As expansion plans wither and the administrators dither, the clubs are aiming to wrest control of the A-League in a battle for the game’s soul

Despite a dream grand final that delivered drama aplenty, the A-League is about to enter into another tumultuous off-season as club owners fight to wrest control of the competition away from Football Federation Australia. With FFA so far failing to reach its broadcast deal target by over $20m a year, and the expansion of the A-League coming to a grinding halt, the owners have lost faith in an administration that is slow to make decisions and hides behind consultants’ reports.



For more than two years, FFA has been building towards the next phase of growth by focusing its efforts on increasing revenue via its broadcast deals and sponsorship. Plans were written, it launched a marketing campaign aimed at converting participants into fans of the A-League and arguably the greatest player in Socceroos history, Tim Cahill, was brought home on a multi-million dollar deal to bring much needed buzz to a competition many felt had become stale.

However, it all seems to no avail.

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Even with FFA winning a record broadcast deal of $346m over six-years, why are the owners in a stand-off with the administration? What has FFA been doing behind the scenes and why has it not pleased the people who have bankrolled the competition?

To understand this, we have to go back to May 2015, when FFA chief executive, David Gallop, released his vision for the game.

The lack of money in the Australian football economy has always plagued the sport. FFA has often called for government funding as well as being reliant on the multi-million dollar proceeds from the sale of A-League clubs such as Brisbane Roar and Newcastle Jets.

While the suits at FFA were openly proud of the Whole of Football Plan (WOFP) they had produced back in May 2015, the reality was that FFA had struggled to grow revenue beyond $100m.

It was time to call in the consultants, this time Boston Consulting, to help solve the following problem: “To take the game to the next level in Australia, the FFA needs to grow to a >$200m a year operation in the long term.”

Boston went to work, analysing FFA’s revenue against the likes of AFL, NRL, Cricket Australia and even New Zealand Rugby, and they recommended that “FFA needs to find a way to balance investment allocation across key strategic choices” in its short-term aim of improving “fan connection and enable further investment into the game”. In other words, the cow needed to be milked so it could be invested in star players.

However, FFA’s cash cow and star were one and the same. Ever since the federal government gave Frank Lowy $15m in 2003 to revolutionise the sport, revenue has moved from being almost totally reliant on the fortunes of the Socceroos to the national league being the main source of income – much to the annoyance of A-League club owners with a combined loss of around $250m.

The outcome from Boston’s report looked positive, as there was the possibility of increasing FFA’s revenue by more than 50% over the four-year cycle. The low-hanging fruit was a “100% uplift in the broadcast deal” to $80m, as well as increasing sponsorship revenue across the federation’s brand assets such as the A-League, national teams, women’s and community football.

While the A-League club owners were calling for self-governance, FFA’s sales pitch was that being one big happy family – from grassroots to professional teams – was the best way to increase the financial pie. This was supported by an accompanying chart created by another group of consultants, Gemba, which outlined in the WOFP that sports organisations, such as FFA, “can best reach participants and less engaged fans”, while the clubs were better at maintaining the relationship with “highly engaged fans”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Besart Berisha, Melbourne Victory’s joint Golden Boot winner. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty Images

Gemba’s fan segmentation report identified eight fan groups – from fringe fan to super fan – based on their level of engagement with FFA’s brand assets and their commercial value to the sport. Gemba also measured attendance and viewership of the A-League and identified that more than 83% of the 1.6 million super fans were also within the “low attendance quadrants”. With the super fans being valued at almost two-thirds of the commercial value of the A-League, this subgroup had been identified as priority to reach out to.

As part of FFA’s plans to move more resources into its digital platforms, the so-called connected football strategic plan was developed by yet another consultancy firm, Symplicit, which concluded that the federation was in the “beginners” quadrant – consultant speak for well behind Cricket Australia’s digital program.

It was not until some nine months after the release of the WOFP, that FFA released its first four-year strategic plan in February 2016, which highlighted the priority of audience growth and fan engagement to drive commercial revenues. The short-term goal was to get the “critical” $80m a year broadcast deal. A yearly target of increasing the number of junior participants supporting an A-League club by 10% per year was set. FFA also set up a fund “for its centralised approach to marquee player recruitment”.

FFA went to work. Additional resources were allocated to the digital department and a restructure in executive roles was undertaken. Westfield’s corporate bankers of choice, UBS’s Matthew Grounds and Guy Fowler, worked on the broadcast deal negotiations, along with Shane Mattiske, managing director of Neilson Sports Australia.

While the clubs called for ​more votes on FFA’s congress, what they really wanted was full control of the A-League

The A-League draw was once again front-loaded with derbies and major fixtures. After protracted negotiations, Cahill was signed by Melbourne City with FFA contributing to his wage bill from its marquee fund. It was all about getting a big increase in ratings and, therefore, more money from the broadcast deal. In the background, the A-League club owners were making noises that they wanted FFA to lift its allocation from $2.6m to $6m per club.

