one that appeared on SBS’s World Game website:

“The fact that the game is still being run by a few fat cats who enjoy the friendship of Mr Lowy is a disgrace! Football people should run football!”

“We need elections and to take the lead of how Victorian football is governed, the most forward-thinking state in reference to governance and equal representation.”

No one but FFV has ever accused FFV of delivering better services than its predecessors but this was something completely different.

What almost looked like an attempt at fostering a perception that Victoria’s football governance was superior to the other states (the states all operate under the same constitutional model) then took a pot shot at Mr Lowy along the way!

It’s a curious development these rank-and-file punters hitting the social media to pump up the credentials of an election system that they themselves are disenfranchised from.

Particularly so given the democratic debacles Football Federation Victoria has presided over in 2007 and 2009 under its “new football” constitution that’s seen more members “elected” to FFV than votes cast.

How anyone could conclude in the wake of those embarrassments to democracy and transparency that Victoria is “the most forward-thinking state in reference to governance and representation” is a bit of a mystery.

But each to their own, even if it does risk being mistaken for the beginnings of a push to establish some moral authority before making a run for the top job at FFA.

That couldn’t possibly be the case given the evident lack of sophistication but it’s an interesting idea nevertheless.

It would certainly be a very Victorian way to go about it, engaging in some ludicrous spin about the quality of system that elected them while hitching their wagon to the burgeoning anti-Lowy sentiment and letting some pretty shallow perceptions and prejudices look after the rest.

Indeed, it mightn’t be a bad template to follow if a football politician were more interested in merely ascending to power than achieving any legitimacy in the eyes of the football community.

Luckily though, we’re in the “new football” era and we can all relax.

Meanwhile, back in the real world away from the bloggers and spruikers, Football Federation Victoria just last month elected a new president, Nick Monteleone, who has succeeded Tony Dunkerley.

The Victorian football landscape is littered with so many discussion-hijacking stereotypes, the safest place to begin to put last month’s election into a broader context might be in the not too distant past when the pressure was being heaped on the former directors of Soccer Australia to make way for Frank Lowy.

Back then, Victoria’s reputation as the enfant terrible on the national governance scene was undisputed and Melbourne might as well have been the caves of Tora Bora.

According to Michael Cockerill in the Sydney Morning Herald in May 2003, “Victoria is the basket case of Australian soccer – factionalised, fragmented and patently incapable of growing the game south of the Murray. What a surprise that the three recalcitrant [Soccer Australia] directors are drawing their only real support from Victoria – illustrated by an official like Joe Brondolino who now quotes FIFA statutes in order to complicate a smooth transition to Lowy …”

It’s not a view completely invalid for having come from a New South Welshman. Over the years, plenty of Victorians have had issues with the governance and administration of Victorian football.

Victorian football, it has to be said, is different. It’s not what you know in Victoria, it’s who you’re out to get that defines you.

It’s the land football freedom forgot, a sideways-glancing Machiavellian peloton of club powerbrokers all making the same motherhood statements about what they want for the game while forming temporary self-beneficial alliances of convenience to get themselves ahead before the throat-cutting begins.

The answer is invariably “they did”. The question is who started it.

With all that history on its side, Victoria’s football governors were always going to be the new constitution’s test pilot in the courts, and Victoria’s new football’s politicians hadn’t even completed their first two-year term when they found themselves in the Supreme Court in 2009.

How does one reconcile what went down there in the Supreme Court with how “new football” was sold to the football community, particularly those attracted to the game by the positive publicity surrounding the Crawford report, and not to forget the taxpayers who came to the game’s rescue on the promise that cabals of club powerbrokers could no longer use football federations as their fiefdoms?

No sooner had Victoria settled back down to business post-Crawford and the exact same virus football governance had supposedly shaken off was back.

The Supreme Court observed that a club looked to have the got the inside running by having a club official involved in a federation decision described by the judge before overturning it as “totally out of alignment with the real world”.

Under those circumstances it really would be a bit of a stretch, promoting Football Federation Victoria as a paragon of democratic virtue.

Even overlooking FFV’s farcical elections that have seen about one in every 10,000 of the Victorian football community cast a vote, FFV also has a shadow of doubt bigger than Texas over its constitutional legitimacy put there by the Supreme Court – and Victoria is using the same constitutions as the other states.

Perhaps the Crawford report was, as some have postulated, a mere circuit-breaker not to be taken all that seriously?

It’s more than a valid opinion, it’s the prevailing opinion – or, at the very least, it has reality on its side since Crawford’s advice certainly hasn’t been taken seriously.

Another view, or perhaps it’s the same view, is that so long as the A-League kicks on, then what goes down with the state federations is mere grassroots minutiae?

It’s a fair point too, so long as Frank Lowy lives forever and the state federations never re-assume control of College Street.

The states will inevitably re-assume control of FFA and it’s the states’ constitutions that will determine who those individuals in Sydney are. They will be appointees of clubs from the state leagues.

Will an FFA that’s accountable to clubs stuck in their respective state leagues be as benevolent as Frank Lowy and Ben Buckley have been to struggling A-League franchises?

