You think it would be in everyone's interest to strike a new deal with an ironclad guarantee with the IAL having full control to run the comp.

Fox are probably well aware of this, they know themselves they need to work on ways to increase revenue and decrease expenses and theres the possiblity of Fox being scared to burn the A-league bridge for two reasons. 

1) Ending an A-league deal could possibly see football of all kinds die on the Foxtel platform, the interest in Bein would be minimal and all football fans would essentially leave the Foxtel platform as a whole. Any attempts to reclaim PL rights or other major European or world leagues would be irrelevant and may not garnish the benefits they would wish for.

2) The new IHAL is communicating and expressing ideas for improvement and growth and the collective intelligence of these businessmen mean the long term A-league could be highly successful and return to or even going beyond the heights of around the 2014 period. Therefore a possibly agreement could be made on an extension or priority bidding for the new broadcasting rights come 2023.

All optimist, but the calmness the FFA and A-league has displayed during the covid situation, seems to feel as if the ship is no longer sinking. Even with the league and individual clubs financial situations very shaky. 

that because gallop is not stinking up the joint being

Id say about 50% of football fans abandon foxtel when they lost the EPL the other 50% where cross code fans ie fans of both AFL/NRL and HAL 

If you subscribed to foxtel just for HAL it honestly made no sense it was expensive esp compared to signing up to the myfootball app or Kayo. 

The truth is going to hurt but the fact is since being burned HARD CORE by optus, foxtel has attempted damage control on football unsuccessfully by signing up independent football channels ie MU TV, Liverpool TV etc or signing on BEin Sports - optus did the smart thing signed up the UCL and essentially did in a few years what Foxtel struggled to do in over a decade and that was be a proper football fan platform. 

After about 2 years (post losing EPL) it became clear fox was looking to shift away from football if you ask me and paying stupid money for other codes and the dud sport that is cricket is costing them huge! 

But here is MY UNPOPULAR OPINION - 

Joining the AFC and going Dutch (development) was the worst thing we could of ever done for football - sure technically we weren't great in the past but we were better then we were now sure we made 1 WC in 32 years but the team that made it was BLOODY GOOD! The teams that missed out esp 1998 squad would of run rings around the  last 2 WC we sides we sent. 

People dont realise this but going to WC to 'make up' numbers and not actually compete hurts football no one wants to see us get smashed 3-0 to Spain and in the long run no one gives a sh!t if we only lost 2-1 to France we lost and we didnt even play good football... 

Joining Asia has made our players a hunting ground for poor development leagues -on the flip side  for FOOTBALLERS it has been great big $$ in UAE etc but for FOOTBALL it has been turd. 

The OFC was crap but we might have a better domestic and international product if we never left we also would of saved a f*** tone of money that could of  should of been put back into development - i like the Asian CL but lets be honest it is a total flop in Australia overall we low crowds and low viewership. Besides an amazing run by WSW and AU we have generally looked sub-par pushing the 'AL is sh!t' narrative.  

Think of all the decent players that went to 'Asia' due to us being part of the 3 + 1 rule and how badly that has hurt the AL 

Going Dutch was simply stupid the British System wasnt perfect but the Dutch system has been shit it only works for them because teams like Ajax can sell a player for 100million Euros and hire maintain a globe scouting network along with UCL participation money....When our record T/F fee is 1.3million it doesnt quite fly. 

If anything we should of stuck to our guns but just increased the need for coaching qualifications put money into pro/rel and united the old and new clubs instead of wasting money on all the sh!t we wasted it on - Marquees, Fury, 'consultants' useless executives, bribing people from the AFC etc 

The actual product itself is poor-to-average quality and it all stems of leaving OFC I think the A league 'standard' is 'better then' then NSL (not by much) but it is way TOO Vanilla teams play ea other to much, and the competition lacks substance without a reason to win and a reason to not come last. The NSL simply put was a better competition because it had the ingredients that a normal football league would have....I didnt even really like the NSL but it was home to community and a passion and the competition wasnt a joke wanna be AFL/NRL competition. 

Ill probably cop flake for this post but honestly i dont care - even SBS has abandon football 

-That's my 2 cents

Don’t worry about people who “are happy just to be there”. We didn’t make the leap but with WC expanding OFC will get a direct spot. 

True about Asian mercenaries

also hope the FIFA club things kicks off and OFC teams get spots while AL don’t. Will reinforce the bad decision.

What did you like the most ....

no pro/rel, the summer season, the two-legged Grand Final, or the conference system?

or maybe you liked the “bonus point” system for sides winning by 4 goals or more?? 

