Yes, the battle for places inside the top four is well and truly joined, and teams switch position weekly. It can' t be denied that it is exciting and provokes debate and interest. But down the bottom of the ladder it's all something of a yawn fest. The Wanderers and the Jets, and perhaps — most likely depending on the result of their next two or three games — the Mariners' seasons are shot. For their supporters the next 10 weeks hold out the prospect of little more than an extended pre-season and trial period (in the Jets case) or a program of preparation for their Asian Champions League defence for the Wanderers. The Mariners have been eliminated from the Champions League in the preliminary round, so they don't have to worry about that. So for them the last two and a half months of the season is essentially about consolidation and looking forward to next season too. Can the A-League continue in perpetuity like this, where for some teams the season is over months from its official end?

There are myriad arguments that have been made against the concept of promotion and relegation being introduced in this country, and it is unlikely that we will see it some time soon. Entrenched interests and a fear of seeing a major population centre without a top-tier team tend to dampen discussion. The FFA has licensed existing clubs for 20 years (bar Wellington) so that would make it legally difficult, although not impossible. Yet in social media and within elements of the game itself the concept is being discussed more than in the past. Perhaps that is a reflection of the difficulties being experienced by clubs like the Jets and the peripatetic Mariners, with some arguing that a handful of the traditional clubs, excluded when the A-League was brought into being, might offer more stability at the very least. But promotion and relegation is a tantalising prospect further in the game's development. Certainly the creation of a genuine national second division with one or two teams going up or down would generate far more interest at the foot of the table, lend greater urgency to the fixtures in which the strugglers compete and put much more pressure on players, coaches and club administrations to deliver. At the moment the only punishment for mediocrity or failure is the risk of lower attendances and some disgruntled sponsors. The argument in Australia is always that the country is too large to have a genuine second-tier competition, or that the money is simply not in the game to sustain two professional leagues, or that there are not enough players, or that the fans won't be interested, or that the media won't care.

But football fans, I suspect, would care and take an interest. They are culturally attuned to the vagaries of fate and have spent their lives watching overseas leagues where quite often the battle to avoid the relegation trapdoor is far more interesting than the contest to win the league. The distance question is an issue in this country solely because of the economics of the game, which does not as yet generate the vast resources of the AFL or NRL and would struggle to subsidise travel for second-tier clubs. But in the National Premier Leagues there exists a viable second-tier structure that could be used to find the candidates for promotion or relegation. Think of the various NPL leagues in each state as the regional equivalents of A-League 2. The champions now go into an end-of-season tournament where they play off against each other to determine Australia's NPL Champion, effectively the second-division title winner. Why couldn't that club go up and simply replace the side that finished bottom in the A-League, with the team that finished runner-up (the beaten finalists in the NPL title game) playing a winner-takes-all match against the A-League's second-bottom side for a place at the top table?

Of course, money would be an issue. But if the FFA gets the TV and broadcasting contract right there should be enough cash to be able to grant promoted teams a one-off windfall bonus of $1 million to $2 million to help them build on the strength of their squad and pay their players as full-time professionals so they can be competitive at a higher grade. And can any one doubt that had last year's NPL champions, Adelaide's Metrostars, for example, gone into the A-League this season to replace last year's bottom club Melbourne Heart, then they would not have had a significant boost in sponsorship, media interest and support, helping them meet the higher costs of the A-League? In that instance it would have been interesting to see if Manchester City, who subsequently bought Heart and renamed it Melbourne City, had been quite so keen to invest in the Australian game. They may have turned their attention to another club, might have still been interested in Heart — at a much lower price — or simply looked elsewhere in the world. Yes, that would have been a lost opportunity for the Australian game, but sometimes sport has to be more than just about business.

Sometimes it has to be about the competition and the integrity of that competition: if Heart had faced relegation they might have changed their manager much earlier than they did, signed more players in the transfer window and not eased off to the extent that they only took two points out of their final 18 in the last six matches of the season, knowing that there was no real penalty for failure. And that gets us back to the point being made at the start. With no ramifications for finishing bottom where is the incentive for teams to play out the campaign with the intensity that they would if there were a real punishment for failure?