For starters I think they’d be fine with being able to collect the money that they’re leaving on the table from their current communitites:
Much better standard of football.
Market games against South Melbourne and Adelaide City instead of Hills United and CCM Youth.
Have a decent production standard, because it only needs to be replicated across 6/8/10 matches across the Championship instead of ~50 matches across the NPL nationally every week.
Be able to approach sponsors as one of 8/10/12 Championship teams, rather than as one of ~100 NPL1 teams.
It certainly is a half arsed attempt at a national 2nd division, but I’m hoping this mini-tournament is just a stepping stone to a proper league structure.
We don’t even know how this will be televised do we?
I think Youtube would be ideal, but for gods sake please make sure the cameras are at a proper height because some games are unwatchable with how low the camera angle is
The NPL finals were a single-leg direct knock-out tournament. 7 games in total, half the teams are eliminated after just one game, often without ever playing at home. Blink and you missed it.
This has 4 groups of 4 and a double-round-robin group stage, so every team hosts three opponents as well as making three away trips, before going in to the single-leg knock-out. A total of 55 fixtures over 9 weeks. Enough for people to actually notice and pay attention.
The other difference is the permanent members. These teams know in advance that they will play this tournament on the presumably ‘bigger’ stage, and can justify investing in their squad and in the club accordingly.
IMO the solution for this would be to have APL take over operating the NSD, and convert Championship ownership shares into APL shares at a rate proportional to respective investments/valuations.
Then you’d change the annual club distributions from being equally distributed, as they are in the current A-League, to being proportional to APL stake. That way the NSD entrants aren’t really on an equal footing financially unless/until they provide equal capitalisation $$$.
This second tier comp will remain as such - can’t mix with the A-league. As soon as an A-League club could potentially go down to Div 2, its licence would lose a lot of value. Let alone that you could lose representation in key areas like Perth and Brisbane. Let’s take this year as an example - if they go down, and next year we lose Newcastle and say Central Coast, all replaced by Sydney and Melbourne teams, how would that work?
Then let’s say you lose a big club like Melbourne Victory, which has invested millions in their academy, and then don’t get enough revenue to recoup it? Just will not happen. We are not in Europe or South America where a second division is viable because 30k+ local fans will support their club and pay for memberships and merch no matter what. If Sydney went to second Division we’d have SFCU and the Cove going to games - that’s about it.
… a year where there is no relegation, and no disincentive whatsoever to just writing off the season and planning for next year? What purpose would that serve?
Quite simply, the only club in a city of two or three million will comfortably out-spend and outperform the ninth-biggest team in a city of five million.
And if they don’t, because they have shitty incompetent owners like Bakries, then they get rightfully relegated and eventually replaced by another Brisbane club which has the carrot of having a market of three million to itself as a motivation to invest in promotion.
Which is what they’ve effectively brought back with this.
I think an 8 team championship to align with the ALM would’ve been good to start with and allow them to play a 21 game regular season plus a finals series.
When the ALM becomes a 14 team comp then I think there could (if this pro rel thing is to be tried and tested), be a two leg play off with the bottom / top of each. Yeah, licences can be of less value but inversely other clubs will gain value.
Let’s be honest here, if you’re at the bottom of a 14 team comp knowing there is no risk then you’re just wasting your time and going through the motions. If you’ve finished 14th and lost over two legs then I think it’s quite reasonable that say that you don’t deserve to stay up.
Any new aspiring clubs can start from the second tier rather than pumping in millions for an ALM gig and/or have the same play off between state NPL and Championship.
Indonesia attempted to do this and they got an international ban. I suspect the US have a bit more money behind them so they can probably buy their way out of the same punishment.