The magic number is 12

With the A-League wrapping up, the focus turns to next year (particularly if your club didn’t make the finals) and the old topic of A-League expansion rears its ugly head. Most editorials spell out why each option for a new club is the worst one, particularly advising against handing A-League licenses to cities that were once home to NSL clubs or clubs from earlier A-League expansions. Very few editorials have actually thought about how an expanded A-League might work, and why it should happen.

Football Federation Australia has been flat-out over the past two years preparing for the FFA Cup, and creating and administering the Western Sydney Wanderers – a team that put together virtually overnight to fill in the gap left by Clive Palmer’s Gold Coast United. Further expanding the A-League has not been high on their list of priorities, but it’s about time that the subject was given some serious thought again.

As the league currently stands there are ten teams, six of whom make the finals. This, some argue, rewards mediocrity. The current state of the A League is based on a combination of trying to please an Australian sporting public hungry for finals, covering the whole continent and yet, not seeing clubs bleed money, playing in front of crowds barely reaching five figures.

Several things have changed since Clive Palmer’s dummy spit in the direction of the FFA; the sky-blue ink is barely dry on Melbourne City’s new deal, Western Sydney are looking for buyers to beef up the FFA’s bottom line and Clive Palmer is too busy in federal politics to worry about the fate of a doomed football team. The time is right, I believe, for the A-League to move into two promising football markets.

The markets? Canberra and Auckland.

Canberra has a very successful W-League team, as well as a team in the NYL, and was unlucky not to be involved in the A-League when it first started. They also have world-class sporting facilities, as evidenced by the city being selected to host Asian Cup matches in 2015. To me, Canberra is the obvious choice for the next A-League club, possibly in season 2015/16. The main sticking point is the question of whether the fans will come out in support of an A-League team in Canberra, where rugby league has always been the football code of choice.

Auckland will be a harder package to sell, mainly due to the failure of the New Zealand Knights, who struggled to last one season. But the third largest city in Australasia managed to draw over 18,000 for a match at Eden Park between Wellington and Adelaide. Auckland City is the most successful club in Oceania, and have been rumoured to be pushing for an expansion into the A-League, searching for investors to provide the necessary cash. Auckland’s ability to draw big crowds for one-off football matches might not convince the FFA that the new Auckland team would last longer than the Auckland Kingz or the New Zealand Knights.

There is another issue with both options. An A-League team affiliated with Canberra United in the W-League, or Auckland City in the New Zealand Football Championship, would possibly share a name with another A-League club (Adelaide United or Melbourne City) and the FFA, which owns the trademarks for all clubs, may not wish to double-up on a single name. It’s unlikely that this issue alone will be an insurmountable barrier to A-League expansion and can be easily worked around.

There is one advantage an Auckland team will have over most other candidates – it will create a rivalry. When fromthestandsal.com put a poll out on twitter about the best game of the season, the response was overwhelmingly in favour of the Sydney Derby, with a few other derbies thrown in for good measure. A New Zealand derby would pull the crowds, whether it was played in Auckland or Wellington.

The other bonus would be an increase in prime time television coverage in New Zealand, with a match being held across the ditch every weekend, instead of every second weekend. With dollars from pay TV coverage and derby ticket sales a major source of income for the FFA, Auckland looks to be a great choice for expanding the A-League.

There is no real reason why Auckland and Canberra can’t put up a side in the A-League. Both have successful teams in other trans-Tasman competitions such as netball, rugby union and rugby league and have the facilities and support required. But why put two new teams in the competition anyway?

The reasons are various, the first being because the FFA can. If the FFA can even go close to replicating the financial and sporting success of the Western Sydney Wanderers, then it can be called a worthwhile venture, and with interest in football at a high with the Socceroos playing in both the World Cup and the Asian Cup, now is the perfect time to do it. The other reasons are with the FFA Cup and Asian Champions League; schedules get crowded at certain points in the season with international duty, as well as FFA Cup and ACL matches robbing teams of their full strength, a move from 27 games, with 10 teams playing each other three times, to 22 games, with 12 teams playing each other twice, will allow for the season to be the same length, with the possibility of rest weeks, either by scheduling split-rounds, or delaying weekend matches when a team has midweek commitments.

This growth is an important step for the future of the A-League. Before promotion and relegation is seriously considered in Australia, the league needs to expand. Promotion and relegation will of course be difficult in the A-League, with population spread making it hard to represent the whole of the country, and a huge gulf between the top and second divisions of football – something with the FFA Cup is in the process of addressing. The important thing about expansion is that it will allow for fewer A-League matches, meaning clubs can shift some of their focus to the FFA Cup and the Asian Champions League. This will lead to increased interest in both of these competitions, as well as in the A-League.

There are other options for the next round of A-League expansion, but most of the arguments against them are hard to ignore. Gold Coast and North Queensland are fresh wounds for the FFA, while most other options (Tasmania, Geelong, Sunshine Coast) don’t have the population centres required to bring the crowds through the turnstiles. Darwin has been offered as an option, but the heat and humidity in an NT summer, coupled with the very low population make that unlikely.  Canberra and Auckland are, I believe, the best options by a long shot.

With the A-League continuing to expand, future A-League licenses can be awarded to clubs that prove themselves in the FFA Cup – by proving that they can bring the crowds, play quality football and have a sound management structure to hopefully prevent any more failed clubs. Now is the time to think about expanding the A-League and Auckland and Canberra are the places where that growth should occur.

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