There's no need for the hypothetical

Fact 1: Australia has only 26 million people
Fact 2: The A League has enough money for it to be viable

Whatever hypothetical calculations you want to make to to try to establish the position of the A League is nullified by what we factually know

The FFA didnt make enough of the opportunities presented because it didnt match the AFL / NRL model. Under different leadership the A League would have thrived

I've been saying this for a while now, but we are better off having a break in January as we get lost in the traffic. it would also help by playing less games in the peak of summer. 

Not sure how you arrive at 2.  What do we "factually know", BB?  It's not enough to blithely state something as fact.  You need evidence.  I wasn't stating a "fact" - I was expressing a view, a subjective and anecdotal conclusion.

Mind you, I don't have figures to disagree, either.  But I do disagree, and sadly I believe I am about to be proven right when the current tv deal expires.

That, BB, is the only way we wll know.  You don't have any figure to back up your view. 

Man, there are lot of wild suppostions masquerading as objective facts starting to appear on this thread.  Your second sentence is a prime example.

You're referring to the billion dollar football economy, if you take a broad view, counting not just the professional game, everything underneath it, and government expenditure, land, equipment, etc, it would be a billion dollar football economy for sure.

We do have facts:
. A while ago the total FFA revenue was said to be over $100m a year. This is likely to be more
. A while ago it was stated that the total to date investment by the 10 owners was equal to that of the total to date TV deal dollars
. MV's total annual revenue a while ago was ~$18m despite less than $4m from the FFA. This is likely to be more
. CFG own a club among other international investors which gives us revenue sources other codes dont have access to
. In the recent bids two teams paid over $15m for a club, and one was willing to get support for a $180m venue. Other licences have been sold for over $10m

There is a lot of investor, commercial and international backing for the game here. It just doesnt suit the AFL / NRL model of a central pool of funds paying for equally sized clubs

We know there is a commercial difference between Melbourne and Gosford. We also know the more teams we stack in a single city, the less money there is unless we have a league consisting only of international sugar daddies. The reality is we get a league with 4-5 big teams, 2-3 teams that can compete and push them, and a few teams that round out the league for size and youth development

Keeping Melbourne to $7m, or forcing Central Coast to $10m-$12m is where the league fails. So is trying to find 12-14 teams of the same size

The A League can definitely work as there is definitely enough money to support it. Just like real life it isnt equal

And who do you think is going to stump up that money?

Nothing in your post suggests I should change my view, and the ferryman will come calling for the fare at the end of the tv deal.  We will have to wait, but we will see who has called this accurately.  I would love it to be you, but I don't think it will be, unfortunately.

BB, the only organisation with the financial muscle to save the  A League is CFG.  In the end, the fate of the League will depend on what CFG are prepared to do to save it.

Well, we could start with the clubs/consortium/people who made multi million dollar bids for the most recent licences. 
Take a look at South Melbourne, or Team 11 for example.

You asking me a question in future tense for things that have already happened. Who is going to stump up the money? Those who already did

I agree with you: The value of the league has diminished and since the code has been painted into the corner of the AFL / NRL model the future looks grim. There is no demand for 12-14 CCMs scattered across Australia taking it in turns winning titles. The ratings prove that

But to say that things couldn't have worked in Australia because of our population or number of rival sports is a cop out. The current state of the league was not an inevitability. It wasn't a case of biting off more than we could chew. We had a wealth of opportunities come our way but we knocked them all back because it didn't fit the bill of what the FFA wanted for the game

Even with your line about how CFG could save the league. Well no, because the FFA are looking at ways to make them money. They can only spend as much as CCM, and the FFA even chipped in to help them buy Cahill. A CFG rescue plan doesn't fit the model of has been Australian sports administrators staring at the AFL / NRL and visualising our teams, branding and ball

The A League under better management, even today, can still work. There is plenty of interest and commercial backing. But those days are numbered. If we are still 12 teams in a closed off graded league by the time our next TV deal comes around we can expect next to nothing. And the rich sugar daddies wont be hanging around so they can invest in a communistic model. If the A League fails, it has nothing to do with population

All good points.

But all the signals clearly point to Fox exiting the tv deal completely.  If they did offer a deal, ratings figures suggest a figure of no more than half of the current deal.

I don't know how the clubs survive with a halving of income.  But, honestly, I've been in the business a long time and I really don't see Fox bidding again.

I don't see FOX bidding either, I believe the last of FOX money goes to keeping Rugby with no meat left on the bone for HAL.

And look at where those kids went.

Where is that BS meter.....LOL

Arguably, under different leadership (ie one without the power/influence of the Lowy’s), the HAL may never have got off the ground. 

