"Team 14" would be more accurate, but hey, everyone's playing let's pretend

Well said.
FFA need to get their shit together and get the hell on with it.

I'd consider moving back to the Dandenongs to be within cooee of this club. I was always a big supporter of the original Heart idea.
Just so much potential in this area..

Don't forget, the local governments are also trying to get the 3rd airport (domestic) at Clyde, and that's also looking like it's getting some love from above by the state.

Cheers :)

Here here, see there's plenty of people in the rest of the country that realise Melbourne is an overblown shithole worth staying away from but that the rest of Victoria is pretty great.

There's Once Caldas in Colombia. Caldas is the name of the department (equivalent to a state), "once" means eleven in Spanish.

i dont really like the name team 11/14 what ever. 

id just use the name Dandenong Rangers F.C.

1) this is part of Melbourne
2)nobody willingly goes to Dandenong.

Yes you just sit tight in the inner city where it's best. Already far too many Melbournians looking to get out of Melbourne on the weekends as it is.
Yes it's true Melbourne really is the best place in the whole world, haha..

Getting out of Melbourne? It is Melbourne lol, just a shit part of it.

I’ve just seen the bid presentation and all this talk of football heartland is pure tripe, the area never had an NSL team, never done anything of note. The heartland of football in Melbourne has always been central (south), the north (Heidelberg, Preston, Brunswick)and the west (knights, George cross), we had over half a dozen NSL teams in this city and none of them were from there.

If it gets up good luck to them, but don’t try tell people where the heartland of the game is in this city.

At least when the Wanderers talked themselves up the area had the history to back it up.

Could we not potentially combine the A-Leagues two most contentious issues; Expansion & Promotion/Relegation?
Commit to adding 2x new clubs every three years, and every three years, kill 2x clubs off?
IN Brisbane City, South Melbourne OUT Wellington Pheonix, Wanderers.
3yrs later..
IN Wollongong, Dandenong OUT Melbourne City, Sydney FC

Hmmm and a franchise without a stadium or fan base or anything is?

Hmmmm

This team will have the potential to draw numbers not too dissimilar to city, only in a smaller stadium which will be a bonus.

The big hurdle would be the first season, they won’t have a stadium, afc rules don’t allow 3 teams to play at the one venue so AAMI Park is out of the question...will be a bit of a pickle.

And that's the problem

You go back 5 years ago and the entire show was being run on $17m a year with the exact same number of clubs and effectively the same playing stock

There is no point whatsoever in going through a financial viability tender process for clubs when the end result is the FFA are not only going to pay for the running of the club but also help them make a profit. Throw two darts at a board and that's the club selection process. Stanhope and Tongala

When the A League started Lowy only wanted $15m for the whole of football. Clubs had to pay for themselves. It wasn't long ago that clubs were only getting $800k from the shared pool

Now obviously we want to close the gap so we don't have clubs folding mid season but there has to be a common sense balance between a bigger premium for clubs and actually finishing the league framework

If the last TV deal was to give clubs $2.5m to help close that gap, then not a dollar more should have been given until we had at least 14 clubs, or even 20 clubs split into two tiers (with bigger handouts for the top tier). But instead we saw the exact same mistake of trying to close the gap once again. Clubs were even demanding $6m

Any A League team should be able to muster $1m-$1.5m in sponsorship, corporate partners, local government assistance and gate keepings. If NQF cost $3.5m and they are no worse than the Mariners today then a $2m-$2.5m hand out until the league has been finished is very reasonable

The $10m that went to the same 10 clubs when the FFA opted to give them $3.5m instead of $2.5m could have paid for 4 more teams!

Instead we are stuck in a situation where expansion will cost $7m, and that's assuming the clubs aren't going to ask for more money 5 years from now

I’ve been a big advocate of this bid and it’s potential.
Ultimately this bid isn’t one that will average 15k crowds straight off the bat but it’s a generational investment.

Technically it’s the geographic ‘heartland’ of a sprawling Melbourne.
Clyde, Berwick, Cranbourne and the surrounding suburbs are absolutely booming and they are struggling to keep up with its infrastructure.

It wouldn’t take much for this side to average 8-10k a season. If they host 3 derbies a season against victory and city plus a few high drawing games against wsw and syd they only need like 6k against all the other sides to get a respectable average.
And then you remember City and Victory get a sugar hit from their home ties against them.

I really hope the state government play ball on this.
The potential economic benefits to Dandenong and Casey would outweigh the initial outlay over time.

Paul Wade, Vince Grella, Mark Bresciano, Steph Cately, Jackson Irvine, Bailey Wright, Scott McDonald, Ljubo Milisevic, Eugine Galekovic, Ajdin Hrustic and many more didn't appear from thin air, you know.

The population is almost 1.5 million right now down there and growing fast, including higher representation of immigrant communities and young families, so perhaps the argument shouldn't be about where the heartland of football was, but rather where it is now, and where it will be in the future?

Addendum after having to deal with Horto: I'm sure you understand that I'd like to see the ready-made South Melbourne get in as well, but that doesn't take away from the compelling points of this bid.