Unfortunately, like any cliché-prone coach says, our future is going to be determined by today’s processes, not yesterday’s results

Post-Lowy, A-League owners, investors and supporters will be gambling more than ever. How confident can they be that no state delegates will be heading to HQ to square-off for what was once described as the “ethnic cleansing” that cleared the decks for the A-League’s creation?

When Lowy steps down and it hits the fan – and that is an inevitability, since an independent commission overseeing the A-League is only tenable if the league is profitable – A-League interests will be as wide open to the new governors’ whims as the former-NSL clubs were when a different handful of the football community had the helm.

Another unintended consequence of the last-minute fiddling with the constitutions in 2006 to consign control of the game back to club appointees is a wee vulnerability in the number of consenting adults required to assume control of an entire state federation, which under Crawford’s blueprint would have required the imprimatur of probably thousands of registered participants.

Under the current arrangements with clubs nominating 27 of the 30 federation members, a federation can be appropriated with the consent of 15 individuals answering to no one but themselves.

Constitutionally speaking, that’s not even a steering lock – the windows are down, there’s cash on the console and the keys are in the ignition.

In Victoria, the newly declared jewel in Australian football governance’s crown, seven federation seats are vacant in the absence of nominations, and a couple of standing committees have been disbanded due to a lack of interest.

The magic number to take control is a football-apt and constitutionally barmy 11 votes in Victoria, or perhaps less since some members double-up and sit on standing committees too!

In Victoria, the engine is running and a full tank too. All you need is the motivation, which only a few have.

Legally bruised and beaten from its Supreme Court adventures, and like all the other state federations still vulnerable to the roundhouse right from a handful of disconsolate club representatives, Football Federation Victoria has persevered anyway and, as mentioned previously, last month announced Nick Monteleone as its new president, succeeding Tony Dunkerley.

An aside to the presidential election was the reappearance of the aforementioned Joe Brondolino, who also nominated for the presidency but withdrew a couple of weeks before the vote.

His numbers wouldn’t have been hard to crunch – 11 individuals onside and he was back in town; there’s always next time.

Monteleone, meanwhile, is a devout believer in “new football”. He is no threat to the A-League and has been a formidable driving force behind some initiatives that have deeply offended some Victorian Premier League clubs, on whose behalf Brondolino has occasionally been outspoken.

If they knew what he was on about, Monteleone might well have the majority of the Victorian football community behind him.

But he is never going to be able to argue that because, due to a deeply flawed electoral system that flies under the broader football community’s radar, there is no evidence he has any discernable support in the football community.

Just one voting FFV member faced an election in 2009. It’s difficult to work out if a mandate can be determined at all, as FFV doesn’t publish the number of votes cast, only the names of the successful candidate.

That’s the “new football” electoral system though, one that’s still tailored to the whims of the club apparatchiks who dominate its voting structure. Their confidence in themselves being “real football people” is only surpassed by their studied ignorance of what democracy is ultimately for, which is to bestow some kind of moral authority upon representatives and leaders.

That Lowy’s regime still hasn’t recognised after eight years that elections need to be about more than just filling vacancies any old which way followed by a trophy presentation suggests the opportunity for real constitutional reform has now passed football by.

No wonder then that the former NSL-club powerbrokers haven’t given up the ghost.

It’s a fair strategy, holding off while Lowy’s been there, and particularly so when the complacency that looks to have been engendered by their absence that has left the state federations and maybe FFA itself prone to takeover by a minimally organised army traveling in a medium-sized station wagon.

It does seem extraordinary that the football community could have been so guileless to have let it to come to this, with an A-League already facing a crisis of confidence under Lowy now finding itself wide open to the possibility of an FFA controlled by hostile state federation appointees.

But that’s the deal while the broader football community sees things the way it does, as if every problem is solvable by just getting rid of a few people or a few clubs.

Thus, just as Lowy once scored standing ovations for sticking the boots into “old soccer”, it’s anti-Lowy claptrap that scores the standing ovations these days.

How does the football community see all that panning out then?

Football politicians and commentators are forever talking about the need for football to be run by “real football people”.

Who exactly do we think has been unsuccessfully running football this last century if not real football people? They’re not eschewing democracy to avail us with their profound football knowledge because their sentiments ultimately lie with tennis or cricket.

That’s always been football’s problem; not just its lousy governance, but always being able to find lousy excuses for having such lousy governance, as if it thinks it can succeed just so long as those outside football think it’s all going terribly well on the inside and they smell the so-called fear.

In the meantime some half a million registered football players continue to not support the A-League for reasons that no one has quite fathomed despite the bleeding obvious, that long before the A-League season kicks off a kid playing club football in Melbourne or Sydney has already had their family’s football budget for the year pillaged by a suburban football club.

Outlandish junior fees are football’s dirties secret and the most overlooked factor in the battle of the football codes.

Probably a good thing too or the AFL bigots would wet themselves laughing at the so-called people’s game and its insatiable lust for money.

This sees itself positioned in Australia as a sport for the middle-classes that’s more expensive for kids to play at the entry level than country club games like tennis and golf.

Club fees aren’t in Ben Buckley’s brief though, they’re a state federation matter. We’d prefer to talk about Ben’s failures.

The Machiavellians watch on knowing that it’s not what happens next or even after that — only the end-game counts. We’re getting there but we’re not there yet.