Last week, as the FFA tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with its stakeholders and FIFA, a group of National Premier League clubs held talks with SBS about a prospective broadcast deal for a national second division to sit below the A-League.
That preliminary meeting, brokered by the Association of Australian Football Clubs, followed a 90-minute presentation to FIFA. The AAFC have received the blessing from several other organisations for their push to establish a national competition. Later that day, one of the AAFC's member clubs, Heidelberg United, unveiled an international sponsor with the view of gaining entry to a second tier.
The long-term goal remains eventual promotion and relegation with the A-League. It could still be two decades away, but the idea is gaining momentum and, critically, commercial support.
With the FFA in turmoil, there is opportunity in their timing. That it also coincides with the release of the first narrative history of Australian football should give them pause for thought.
One of the key issues addressed in Joe Gorman's recently released book The Death and Life of Australian Soccer is the game's constant search to establish a traditional football pyramid in a market as challenging as ours.
"The entire history of the game in this country has been about resolving the tension between the traditions of soccer and the desires of the Australian commercial marketplace," Gorman writes.
The book reveals two previous studies from 1981 and 1990 that deemed promotion and relegation to be counterproductive to the growth of the National Soccer League.
The first, produced by the marketing arm of the Australian Soccer Federation, noted that it is "simply not a practical system ??? for a sport that wishes to develop nationally".
The second study came in 1990, after years of ill-fated promotion and relegation that "brought instability to the League". Worse, as Gorman writes, promotion and relegation "brought a cluster of teams from the rich, populous cities of Sydney and Melbourne at the expense of a true national spread." By 1989 only two clubs, Adelaide City and Wollongong City, came from outside Sydney and Melbourne.
While a national second tier is aiming to be self-funded and promises to bridge the pathway between semi-professional football and the A-League, it is worth noting that since the introduction of Perth Glory in 1996, the game is tending towards privately owned franchises that represent entire regions and cities, rather than ethnic communities.
Gorman points to the emergence of Adelaide United, which replaced the Italian-backed Adelaide City in 2003, as a pivotal event in the game's history.
"Above all else, Adelaide United's success proved beyond doubt that soccer could simply do away with its pre-existing ethnic clubs, create new clubs in their place, and fans would come along in droves," writes Gorman.
They, alongside Perth Glory and Newcastle Jets were the only clubs to have made a successful transition from the NSL.
The A-League, as this book reminds us, was designed specifically to transcend the community clubs, many of which are now members of the AAFC. The attempt to reverse-engineer these clubs back into the national competition via promotion and relegation will be an enormously challenging task.
The Death and Life of Australian Soccer provides the football community a warts-and-all examination, not just a celebration, of the past.
"The reason why I wrote this book was to show how and why we got to the present moment," Gorman said. "The lessons of history are not always comfortable, but they're worth remembering when planning for the future."