The NSL sucked .
The A League was an improvement in many many respects. It lacks things that can be implemented without nuking it totally.
We are at a place where evolution is possible and responsible.  Revolution must cease or we are doomed to cyclical failure.
There is little that won't be resolved, over time, with the introduction of a large 2nd tier (no conferences), that graduates with teams from the bottom with semi-pro, to full time at the top.
Have that 2nd tier integrate with the Regional NPLs first.
Each tier runs itself to standards agreed by all at that level, oversight for compliance by a central body.
Then stick the A League on top and you have a sustainable monster that will have the capacity to grow at the determination of its constituents.

The world has changed and football has moved on.
Asia and Africa  have raised their game tremendously.
Australia is trying to do the same.

Unfortunately some people are living in the past .The so called Golden Generation is overhyped.When we went into the World Cup in Germany ,we had Guus ,Kewell,Viduka and co and we were still favourites to be eliminated from the group phase.A freak of a player called Kewell got us through.Take him out of the team and we would have done no better than in our other World Cup appearances.
Without Kewell we wouldnt have even qualified.

People need to look forward ,otherwise we will end up like Kodak and the Dodo.

https://theworldgame.sbs.com.au/fox-sports-looks-to-cut-a-league-outlay-by-half-in-renegotiated-tv-deal

       

Fox Sports looks to cut A-League outlay by half in renegotiated TV deal

     Besieged rights holder Fox Sports is seeking to slash its $57 million per year funding commitment to the A-League by 50 per cent or more, as parent company Foxtel fights for survival.         Updated Updated 1 hour ago        By        Dave Lewis          

Having last month paid a $12 million quarterly instalment to Football Federation Australia amidst the spectre of legal redress had the money been withheld, Fox Sports has now flagged its intention to renegotiate the remaining three years of the six-year contract.

Parent company Foxtel is $2 billion in debt and has cut 250 jobs with more redundancies likely as subscribers desert the pay-TV provider for cheaper streaming services.

Multiple sources close to the matter have confirmed that initial discussions are imminent on a restructuring of the agreement between Fox Sports and the FFA, which could include a ‘performance based’ component in terms of the A-League delivering improved viewership numbers ...Broadcast rights analyst Colin Smith, head of the consultancy Global Media & Sports, is convinced Fox Sports will be looking to trim its annual outlay to $28 million, or less.                       

If you literally read the next line i didnt like the NSL it had a number of issues but the league structure was better then the HAL 

I dont think the HAL needs to be scrapped but it needs to be changed 

Oh dear, just imagine the new ffa re-negotiating for half (or less than half) of what Lowy got. And still on Fox...

The NSL was a basket case competition imo and the reason I posted that reply to your comment was your comment to the effect “the NSL had more integrity as a football competition”. Well it just didn’t, and we tend to romanticise about it more and more as time passes but man, it shifted from winter to summer, had conferences, weird play off systems for finals, had 4 points for a win, awarded 1 point for a loss, outlawed draws and replaced them with penalty shootouts, it had clubs fold at an alarming rate, and maybe the only consistent thing about the NSL was its inconsistency .... maybe the worst crime of all against football was the fact it called itself “soccer”, ugh. 

Oh fuck off you whining moron. 

That idiot libel aside, is anyone surprised by this? The ratings indicated 50% at best. 

This actually what the league is currently worth. 

And for that, libel, we can thank the Loweys and Gallop, no one else. 

Let's try to blow the head off the NSL zombie because it just keeps trying to get out of the grave.

Conferences: In 1984 the competition split into 2 "regions".  It held the benefit of expanding the competition, allowing the two big drawing Croatian teams to join and the introduction of regional pro/rel (with a couple of clubs "quarantined").   The benefit was that with the expansion and regionalisation the crowds would increase.  (Think more derbys).  Result was that crowds dropped to an average of 2000 and they didn't recover until the conferences died in in '87.  

Summary:  Conferences blow.  Regionalisation doesn't increase crowds.  You just have a State League with a fancy name.  Pro/Rel was fully politicised and just didn't work.  St George did recover when put back in the NSW State League and promptly entertained larger attendances than they had enjoyed in the NSL.  Weird but true.  Sydney City dropped out of the League after it became national again because they said it was sending them broke.

Summer vs Winter:
Channel 9 had changed cricket forever.  The same people were asked to look at Australian Soccer and they came up with a bunch of changes that were deemed necessary to get the game on television ( the big money). In 1989 we transitioned straight from winter to summer.  Plenty of football that year.  The pitches were better and the crowds started to improve.
First GF was 26.000 odd with Sydney Olympic vs Marconi.  New record crowd.
Crowds actually rose (rocketed) from 500,000 total with an average of 3000 to a new total of 1.5 million average of 5000.
The ABC started broadcasting the games.
It was about this time that a couple of players declared that they would become full time professional players.  Mark Jankovic and Eddie Krncevic? Peter Sharne? So there was some money at the clubs that were willing to pay a living wage to a few of their top signings.
So the game was going busters right?  The ASF meanwhile ran a critical loss of $690k.  Not a happy bottom line and one that risked the National Team and somewhat obviously any investment at all at any level of the game.

