The curious case of Melbourne Heart, a club that said all the right things but were never able to translate those principles into reality.
The club that paraded their intention to take on the world from their rather humble surroundings of the Biology block of La Trobe University
Someone get Guy Ritchie on the line, I’ve found the next Sherlock Holmes script. And this may be a case even the super sleuth may not be able to solve.
And yet here we are, the second Melbourne franchise is £1 trillion richer and is daring to dream of toilet seats and dinner plates.
And fancy that, a quaint little Melbourne ‘soccer’ club being aligned with a humongously promising prospect such as New York City FC and the perennial financial overlords in Manchester City.
How far we’ve come.
It’s at this point I will point out a few things. I am a Melbourne Victory fan that has watched on for the past five years at our much less-gifted little brother stumbling around the stage embarrassing the Victorian family.
My mother supports Manchester City to the hilt as well, if only for the coincidence of the first game she watched being City versus Chelsea and one of her favourite songs, ‘Blue Moon’, blaring around Eastlands and similarly our lounge room. If only for the curiosity of the past World Cup that year.
I am also a Tottenham Hotspur fan that does not believe City can win the Premier League this season, owing to history not favouring them and the topsy-turvy world in which British football now finds itself in.
Although I hope you, the reader, can look past these glaring points of bias.
I am genuinely concerned about the viability of a second Melbourne franchise, and yes even more so than I was a month ago when the Victory rounded up a very merry Christmas with a 3-1 stroll through East Olympic Park and its surrounds.
City’s investment in Australian football, don’t get me wrong, is the biggest thing to happen to the sport in this country since Alessandro Del Piero penned a contract to go to the harbour city only a year ago, which is a testament to how far the sport has come in such a short time.
It also sets a precedent that could see the A-League turn it up a few notches and truly become the sporting code dominator that it has always desired, but is this all roses without a single thorn in sight?
Concerns have arisen about a foreign rebranding, not helped by News Corp Australia’s contradictory reports on the matter, with the Herald Sun stating that the club would change their colours and image to suit that of their new Emirates conquerors and Fox Sports reporting that no rebranding will occur.
For a club that has always struggled with identity, purpose and attracting crowds, the idea of foregoing a vague identity for that of another club 16,000 kilometres away has already and will in the future put a lot off the club. Especially those of the United persuasion, of which there is a large majority of in old Melbourne town.
The other problem is the dreaded salary cap. If we use the aforementioned NYCFC as an example, compared to A-League teams they have roughly an extra one million to play with, not including their version of our marquee player, the ‘designated player’.
In the broader football tense this is a meagre number that would be laughed at outside of the continental powerhouses of Europe and South America, and even North America in recent years.
For this reason alone the NYCFC model will struggle to make play in the A-League, for the sole reason that ‘buying the league’ is a lot harder here, as evident from my own club and Sydney FC’s recent example: Money does not necessarily translate to on field success, being overshadowed by intelligent thought and planning.
So it would seem that I’m pleading for those wearing red and white to convert before the inevitable armageddon like it’s 2012. Not the case.
Heart, or the second Melbourne franchise that is yet to be named, will finally be able to hold board meetings and train in suitable surrounds rather than the small room and even smaller field that they currently call home.
It will also mean that they will join the peloton of the A-League, able to scrap and brawl with the harder hitters for the finest foreign and local talent.
Western Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne Victory and Sydney FC have a fellow competitor on this plateau.
Melbourne, much like its weather, is indecisive about whether it needs a second team. Victory is streaks ahead of the rest of the league in terms of sponsorship, season ticket holders and general aura, of which it isn’t afraid to flaunt around town.
City buying into Heart definitely throws another major actor onto the fascinating sporting stage we’ve been lucky to showcase across the continent, and once again reaffirms that Melbourne is the true sporting city that has other capitals looking onward in derision and jealousy.
However, are all of these changes acceptable considering that the minimal identity that Heart had will be chucked into the nearest hard rubbish facility?
We’ve seen success and contempt for established sporting clubs such as Footscray, Hawthorn, North Melbourne and Melbourne who have looked beyond borders to strengthen their supporter base, attacked for even daring to stray but a couple of yards away from their ‘traditional’ home.
Is this something Heart/Melbourne City will be able to survive? Or will a rebranding in align with a world superpower turn off prospective supporters, if only for existing allegiances?
As meagre as that identity was and for all the arguably wrongful condemnation that Heart received for their grandiose plans not coming to fruition, is it all worth discarding it to become a mindless follower of a foreign team?
This is the next question that Australia will have to answer for themselves to truly herald a new coming for the sport in this country.
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The real concern comes down to football's growing trend of big corporations taking up slices of the world game at the expense of smaller teams.
