Harry said:
Any idea on name and colors Ian?
name and colours are still to be decided by the fans via community forums. I have been involved in their social media fan groups and black and teal blue seems to be popular amongst them. as is gold. as for name, it won't be Tarneit. Werribee or Wyndham. They want it to be broader name so it appeals to people in the west of melbourne and west of victoria, which is their target demographic. It will have a variation of West in the name (Western, Westside, Westgate), but thats as much as I can tell ya.
Smoking Aces said:
It is a joke.
They won the race purely because they paid the most money for their licence. It had nothing to do with their ability to actually improve the A - League. From what I heard they threatened the FFA that if they were not awarded the licence, they will pull out of any future backing of money towards the FFA.
Maybe you should ask me first before making these comments. I am extremely well informed on the whole expansion process and I can answer any questions you have.
Firstly, yes there was a bit of a bidding war for licences and the FFA did favour the higher bidders. which is a common sense approach considering the circumstances. There is a lack of revenue coming to the ALeague right now. The game needs a short term funding boost to help the bottm line of the existing clubs, bring bigger names to the game and to improve promotion and marketing, which is non-existant. But money wasn't the number 1 factor. If that were the case, the team that bidded the most money (Southern Expansion at $20 million) would have won.
And secondly, WMG did not threaten the FFA with backing out altogether if they were unsuccessful this time around. the stadium site was originally earmarked to be a fitness and leisure centre by the Wyndham council. if WMG were unsuccessful, the council wasn't willing to leave such valuable land idle for 5-10 years in the hope they would get a licence and build a stadium on the site. they were going to revert to their original plan of the fitness and leisure centre. this means the WMG bid was always ever gonna be a "do or die" one time thing.
Smoking Aces said:
Furthermore, they will be playing out of Kardinia Park for the next 4 years. What a great look that would be. :
it will be a minimum of 2 years and a maximum of 3 years at Kardinia Park. yes, it will be short term pain, but it'll mean little over the course of the next 50 years. And playing in Geelong for 2-3 years will give them the chance to capture a fanbase in Geelong. again, that can only benefit them in the long term.
year of the tiger said:
And I still can’t understand why they limited expansion to only 2 clubs which meant more of the same for Melb and Sydney.
Missed opportunity to beat AFL into the Canberra mkt and Tassie also. I reckon these two locations would match Kardinia Park for crowd numbers.
They could have then increased the comp by 2 teams per year for 2 years if they wanted to grow slowly. Gallop has no idea imo
when this whole process started a couple of years ago, i argued that the next 2 teams should be Hobart and Canberra. I ridiculed Gallop's "fish where the fishes are" statement thinking we needed to get in the markets that are starved of professional sport. But that was before I understood all the metrics.
I will list 3 of the main metrics here:
1. The TV deal with Fox Sports includes an extra $5 million per season for the life of the deal (4 years left after this season) on the condition that the next 2 teams are from either Melbourne, Sydeny or Brisbane.
2. by 2030, it is projected that the population of the western suburbs of Melbourne will double. which is roughly 3 times of what Canberra's population is today. I can't see how this can be ignored tbh.
3. Canberra get the lowest crowds in the NRL.
One thing I do agree on is the safe, almost gutless timeline the FFA went with. they could have gone with 2, 3 or 4 teams. they could have gone with 2 next year and 2 the year after. the 1+1 option the choose is really dumb as we will have to enure unecessary byes next season. it was also weak of them to hold off admitting MSWS next season so that WSW could have 1 year of clear air in their new stadium. Its 50km from Parramatta to Campbelltown FFS.
But I will add a sidenote to this: the FFA will have the right to boot out Wellington after the 2019-2020 season if they don't meet certain criteria (which they are failing at). Many poeple (including me) are of the opinion that Canberra are next in line and are likely to replace Wellington in 2 years. There are rumours about that the Canberra bid team has already been advised of this.
