Except that life doesn’t work out that way. Sports teams unite smaller cities, which is why the Jets have a membership and attendance not far below ours despite only having a quarter of the fans by that metric, and thus not being worth of a place.
Anyway, let’s see how the 3rd teams in Sydney and Melbourne work out.
teams located among good and popular surfing beaches seem to have trouble pulling fans, whatever sport. It’s the local vibe as well as the opportunity to go to the beach on a nice day. People will play those sports in great numbers - note Manly Warringhah and the Shire - but it seems hard to get them regularly to watch matches. May be a problem for Canberra too with so many of them heading down to eg Bateman’s Bay on weekends. Good reason for Canberra matches to be on Thursday nights!
I am for: 13. Wollongong 14. Canberra 15. South Queensland/outer Brisbane (eg Ipswich or Brissie-Gold Coast corridor like Logan/Beenleigh) 16. Dandenong/E Melbourne (seemed like a great bid).
Can anyone see Melbourne City folding (being sold off) in the next couple of years if they keep on being middling on the pitch and substandard in the stands? I wonder if Western United could take over their (apparently great) training facilities. That would open a space for a properly geography/community-rooted club. So MV is the inner city club, you have one out west, one out east. Derbies! If that happened, maybe the next one off the bench is Tassie.
No, they don’t really care about this. It’s about the broad soft power exercise by the horrible regime they are tied to, and enabling that.
Newcastle isn’t a small city compared to the likes of Hobart, Wollongong, Darwin, Townsville.
Far from the rule you make out there really are very few examples of pro sports teams in towns of that size. Most ventures into the provinces have died swift deaths. A limited few struggle along on life support.
Perry Park is too close to Suncorp. I think it would be another Melbourne City situation. Dolphin Stadium makes more sense.
Even though Canberra makes more sense population wise I would prefer the Wolves to be one of the next two given they are an existing club and should be more ready to join. Hopefully their success in the NPL can help rebuild their supporter base.
You’re failing to take into account the fact that Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne already have a quite saturated and fickle market. Melbourne has major competition with AFL, Sydney with NRL and Brisbane with a mixture of the two. While the sports are played at different times, in general, supporters of NRL and AFL will look down on the A-league and refuse to support it as a matter of principle, especially with the negative media coverage.
Smaller towns with no professional teams, or limited teams, are more likely to unite behind them and support them in the long term despite positive or negative success. Building the club, plus community engagement needs to be done well to make sure this works despite all this.
I doubt the level of parochialism is less in small towns. Outside of Sydney and Melbourne, Australians aren’t really into football.
Newcastle and Wollongong have as long and certainly more continuous history with football as Sydney and more than Melbourne. It’s why Australia’s longest running football clubs such as Balgownie and Adamstown are in those areas. They are proper footballing towns. Blokes came out of England’s North, Wales and Scotland to work the mines and steel mills and they played football. And it stayed there - unlike in the capitals where it needed the 20th Century migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe to keep the game going.
Canberra, Wollongong and Brisbane2 make the most sense to me.
There will never be a Wollongong team. The population area around Wollongong is less than the population around Gosford. Ditto Tasmania.
With the exceptions of Canberra and Brisbane, all new teams will be in Sydney and Melbourne.
My guess that a reasonable team from the Illawarra will draw more people to home games than Melbourne City does.
Not with that attitude.
So journalists just read the forums and print whatever is posted right?
Bring back New Zealand Knights!
No. It’s FFA and the A-League body who are reading SFCU for strategic direction 
Stats are shady on population, but most sources say ~300k for both Central Coast and Wollongong… if CC can sustain a team, so can Wollongong.
Hobart is only ~200k, but there are over 500k in Tassie, so if they market it across the State, it could work.
ACT has over 400k, so enough for a team.
All these smaller centres would benefit from a siege mentality against the big city clubs (see ‘Arnie’ during CC days).
Yeah but if you’ve got nothing to do in Wollongong on a Saturday night then you’re probably more likely to hit up the football, especially as there really is no teams that play there professionally.
A Wollongong big would have to be a simple step up for the Wolves, otherwise you’d be alienating the population that has history with them
From the article @eff_see posted above…
At this stage, it is likely the new entity running the A-League will initiate the next stage of expansion in 2021 by inviting bids from pre-determined markets. Two new teams could then be announced in 2022, providing those winning bids with at least a full year to prepare for their debut seasons in 2023 when the next TV deal will begin.
club sources suggest a number of owners are already fancying the prospect of inviting bids from Brisbane, Canberra and Auckland.
Which wouldn’t really surprise me if correct and would see Tassie and Wollongong left waiting till next time and the possibility/likelihood that only one of them makes it. If at all.
I can’t see a 2nd Brisbane side playing exclusively out of Dolphin Oval… Too far away.
i think Brisbane 2 is more viable than Gold Coast mk2. No doubt there’s potential on the coast but if AFL/NRL can’t get their shit sorted down there then Football face a massive challenge as well…
Ipswich is a bit of an unknown. Plenty of development and $$$ getting pumped in and their local clubs are fairly strong. Not sure if you could get an existing club up or try to set up a new club and try to bring together the different tribes. May be in the too hard basket for now.
A NQ side playing out of the new stadium being built has potential IMO. Although NQ got burnt by the FFA, with the new independent HAL there may be an appetite to get back into the mix.
They don’t have a presence in the NPL QLD (Mackay being the Northern most club) either so for the youngsters it’d be great to have an HAL club to aspire to.