Summary:  Summer improved crowds, attracted television and improved finances locally, but not for the ASF.  The game was played on better pitches but afternoon games were sometimes testing player and spectator comfort.  Spectators generally enjoyed the late summer evening games more than the drizzly freezing winter alternative played in a bog.

Soldiering on with it until everybody went broke:
Over the next 10 years the game became massively financed in Europe and suddenly there was a lucrative path for players to have a high paid career - as long as they were happy to pack their bags and move offshore for a decade.  The "stars" left the local game.  They did however improve as players and this rapidly improved the prospects of the National Team.  The problem remained that the ASF was perennially broke and couldn't afford to arrange quality travel, accommodation, or wages when it called on their rising stars for representative duty.  It wasn't that great for the players either. Easier to play for say, Italy if you had a dual passport.  The NSL was part-time, under-funded and run along political lines closely associated with a couple of "larger" clubs and to a degree, the State they came from. 

It was clear that the Clubs based on ethnic followings couldn't afford to field fully professional teams, because their base crowd and interest, already insufficient, was falling as the years passed.  Attempts had to be made to attract a broader base of supporters identifying with locality rather than ethnicity.  (Whoa! This was 1950 all over again.  I digress.)
Suddenly the stage was set for Carlton and Perth Glory and Northern Spirit.  It worked and it didn't. David Hill pushed it forward.  The game had to go forward to escape the awful spectre of Senate inquiries into possible corruption at the ASF and its National Team setup that had just happened.  It looked rosy until the debacle against Iran at the MCG.  Dead man walking after that as Hill had emptied the piggy bank desperate to get Oz to the world cup.  Peter Hoare eh?  But what are you gonna do?  ASF dead and buried and the old chums stepped back up and took all the seats.

The ASF was down and out but those wonderful traditional teams playing out of boutique stadiums, with low cost structures, would hold up well. Right?
Between 2001-2003 the aggregate losses of the NSL clubs was (wait for it................) in excess of $52 million!  (Source: A History of Football in Australia).

Summary:  The NSL started brightly with great ambition.  It was torn apart by selfish interest groups, regional prejudice and chronic under-funding.  It wasn't an attractive proposition to gain the investment it desperately needed from television, sponsorship, or gate receipts.  Licensed Clubs particularly in NSW kept much of it going until even those Clubs actually started to fold under the burden of their Football teams.  In some cases it was lose the Football or the Club.

It wasn't put down by mysterious dark powers, racists, or the Illuminati.  It just wasn't a competition attractive to money.  It needed investment to make itself pretty enough to earn that money.
Not a lot of people with that sort of investment power were willing to pour it into a product that had no vision of what it would look like after the money was consumed.

It was dieing and it could not be revived.  Recite the Dead Parrot sketch and insert NSL instead of parrot and you can summarise where it ended.

Something new was tried and remarkably, despite the visionaries forecasts, has lasted more than 3 years.

THE NSL IS DEAD AND IT IS NEVER COMING BACK. 

Look forward.  The view is better. Not great.  Better.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Brilliant mate ... the last line is a killer....

The other zombie to destroy is the notion that 1 or any ethnic teams entering the AL would turn it into NSL.

I personally liked the name of the competition.  What was that really awesome name they had back in the 90s when they were sponsored by Ericson?

Totally agree with this comment.

Great summary.

Loved the line ”The NSL started brightly with great ambition” .... it did, and it should be celebrated for that and we should reinvigorate that “great ambition” as we look forwards. 

Well if fox get away with only paying half of the 48mil for next 3 yrs it will be the end of the overseas players and coaches , will that be a positive or negative? 

As previously reported, they will cut the salary cap in half, which is consistent with Fox cutting its money in half.
I'd be happy with the A-League running the 3+1 rule to be consistent with the ACL.
It's true more than half of the clubs will not be able to afford good foreign players, but a club like the Victory would be able to fill its quota of 3 or 4.

If that what happens then clubs will have to deal with it. 

Fowler will be happy as he can sign more backpackers to BR

He’ll be very happy - best team in 2020 

Could they not go to market if its renegotiated to see if someone else is wiling to pay more?

Such a watertight contract that one. Yeah Lowy really is amazing.

They could and probably will.