FFA Cup needed prior to Western Sydney A-League club

The news in recent weeks that the Sydney Rovers Football Club is finding it difficult to raise the necessary capital to enter into the 2011/2012 season resulted in unwanted headlines across major Australian newspapers, throughout the web and the blogosphere.

Whilst the impact of the Global Financial Crisis cannot be understated and the current state of crowds and awareness of the Hyundai A-League has affected the commercial appetite for investment, the Rovers’ fortunes are contingent on several other factors.

Unsurprisingly, the Rovers’ being a football club first and foremost identified the need to engage the region’s football community as the first step. It entered into a variety of arrangements with the region’s clubs and indeed comprised many of the foundation board members themselves from the region’s football community, including former Socceroos Captain Charlie Yankos.

The Rovers’ had hoped that community engagement would lead to investment and investment would lead to accession into the next version of the A-League.

Though if we view the backdrop and history to the club’s geography we can find several salient reasons as to why entry into the competition following the above formula has been so difficult to achieve.

The Sydney Rovers Football Club cannot hope to succeed until the region with the largest number of registered football players in the country comes to the table. But, as will be shown, until the scars of the past have healed there can be no hope of this.

The reason for these scars can neatly be described by the phrase which first arose in the context of the Crawford Report which provided for an Old Soccer/New Football dichotomy. This dichotomy has only acted to further entrench division.

To provide some context, the situation would be akin to the AFL deciding that in its haste to grow a competition which had previously only been played in Victoria, the VFL as it related culturally to the game would be erased not only from history, but from its plans for growth.
A competition, or indeed the Sydney Rovers Football Club, cannot be grown by overlooking the elements that form its relevance. A new, more inclusive view of where football is positioned culturally and historically needs to come to the fore.

The football community are and have always been one and the same. We all believe in the greatness of the game of football and we must all recognise that this division is exponentially more damaging than the Rugby League split evident in ARL/Super League wars of 1997.

Football in Australia is inextricably linked to the roots and traditions of the countries that brought the beautiful game to our shores. From the Unionised labour of miners which overwhelmingly hailed from the UK, to the sugar cane growers of Queensland or citrus growers of NSW who hail from Italy, to the Greek, Serbian, Croatian, and Macedonian communities of Western Sydney. These communities commenced footballing festivities in Australia. In turn, the principal growth of the first national sporting competition in Australia in the NSL had its roots in the development of strong clubs on the fringes of the main population centres in Sydney and Melbourne. As a corollary of this, it is not surprising that the overwhelming majority of the current and most recent World Cup Socceroos squads hail from Western Sydney and began their careers in the backyard or local ground of one of these multicultural nurseries.

So how is it that a situation has developed which seeks to exclude the very foundations of the game in Australia? Why is it that we aren’t able to celebrate the undeniable contribution of these pioneering clubs to the game as administered by the FFA?

Given Frank Lowy’s Hakoah roots which gave him the very introduction to football and business that has enabled him to become one of the world’s largest ever accumulators of capital, it is astonishing that he hasn’t reached out to the community which hold the key to the development of a successful club in Western Sydney.

That is until yesterday.

As the news filtered through Twitter that Frank Lowy and Ben Buckley had summoned the nation’s preeminent football journalists to a call-to-arms meeting, it became clear that the FFA had some big plans. In particular Frank had seen the need to give football every chance to succeed, not only in the context of the battle for World Cup hosting rights but in terms of the on-going growth of the game.

At this meeting it was announced that the inaugural FFA Cup, something which has been a topic of conversation previously, has been discussed with a timetable attached for the first time. Next year, subject to agreement of stakeholders including club owners, State League clubs will be able to mix it with their professional A-League cousins for a spot in the AFC Champions League (similar to an idea put forward earlier by The Football Sack).

This represents one of the most meaningful steps taken to bridge the divide in the football community, giving the right of the nation’s foundation clubs to compete at the top level once again, to stake their claim and for the football family to begin to reunify again (that is being separated by the length of a football field and singing songs at one another!).

Once this occurs there may be a genuine interest in a team from Western Sydney which is not seen to be an esoteric market created entity but rather an organic creature which forms for a purpose and to satiate a need in the community. It also presents the chance for former NSL clubs and their supporters to show their classical pedigree and to show what the true essence of Australia’s footballing philosophy is comprised of.

The FFA is to be applauded for committing to undertake this vital step which also represents a genuine point of difference between Football, AFL and Rugby in its two forms. It is also a first step in complying with the AFC directive for all domestic leagues in the confederation to have domestic cup football in addition to a system of promotion and relegation.

If indeed this occurs next year, it will be another step taken towards presenting football as it is elsewhere in the world to the Australian market. It will also enable the football public to pin their association to football fandom where it lies whether it be to a State league club or an A-League club. This will grow a united product which is not football in two separated forms but is one and is celebrated as such.