In the next few weeks and months, excavators will start shifting tons of soil that are more than 1000km apart, but tell the same story about building a future for football.
Melbourne City’s announcement today that the club will move to Casey Fields south-east of Melbourne, and create another of its lauded City Football Academies as a home for its entire club, will cost close to $20m and change the very identity of the club.
Meanwhile, further up the Eastern Seaboard, Sydney FC hope to move into their own, purpose-built complex in little more than a year, with multiple pitches, a 2000sq-m building to house every team and every member of staff, and even a hall of fame and museum.
In the longer term, both expansion clubs – Western United and Macarthur Bulls – have worked with local councils to design brand new, multi-million-dollar training and club facilities, in the latter case actually drawing on existing City Group designs.
Given that Western Sydney have already spent $20m on the Wanderers Football Park, itself boasting nine training pitches and multiple change rooms on an 11ha block, the investment in building the A-League literally from the bottom up is starting to reach steepling sums.
This is the long-term narrative going on in the background, for all that there is some predictable frustration in some quarters around the here and now.
Lawyers are finalising a fiendishly complicated agreement to split the A-League formally from Football Federation Australia and hand control to the clubs. All parties wanted it done sooner, but the literally hundreds of pages that make up the agreement will change the face of the competition.
Supporters’ eyes of course are focused only on the start of the new season on December 27 – always more concerned with player signings and their team’s immediate prospects than they are by architects’ drawings and bricks-and-mortar investment.
Yet one of the biggest criticisms of the A-League clubs in the early days was that they built from the top down. Clubs bought marquee players, sometimes with on-field success, but could rarely show a lasting benefit once the stars had moved on. Playing rosters were filled but sometimes in the early days trained on cow paddocks, while admin staff were bunkered down kilometres away.
The money being spent now is by owners who wanted the take control of the A-League so they could see and control where their investment went. Even Wanderers chairman Paul Lederer – wearing his hat as chairman of the Australian Professional Football Clubs Association – welcomed City’s decision to shift from Melbourne’s northern suburbs to south-east of the city, because of what it represents.
“This is a fantastic demonstration of the kind of investment that can come from a League with an ability to determine its own commercial future,” Lederer said.
“City Football Group have demonstrated their faith in the fundamentals of the Australian game and that is something we expect to be replicated by other investors many times once unbundling of the FFA and Leagues is completed.”
City’s move has other long-term implications for the working of the A-League. Hovering over a map of Melbourne and its surrounds, it’s obvious that the three Victorian clubs now have a more natural spread as neighbours and rivals.
The original idea a decade ago that Melbourne Victory and Melbourne Heart could establish a cheek by jowl rivalry like Liverpool and Everton or the Manchester clubs just never played out.
Now each has an area to cultivate and turf to defend. Not to mention hundreds of rolls of turf to lay, as the A-League clubs start building for the long term.
