Can football be saved from itself?

Ahhh. Pretend to have p+r tomorrow, or maybe next week if conditions are right.

Midfielder, You can have a financially viable league with cost control, or you can have p+r. Pick one.

Abandoned by whom? And yes, you want your club to work towards promotion. That's precisely the point! That's where the interest lies, that's how great sporting narratives are formed. Even in a big football country such as Holland, the lower second tier clubs border on being semi-pro.

Yeah, so in the long term a semi-pro second division is pointless, unless it's a trojan horse to get the semipro team you like into first grade, and after which it can be safely abandoned ?

Soccer in Australia is a failure of integration from the start: too many clubs based on ethnic heritage, with natural rivalries and animosities ensuing.

What you are saying about the gap between fully pro and semi pro would have been true - until COVID came along. As of next season, that gap just reduced, by a lot.

There are grounds, but these grounds aren't up to broadcast standards. If you are going to have promotion and relegation, then a semi-pro second division will be pointless - the quality gap means a promoted club just heads back down again next season, either because it's cattle weren't up to it, or because of a lack of cohesion from replacing the player group. If players are at least semi-professional, then you can afford a national competition - flying people around the country and putting them up in hotels is remarkably cheap. And yeah, there's a solution to clubs losing quality players for nothing, but that requires long term central contracting of good young Australian players, with all the politics that implies.

There might be a shortage of high end grounds, but as far as boutique grounds go, there are endless options (and they don't even need to be oval shaped!) A 2nd division might introduce cost pressures, but we do have the option of accepting it as a purely semi-professional comp, being barely one step up from the current NPL set up. We might even have to concede that the early years of an NSD will be based in Sydney and Melbourne (and maybe Canberra and Wollongong). The best footballers will always go overseas, that will never change, hopefully we'll get better at making transfer fees out of it, indeed, the transfer fees alone could be enough to fund the whole thing.

"Acknowledge the current format of 12 clubs, no second division and no promotion and relegation needs to change" Why is this true ? Right now, association football doesn't have enough grounds, unless it is prepared to share with the rugby codes, which means turf damage. Moving to 32 professional clubs need more grounds equipped to broadcast standards, with facilities for night games and the rest of it. If you expand to a second division, how is this funded ? Across the world, second divisions are where the money is lost. If you enforce cost control by salary caps (and off-field spending caps), then clubs looking for promotion or to avoid relegation have a massive incentive to cheat. And if you don't, then clubs are going to go bankrupt (Roberto Battega writes about the AFL's governance model, with a powerful central commission. This happened because, just before it was brought in, Collingwood, Richmond and Carlton overspent on players and were either bankrupt or close to it, and they were the "rich" VFL clubs). "Football two huge advantages, which are the size of the player base and being the most global game." The second one is very much a two-edged sword, as every good player in the Australian league is going to see pressure to move overseas. With financially unstable A-League clubs unable to lock players in on sufficiently long contracts, this means the clubs don't even get meaningful revenue when good players leave (as a side point, what is the total value of A-League players sold overseas ? Transfermarkt implies it's surprisingly low). On the plus side, there is a practically unlimited supply of good imports at every price point.

There might be some truth in that re S. Lowy, but I just think his goose was cooked as soon as he was nominated by his own father, that was just never going to fly. Add to that, once City Group got involved, you had a very, very powerful voice in the game. Lowy senior might have been able to withstand the club owners' momentum, but probably no one else was ever going to be able to withstand, especially once the bigger state feds got on board.

Roberto -Don't remember using the word "coup". Lowy left the second time due to a combination of many things,not the least of what was advancing years,and the "troubles" that brings. Putting his son in charge was probably an error in judgement but that being the fact not a lot can be said for the other choices he could have made. Finally on the subject, I don't think anyone in their right mind would cite FIFA as an ideal source of "democratic thinking". The names Blatter, Platini and Walker jump to mind, and even a man with Lowy's contacts missed out when dealing with that trio and their cohorts. Cheers again jb.

Strictly speaking, Lowy Snr was not finished off via a coup, he did last some 10 years in the job, so not really analogous to your history lesson. However, there is no doubting that putting his own son in the Chairman's role was sufficient to kick off a bit of agitation. But there's even more to it. FIFA came out in support of increased "democracy" and representation in the governance of Australian football (on the back of a bit of lobbying from the City Group).

Roberta - Yes I was referring to Frank Lowy. You may or may not know the history of that man's involvements in our game so I'll take a few moments of your time to refresh your memory. Lowy first got involved in football through his connection with the Hakoah/Eastern Suburbs team which ruled the then NSL for that comp's early life being by far the best team in the Australian game. He was aided and abetted in that chore by another football man Andrew Lederer. Come 1984 Lowy, obviously fed up with the path the game was taking, decided to apply for a Vice-Presidency vacancy that had occurred with a public announcement that Sir Arthur George ,the long term President of the ASF, was standing down. At the AGM held that year Lowy was absolutely annihilated in the voting. Some of the lobbying that went on during that meeting beggared description. The outcome? Lowy decided to get out of football,and he did. 3 seasons later his erstwhile club was withdrawn from the NSL,so not only did football lose an adept administrator, they also lost a champion team. We now move to 2004 and that same NSL is on the verge of bankruptcy and the Australian government of the day was forced to approach someone they thought to save the game. Their chosen messiah,Frank Lowy. As you say ,within a couple of years we had a fully professional league and had entered Asia, not to mention World Cup entries, and also a new HAL club WSW, owned by another Lederer, (Andrews nephew), but that was not enough for the critics,and once again the political maneuverings took over and Lowy was gone. Talk about self destruct buttons. Football, and its behind the scenes administrations, must have more than their fair share of that 'aid to management" Cheers jb.