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Football fans in Australia are part of one family, but they are divided. They have acknowledged this and together, let us now take the next step .
Something this article and others recently have highlighted in comments is the divide within football is still very much evident.
This is no surprise in some respects, as the divide is barely a decade old. Acknowledging this is the first step. Are we ready to take the next one?
Perhaps my pre and post-NSL club experience makes my outlook a little different to other fans of the game.
My team, the Newcastle Breakers, which became Newcastle United for a time, was waiting on the decision on whether it would be included in the new professional league that became the A-League.
Remembering back at that time, I had my fingers crossed that they would be included. They eventually succeeded as the Newcastle United Jets.
Easy transition then? Perhaps, but the alternative at the time wasn’t good.
In an alternate reality, Newcastle United may have folded, or went back to the Northern NSW state league; perhaps waiting to be granted a new licence into the A-League when expansion teams were called for. This would have created a divide in Newcastle and the Hunter.
While that did not happen, across the football spectrum whether the FFA had intended to or not, there is a divide.
Building bridges and moving forward is going to be the next step and far more productive.
To me, for any squabbling family, you just have to get all parties into a room and ‘have it out’. The most immediate and productive room for that is the football pitch, not an online forum.
The carrot to get everyone in there? The FFA Cup.
This is the only immediate way of bringing the ‘family’ together: mixing, getting to know one-another again and ‘having it out’ on the field.
State and knockout cup winners mixed in with the A-League teams. Sooner this happens the better, because it will help bridge another divide in the game at the same time: amateur vs professional
Creating a competition with professional teams from both new and improved ex-NSL clubs created a divide by money.
State teams, ex-NSL or otherwise, have every opportunity to raise themselves as close to professional status as they can and regular FFA Cup participation (via knockout or state league championship) is a great tool and incentive to help achieve that aim.
Why become a professional club in an amateur or semi-pro league?
It is about becoming a big fish in a small pond. It is about being ready for when the FFA and the A-League are ready for new teams.
Then the ground-work of creating ‘new’ club bids is already done. The finer details are already in place. The community is there, and infrastructure and history are the envy of a new consortiums’ club bid.
There are only so many professional teams the FFA’s call can create from scratch. I think a proportion of the professional teams in the end will come from those state-based clubs having moved towards becoming as close to a full-time professional club as they can. Because the future game will be professional: full-time players, club admin, support staff and all the other trimmings that go with that status.
Just how many professional clubs Australia can support in time, and that number will change over the years, and whether it is a ‘conference’ or promotion-relegation system remains to be seen.
When these clubs are entered into the A-League, football would have come full circle and be well on the way to being ‘united’ once more, or at least this recent divide in the football family narrowed and eventually closed.
All it takes is one small step. Supporting something like the FFA Cup is a start. Are you ready to take it?
Note: This is based off a comment I made in a recent Roar of the Crowd article and was submitted as its own article as a call for further discussion on uniting the football community.
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