I believe that for football to thrive we need smaller regional clubs such as Mariners and Jets and, indeed, clubs such as Woolongong and Canberra to expand the footprint of football, whether that be via the A league or a second division.

Regional markets are challenging, due to the limited population and corporate base to draw from.

Clubs like the Mariners are important for pathways and are fine overall if the model allows to operate at their own level. They become a ball and chain on the league however when they start squatting at the bottom of the table and every other club is forced to stay at their level.

Hate to say it, Gallop's comment was spot on about fishing where the fish are.

Mariners and Jets were going fine when the model worked. They then got changed around and put into a hole and it's very hard to dig out of. Wollongong and Canberra should come as expansion only. 

Very happy to see them there. Both have had their moments, even though I do support pro/rel.

The Jets were fine before their owner was screwed over by Trump. During the earlier years of the HAL, Jets often had the second highest memberships in the league. The fanbase is solid in Newcastle, they just need stable ownership and they could easily become one of the leagues 'big' clubs. 

Wash your mouth out ...! 

Agree.

If we ever got direct P&R in place, you'll get alls sorts of clubs earning promotion over the years, many will be even smaller than the Mariners, and maybe even more regional.
That's the beauty of it.
That's precisely what can hold our interest over many years.
There might be seasons when all the clubs are from Sydney and Melbourne, that might happen, that's just the way it is.

That will be the inevitable - and permanent - consequence of pro/rel and I don’t see any way of avoiding it in a full pyramid system 

Pipe down Wazman.. Back in the corner.

That’s why there will never be pro/rel

I think the Mariners early success was due to all clubs at that time being new entities, so the better resourced clubs hadnt established themselves enough to take advantage of their relative wealth. Also, the Mariners had more access to Western Sydney talent prior to the entry of the Wanderers into the league. If it is true about minimum a league salary being $70K, this is probably preventing the Mariners from being an effective player development club, a role that probably suits them best.

The Mariners had $7m revenue and made a small profit in season 3.  Then came the GFC.

https://www.ccmariners.com.au/news/mariners-continue-kick-goals-field

Yeah lots of fish in the gold coast when he put team there with the NRL, OVER the central coast

NRL support on the Coast is for traditional teams - not a new team. Souths, Tiigers, Bulldogs and the Eels do well on the coast because they are the teams the middle-aged Coasties followed as kids, whether on the Coast or when they lived in Sydney. I was a mad Tigers fan but since the merger with Wests have no interest in the NRL but there are plenty of people my age that follow their childhood teams. 

 

It helps for the regional team to be close to a bigger city (Sydney or Melbourne) to get the attendance boost from away fans. You could say NQF and GCU were too regional compared to Jets and Mariners. This is why I've always thought Wollongong and Canberra were good expansion options.

Coast is hardly regional these days. Gold Coast is a 1 hour drive from Brisbane and has good rail transport between the two cities. There are plenty of people that live in the Gold Coast and work in Brisbane. It has a population of nearly 600k. That is 230k more than Canberra, 290k more than Newcastle and 310k more than Woolongong.

Going from an initial “hard cap” to a “softer cap” with plenty of avenues to exemptions over the years sealed the fate of the so called smaller clubs

initially it was salary cap plus one marquee outside the cap? Not enough for the league to separate the men from the boys over a long term.  

But Wollongong and Canberra are closer to Sydney....

Yep.
That's why the EPL consists only of teams from London.

if that's the case, it would force all clubs in those states to look themselves in the mirror as they have no one to blame but themselves

Eleven former school friends meet up on the invitation of their mutual friend Frank. Two or three of them have gone on to have successful careers and are quite wealthy, while most of them getting by alright managing to pay the bills and mortgage, but one or two have had trouble finding work lately and are currently on the dole. Frank chose a rather upmarket restaurant, some of the guys who weren't as well off were uneasy about that, but with no other option they went along and insisted out of dignity that the minestrone was all they were hungry enough for, while Frank was having lobster and insisting on the most expensive bottle of wine for the table. At the end of the night, Frank says "so, we'll just split the bill evenly, yeah?"

There are not 11 Melbourne Victories and Sydney FCs in the A-League, as is the case in any football league.

Not Einstein said that "if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." If you're measuring the success of small clubs like the Mariners by the same expectations as Victory or Sydney then of course they'll appear to be a failure. If you remember that they've provided us with Rogic, Jedinak, Ryan and Amini (perhaps we'll add Ruiz-Diaz to that list soon) then they start looking like a terrific success.

We need more access to the top tier for small clubs like Mariners, not less, while the bigger couple of clubs should be free to challenge in Asia and higher, raising the standard while subsidising the rest of the pyramid with transfer fees. We need a system that rewards clubs staying within their means and investing in youth instead of pretending that we're 11 guys that can all afford the lobster.

Those that cannot afford lobster go to second division till they can. Mind you, EPL has 20 teams with 3 that go up, and three that go down every season, yet only 4 clubs can only ever win the title, 9 times out of 10 (Leichester City). Champions League, one massive bank balance vs another massive bank balance, and then there is a winner. Usually the same 14 teams compete, 3-5 teams usually good enough to win it. We are more than filled with this rinse and repeat.
AND, cause they are so wealthy, they themselves drive the price of players up up up up cause they can. So a players get obsenely rich beyond his wildest dreams. Shieks and the like can only have so many gold Rolls Royces and Harems I guess.
The Saudi arab shiek defeated the UAE arab shiek...damn!

Yep, you get it. 

In hindsight, my restaurant analogy could also have been 11 guys having to have Dominos at a bus stop in the rain so the poorer guys don't feel bad (franchise model, "competitive balance"), when ideally the richer couple of guys could be shouting lobster for everyone at the table (unshackling the big clubs, transfer fees).

That analogy with the two richer guys, is like the recent twitter article on A League Hub, that mentions rich owners of Melbourne City, Melbourne Victory and Sydney FC taking over the Mariners and Jets, by creating a fund for these teams as they cannot keep up with the wealthier teams in this comp.

That’s not quite the intent

by preventing clubs like Mariners and Jets falling over it protects the tv contract and prevents turmoil in the competition while new sponsors are sorted out, and of course a new tv deal is negotiated. 

Thats the ultimate reason I agree.