Do you have next month's winning lotto numbers too ? happy to split the earning if its a 7 figure win :)

Seriously , is the south east melbourne area a growing pot off junior football teams and culture ?
 thought South Melbourne and their strong heritage would be the best for a 3rd team in Victoria

Any bid that adds significant infrastructure to the game needs to be considered very seriously...  The only blip in this plan is that it's not funded.  Teams have struggled to come up with operating costs - let alone $170m worth of stadium costs.

27,000 posts, I guess I was due to be right about something in one of them lol

According to the bid's own page, Dandenong is the "most diverse" municipality in the country, and they claim over 90 football clubs in the area with 17k players, which is probably hard to dispute.

Which is a feather in South Melbourne's cap with Lakeside ready to go, but yeah if they can pull off getting that stadium built it would be a tangible addition to football in Australia as a whole.

With so many marginal seats down there and the investment in the Skyrail infrastructure to Dandenong Station, it wouldn't be in the realm of fantasy to see both major parties matching their backing for this stadium ahead of the coming state election, and you can be sure that the bid's backers from the three Councils down there would be very aware of this.

Don't think any government is stupid enough to spend $250 million+( cause that's what it will end up costing!!!) on a soccer stadium for essentially a private franchise that will be used around 15 times a year. People are fed up with money being wasted on this type of stuff. I think the government recently announced that it will be giving hundreds of millions to upgrade the AFL owned Etihad Stadium. Fucking ridiculous imo. Build and psyfor it yourself ffs. This type of money is better spent on what the community out there REALLY needs, schools, healthcare, transport etc etc. I'm not really seeing or hearing a massive community groundswell of support, anticipation etc for a team out in Dandenong either.

$60 million for Lakeside is a-ok though?

I’m not from Melbourne, so I’ve got a couple of questions.

- this is a bit of a rough/ lower socioeconomic-economic part of Melbourne right? What’s a Sydney equivalent?

- Am I right in thinking there is zero AFL representation here? What’s the closest AFL team?

Throwing up 10 players that have come from that region has very little relevance, melbourne knights produced the same amount and most of them lived in 2-3 suburbs out west lol.

However i do conceed that the bid fits the model of what the ffa tends to go for. Granted of those 1.5 mill a significant chunk of the south east is considered indian/chinese hotbeds who have very little interest in our game. Which is why the traditional football history was always concentrated in other areas which i memtioned before. Its not quite the wanderers clone they seem to be boasting about.

Im actually not interested in the South bid, we have no business being in this version of the top flight, we would be out of place and any bid should be binned.

They had to find a home for athletics and the vis, lakeside doesnt get done without Eddie McGuire, it clearly had afl fingerprints on it.

Good post, agree with all that. It's about 2018 not 1977.
And to stress, i want Souths and this bid in also. I've lived in or near to and have an understanding of both these areas. Both are particularly important to the future of the game.

When Bob Jane Stadium was originally built around 25 years ago South Melbourne matched dollar for dollar the government contribution to the project, around $5 million from memory. Before that we had a long term lease at Middle Park and were about to build a brand new social club there when the government took the land over the GP track. Lakeside wasn't exactly given to us. And the $60 million spent on it a few years ago was basically a series of Collingwood/Athletics/Olympic Park/Eddie Maguire side deals designed to give Collingwood FC the site of the old Olympic Park for their training centre. Funny how Maguire was on the board of Aths Australia at the time....Off course you're entitled to compensation when leases are broken and land is compulsory acquired. We have built up a certain amount of 'equity' at Lakeside with which is absolute prime Melbourne real estate. That's why we have a massive headstart on every other bid. We already own something tangible.

The very first year of operating the A-League the FFA's revenue was $27m up $13m from the last year of the old regime.  In his report to the AGM after 5 years Lowy stated that revenue has reached $85m including $20m broadcast rights, $17m in sponsorship and $17m in gate receipts.  In another of his addresses to the AGM Lowy indicated spending on the A-League including distribution to the clubs was $31m.

The $15m Lowy got out of the Government to establish the FFA included $6m as a loan and $3m pa for 3 years.  It was to supplement the FFA's revenue over that 3 year period not the cost to operate the A-League.

Perhaps Paramatta. Melbourne is far more geographically central than Sydney, but the south-east spreads much further than any direction, and like Paramatta, Dandenong functions as something of a CBD for that area as that's where the infrastructure splits out for other areas, ie the Pakenham and Cranbourne train lines. There are more high rise buildings around Dandenong Station than anywhere else that far out from the Melbourne CBD, easily.

Zero AFL teams are from there, the closest traditional home of an AFL team is St Kilda which is really only a few k's from the CBD, but their training and admin has since been relocated to Moorabbin which is about half way in that direction. AFL also famously experimented and failed with Waverly Park, but unlike the mooted Dandenong Stadium it was so far from any infrastructure and before the huge growth we've seen now that they pulled up stumps and demolished it and turned it into houses. To add salt to the AFL's wounds the developer must have been a football fan as all the streets are named after English football stadiums lol

Essentially it's the centre of an area with almost 1.5 million people, many immigrant communities and young families, with no local representation in other football codes.