If it’s priced properly, I’d be all over it.
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So the A2 League just keeps expanding forever to avoid ever relegating an A-League team?
The quality of the football in a 20 team A-League, let alone a second division is going to be dire.
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Told you we’d screw this up.
Australians don’t do pro/rel. We’re basically forced to do so because every other footballing nation does it.
If the wrong teams get dropped, watch every other league lick its lips in anticipation of gobbling up the displaced fans. BBL/WBBL and NBL/WNBL would be getting a chub over that.
This isnt a new magical requirement - we’ve known about it for a long time and done everything possible to avoid implementing it (which says a lot about the Governance of the game locally)
The gap between the top tier and the rest needs to close up if the sport has any desire to succeed, there needs to be a clear pathway for players to get to the top locally. The proposal does seem a bit overkill though.
I know that. Basically football in this country is a lot like the asylum being run by the inmates.
All I am saying is, if it is not doing properly, and given the sport’s history in this country, it’s a possiblity, it will be a complete and utter disaster.
You could’ve looked to Japan and how they’ve done it. Very structured, and those clubs had to work for it. But we are letting clubs like Melbourne Knights, South Melbourne and Sydney United FC 58 back into top teir football. No f**king way.
The model that has been proposed here is based on the Japanese model - but with changes to cater to things like the offset in timings of the seasons between the top tier and the lower tiers.
It’s optimistic and ambitious and hard to see how it’s going to succeed, but the longer we sit on our hands on this the harder the task of building a decent pathway will become.
This is an uncomfortable reality that the game is going to have to face - distancing the game from ethnic factions was important in the early days of the A-League, but this was done in the naive hope that these clubs and factions would simply evaporate without actually putting any effort into reshaping the game at lower levels.
Its now hard to see how they can build the proposed platform without engaging with these clubs
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Well they’ve done it wrong. The gap between seasons needs to go. They all play at the same time. And if that means play in summer, tough tits, they’re playing in summer. They don’t like it, f**k off.
These lower tier clubs need to make sure they’re representringf every single ethincity of the area - not just those who back the club. The Japanese model did this by reducing the corporate influence. These clubs need to understand - this is Australia, not Europe. They’re more likely to appear in The Real Football Factories than they are Match Of The Day if you get my drift.
I do not think the old NSL clubs and those in the NPL have the ability to compete successfully. They’ve had their day in the sun. If they want a part of it, fine - merge between themselves.
Again, I can see us buggering this up. The moment Sydney or Melbourne loses a team, especially the big teams, they’ll find a way to keep them in, Just you watch. Sydney and Melbourne run this league to the detriment of everyone else, and it will continue.
Given there were murmurings that the A-League were considering a switch back to being in winter, questions need to be asked whether playing in Summer is the right approach - while it aligns our season with most other competitions around the world, it was done to try to get clear air from other football codes.
These clubs represent the history of the sport in this country, for good and for bad - the game didn’t want them involved in the A-League led reincarnation in the vain hope they’d disappear. That went about as well as you’d expect for something that you do nothing about and expect an outcome.
The difficult decision will be whether the game wants to engage with these clubs in building out the top end of the pyramid, something that’s going to be made even harder given there is a desire to have a decent number of teams (which is going to be somewhere between 60 and 100) involved that has to come from somewhere and aren’t just going to magically appear.
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The English version of Leichhardt Oval.
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Will be interesting to see if the Premier League allow them to play there - there was a suggestion that they may need to play games at the ground in Milton Keynes
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Luton Town is planning to build a brand new stadium at Power Court, while still undertaking £10m of improvements at their current Kenilworth Road venue. This BBC report was from April this year.
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There were murmurings of Nine and Optus wanting the league in winter should they have won the rights, 10 were adamant no change was required (knowing they couldn’t compete with the winter codes). Now that the AFC have switched to our calendar for continental competitions, we won’t be changing to winter.
Unless current clubs choose to merge, there will only be 2-4 new teams (the ALM expansion teams announced for Canberra and Auckland and two more) created for high level competition. Otherwise they will all be current (or rebranded) teams.
They will be allowed to given they have announced they will be building a new stadium and upgrading their current one to make it compliant. These compliance upgrade costs are covered by their promotion winnings. Had they not done this they would have needed to groundshare, probably with MK Dons yes.
They haven’t exactly switched to ‘our’ calendar though - they’ve switched to one that better integrates with the rest of the continental groupings. Not all of Asia is on the same calendar either, one of the biggest club leagues in Asia (Japan’s J1) doesn’t run on the same calendar as us.
The new stadium has planning approval, but until recent times has had no timeframe for delivery - either way, it won’t be finished for some time (which may be on a longer timeline then Luton is in the top flight). The upgrades required to meet the minimum standard for PL won’t be completed by the time the season commences too, so a temporary move may still be required.
They should play a Friendy at Leichhardt Oval just to show the EPL power brokers how good it is to play in a shit stadium when it’s packed.
No. That gives Leichhardt too much credibility. Knock the place down.
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Oh, come on Leichhardts not that bad. 
I went to games at Leichhardt in the 90s and the joint was terrible and ready for the bulldozer then and’s had minimal work since
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