It was fine the first few seasons but after S5/S6 we went astray 

Mark Peters of the ASC didn't think football could support a national professional league.  It was only after O'Neil approached Lowy with this that Lowy insisted that it had to happen.  O'Neill then put his model together and sold the concept to Lowy and the Board.

When will we let the meme of Lowy being our lord and saviour die? The reboot of the FFA and move to the A-League was thanks to $13 million in grants and loans by Howard (at least he did one thing right) based on the Crawford report that he and Rod Kemp commissioned. Lowy didn't put in a single dollar of his own in and just sat on the board making connections to benefit himself. He didn't actually do anything. In fact, after riding the wave of success from the 2006 WC which he had nothing to do with he was heavily invested in keeping the status quo throughout his tenure, curtailing the Crawford report recommendations to focus power on himself, going about the 2018 WC bid in his own corrupt way and even making a FIFA ethics panel (that included a member from North Korea) go "hey, that's a bit too obvious" when he installed his own son as successor. Just another case of a well-connected billionaire benefiting of the public taxpayer's hard-earned. Set the game back 20 to 25 years.

The extra loans only came because of Lowy's connections as did the near $70m in Special Grants from the ASC that covered the FFA's losses each year through to 2014.

Look perhaps he was our Napoleon we had to have after our Reign of Terror, a dictator to crush dissent and enforce stability after the revolution, I'll give you that, but really with the government backing we could have had anyone sit in his chair and rebooted the game quite well but unfortunately it was someone who was a bit more used to looking after number one than serving the game.

Unfortunately the Liberal's dodginess with our money on this sort of thing is in the news now more than ever, but saying we wouldn't have gotten those grants without Lowy around (considering the government got the ball rolling on Crawford before he was back on the scene) is hard to prove with certainty, and what someone else might have achieved with that backing at the time is something we'll never know.

Did you know that John Howard personally asked Frank Lowy to take on the Chairman's role?  That is where the $13m came from.  Lowy negotiated for it from a position of strength because both Howard and Mark Peters (CEO of ASC) wanted him for the job.  It was Mark Peter's idea to engage Crawford to report on the governance of Soccer Australia and he saw Lowy as the man to lead the resetting of football in Australia that the Crawford Report described.

Lowy opened the door to government and big business because of his contacts.  Few others could get on the phone to the PM and CEO's of big business.  During his tenure he took the FFA's revenue from $14m pa to in excess of $100m pa.  When the FFA got into a bind financially during the GFC they were able to raise the problem with Government and arrange Special Grants at short notice, the largest of which was $11m.

To suggest that Lowy held the game up 20-25 years is to not recognise that without Lowy's involvement we would not have had a professional league and we would not have qualified for WC2006 because Soccer Australia was broke and couldn't afford to fund either.

There are plenty of things where Lowy can be criticised but to write off his involvement in setting up the FFA with funds to operate is not one of them.  The thing that can be criticised is his preparedness to take risks and he was bitten on the bum when he drove expansion of the league, the start up of both the W-League and NYL and the bid to host a World Cup all in the one period only for the GFC to cut a hole in revenue for the clubs and the FFA and tip the sustainability of both   on their heads.  Football has struggled ever since.

If it really is the case that Australian football could have only gotten the support it got due to Lowy's nepotism as a connected billionaire then I guess all that proves is that we have some really big problems as a society.

I would also say that you're leaning a little too hard on the GFC in your defence of Lowy's failures, to be fair.

Your French history needs work. 

Not at all.  Lowy led the decision making in the 3 areas I mentioned and the GFC led to an additional shortage of funds for the clubs and the FFA at the time.  The decisions are on Lowy and his Board.  Some clubs handed back their licenses because of the extra financial load placed on them by the FFA and the rest took on greater losses.  The high cost of the A-League was Lowy and the Boards decision in the first place.  They didn't have to accept O'Neill's model.  In my view it was the first of their failures and it put the clubs under financial stress from day 1.  The point is that although there are many things that can be pointed to as mistakes there are also many things where they managed well.  As an example the high cost A-League model was a mistake in my view but obtaining a revenue stream that is now nearly 10 times that of their predecessor is one of their successes.  The challenge for the new Board and the Indie-A is to minimise the mistakes and to maximise the good management but already the mistakes have had a higher profile unfortunately.

bingo

paladisious has no idea what hes even talking about.

without Lowy, the HAL doesn't get off the ground.

Well said.  Without Lowy the best we could have hoped for was a semi pro league and certainly no WC2006 quali.

once again abc has the worst match of the round jets vs wu 

Well there's certainly some Frankophiles in this thread lol

Robespierre was the guy you were looking for.. 
But Frank was definitely more Napoleon-like