The 2016-17 season launched with the “You’ve Gotta Have a Team” campaign, using a 10-year old boy, Yoshi, to attract 15-year-olds and under who had “yet to make a solid commitment to support a Hyundai A-League team”.

Yoshi perfectly reflected this demographic, complete with dabbing, in his fictional tale of visiting various A-League clubs in the search of finding a team he could call his own. It was no surprise when Yoshi decided to support City, whose marquee signing is the author of children’s book series, Tiny Timmy.



In December 2016, FFA announced the $346m, six-year television broadcast package with Fox Sports. But the $58m a year deal, of which $6m is in contra payments, fell well short of the $80m a year target. All hell broke loose and suddenly the sport was engulfed with talk about revenue.



Questions were being asked about where the rest of the money would come from. FFA were confident it could bridge the gap by selling one game to a free-to-air network, along with selling digital rights and broadcast rights overseas. But the truth was that FFA needed at least $70m a year to cover the A-League club losses and also its own costs.

The new year was welcomed with FFA releasing new logos, developed by brand agency, Hulsbosch Design, for its elite competitions – A-League, W-League and National Youth Leagu. But it was overshadowed by their ongoing battle with A-League clubs.

Meanwhile, the clubs were furious at the failure to deliver broadcast money and pushed for a greater say in running the A-League. While the clubs called for more votes on FFA’s congress, what they really wanted was full control of the A-League.

The federation started to look for cuts, including in its own wage bill but that had been declining as a percentage of revenue. In the end the senior executive team was restructured and the Centre of Excellence earmarked for closure in August.



In late February, Gallop and his chairman, Steven Lowy, admitted that they could not expand the A-League without unsustainable losses. Again, consultants were brought in to assist developing models for a new structure, with a promise that it would take months before an expansion criteria was finalised.

In mid-April, it emerged that FFA had failed to find a commercial network to take the free-to-air for A-League and Socceroos matches, leaving Gallop to go cap in hand to public broadcaster, ABC. FFA is still hoping to secure a deal, but could only walk away with a couple of million dollars extra.

It could hardly get worse off the field, but in a bizarre move, FFA met the clubs in grand final week to discuss the cash distribution for each club for 2017-18 season.

After Gallop and chief financial officer, David Cohen, announced the clubs would each receive $3.25m, the owners staged a walkout and told FFA to come up with a better figure. The clubs estimate that the revenue generated by the A-League makes up to 80% of FFA’s total income. The club’s statement said that “under this proposal nearly every dollar would be pre-committed to cover the $3.2m of player obligations made up of A-League, W-League, NPL and NYL player payments”. It then went on to list almost every line item, excluding staffroom tea and coffee, in the expense column.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest FFA boss David Gallop. Photograph: Matt King/Getty Images

The leadership of Lowy, Gallop and the FFA board, has underwhelmed the owners. While Steven’s father Frank was seen as a visionary chairman, he is seen as too cautious. Gallop has been the boss for over four years and the experienced sports administrator has taken a considered approach to running the sport. While he touted the WOFP as being visionary, Gallop had to make sure that the media deal and expansion plans came off so he could get the football community’s buy-in. So far it hasn’t.

Questions have been asked about why the board, comprised almost entirely of bankers and lawyers – even Lowy had his university thesis published in an accounting magazine – have been unable tobuild an asset base and generate more revenue.



Currently FFA’s minuscule assets are mainly cash in the bank, which rises and falls based on revenue and expenses. The state federations, with their own additional revenue streams, hold all the property assets in the sport.

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For example, Football NSW has over $40m in property assets and Northern NSW Football is valued at over $10m so there have been calls to bring the state federations under the directorship of the national body. However, this is not as simple as it sounds, as each state federation would require their members to approve such a motion by majority vote. It is hard to fathom the likes of FNSW or Football Federation Victoria, the two state bodies pushing FFA on governance reform, to relinquish their stronghold.

For all of the A-League club’s posturing, what would they do specifically to grow the revenue stream and capital base?



The immediate opportunities lie with expanding the competitionand the removal of restrictions on non-competing clauses with the competition’s major sponsors would help each club to increase its sponsorship. Also a review of the A-League merchandise arrangement would allow more revenue to flow directly to clubs. “I am looking at this as a businessman. I would really like them to have that opportunity to make money on having that asset, to sell their shares if they want and for owners of expansion teams to buy in. We can raise capital that way,” Lowy told Australian Financial Review.



Lowy, in a previous interview with the same publication, admitted that his personal style is to “deal with things in a disciplined manner, one at a time, you can deal with issues that seem insurmountable. They become surmountable when they break down into compartmental bits”.



The question is, how long will football’s community allow this meticulous style of governance to continue? FFA has many parts and its stakeholders are restless. With the game in a financial holding pattern, they are looking towards the chairman to show some boldness with his vision and not to wait for the conclusions made by consultants.