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It’s flown by so quickly. We’re already up to round eight of the new A-League season. This means we have only two more weeks of fresh fixtures until we see repeats of games we’ve already seen this year.
It seems like only yesterday Alessandro Del Piero made his Sydney debut in the opener over in Wellington. Yet in the first week of next month, these two teams will be doing battle once again at Westpac Stadium.
The Wanderers’ stunning 1-0 win over Brisbane is still fresh in the memory – but straight after the Sky Blues/Phoenix rematch, they’ll be at it for the second time this season.
That’s the trouble with a 10-team competition. Not that it’s all about to turn boring two weeks – if any edition of the A-League looks like it has the legs to keep interest for the full length, this is it.
But wouldn’t it be nice to see a different team or two, with different players, a different coach, in different colours and in a different stadium?
Well, for the next wave of expansion – unless there is a “big present” landing in Frank Lowy’s lap at some stage over the next four years, as he quipped during yesterday’s TV deal announcement – we will have to wait at least until 2017.
Fair enough too – it’s important to get the current 10 clubs in order first, given the instability of seasons gone and the failed forays into North Queensland and the Gold Coast.
But for all those potential franchises across Australia, now is the time to get your houses in order.
Putting off expansion until a set date in the future is probably the best way the A-League can protect itself from another new club’s stillbirth.
The likes of the Northern Fury, the Canberra bid, the Sunshine Coast Fire, the South Coast of NSW and anyone else aspiring to reach the top tier now have a goal they can work towards.
If you need another reason why expansion is so important at this stage in Australian football’s renaissance, here’s a compelling one – more opportunities are needed for the young players coming through the ranks.
At a time when up-and-comers like Tom Rogic, Trent Sainsbury, Aaron Mooy and Josh Risdon are making names for themselves while cutting their teeth on a consistent basis in the A-League, there are surely others waiting in the wings for their opportunities that are being blocked by established stars.
FFA technical director Han Berger wanted to cut the visa quota of clubs from five to four this season. Thank god he didn’t get his way – we might not be seeing Del Piero, Emile Heskey, Shinji Ono, Jeronimo Neumann and Josip Tadic if there were less slots for foreigners.
But what was driving Berger is an understanding of youth development – the more chances there are for young players to play A-League, the better Australian football will be ultimately as a whole.
Add another two teams and you also get 56 full-time roster spots, two National Youth League set-ups, possibly two academies and a pair of footballing outposts that local fans can get around.
Given the way Gold Coast United’s carcass was picked apart, clubs are starting to understand just how crucial youth development is not only to maintain a strong team, but for the possibility of transfer fees as Melbourne Heart is showing.
The wonderful thing about the decision to delay A-League expansion is that, come 2017 – and barring any unforeseen disasters – Australian state-level football will look completely different.
By that stage every member federation of the FFA will have its own Australian Premier League conference and join a restructuring of the second tier that has two things in mind – making young players better, and encouraging successful talent farms to grow and clubs to potentially become an A-League franchise.
As the urban sprawl in south-east Queensland continues to seep further north and south of Brisbane, it will be exciting to see what can become of a team on the Sunshine Coast in a competition with heightened professionalism and all-round pressure.
At the same time, if the team behind the speculative sale of the Gold Coast Dragons concept to the Chinese business community can secure an APL license, we could see the team on the tourist strip that Clive Palmer held back.
A more likely prospect than both of these is the Fury. They were meant to be gone but the groundswell of support behind that wholesome and sadly departed A-League franchise has seen their distinctive double green colours revived.
Townsville may yet rise again.
The opportunity is there for every bid team – the Illawarra, Geelong, Gippsland, Tasmania, Canberra, even South Melbourne – to use the next four years to build from the ground up and create a club.
Because it’s not about forming a club with an A-League license – it’s about giving an A-League license to an established club. That has to be the dream.
If it can happen by 2017, and the competition is strong enough to attract even more broadcast money at the end of the new contract, two teams will be ready to step up and give Australian football an unmistakeable injection of freshness and rejuvenation.
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