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.

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 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.

They could and probably will. 

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.

It now appears Fox will honour the remaining three years of the tv contract:

https://amp.smh.com.au/sport/soccer/club-owners-optimistic-about-fox-sports-a-league-appetite-20200503-p54pep.html?__twitter_impression=true

#ThanksNewFFA 

The new FFA and iHAL had plenty of time now to start planning and actioning a path forward and we don't even have a vision.

What a disastrous state of affairs we have led ourselves into.

You seem to be out by a decade.  Krncevic left Australia for Europe in 1981, and Sharne retired in 1988.  They and Jankovic played together at Marconi in the late 70s.

Yep.  Dead right.  I was picturing 1980 in my head when I wrote it.  Not sure how I placed it non-chronological order.  I remember the SMH did a story on two Marconi players announcing that they were about to become the first NSL full timers.  I was having a chat to a leading, if not the leading, NSL striker about that time and he told me was on 400 per goal.  I was stunned.   That was about a month's wages for a pleb back then.  This guy (wonderful person) had a full time Govt job.  His Sydney based club were tossing money they didn't have, at the team, chasing a trophy.

That was were the over-expenditure started.  It got worse after the overhaul in Europe.  That is how I meant to ramble the story out.  Now players could stay and get a good wage and maybe send their club broke or travel overseas and set themselves up for life - but at the real chance of losing their local comfort without ever getting a real gig in the big time.

A lot of people keep putting the forward the notion that for some non-understandable reason (must be the Aussie way!) why we foolishly entered the current era with a salary cap.  A huge reason was that the investors in the teams wanted to avoid the disaster that befell the NSL. Crazy overspending raged for a title that way too few could care about.  Who even remembers what the trophy looked like?  I bet you can mentally picture the FA Cup or the World Cup though....right?

Another, much hated latterly by the masses, idea was separating the League licence from the Club that managed it.  The idea was talked about as way of carving off the Football operation from your "real" club.  The football team could sink and not take the club house with it.  Well it hasn't been that easy for community clubs whether they be locality or ethnically based.  Ask Brisbane Lions if it was a costly venture setting up Roar.  On the other hand I've noted conversations where opinions were expressed where slick business operators might be able to pump debt into into the licence holding company and then send that neat little vessel onto the bankruptcy rocks.  It's probably good PR if you cry the nasty soccer people ripped me off and now I can't pay the scrillions of money owed to the debt holders of the shelf companys mortgaged to raise the capital for the licence!  So they say.  What do we really know if we believe the newspapers, or worse, the internet journalists?

I like real clubs being fully integrated with real football teams.  I also like to believe that a lot of good people aren't going to lose everything because they signed onto what seemed a good idea. Well good as long as you think with your heart.  There are new and interesting ways being trialled OS about managing Club investment and debt.  I genuinely don't have a view as to whether they work well, or at all.  The last thing this country needs is club after club falling out of the national competitions because their football department had the great idea if we bring in Ronaldo (the fat one) "we are gonna make millions through the gate and shirt sales".

Some interesting stats from sports industry:

March had an all time Kayo paying sub high of 408,000, But as of May 2nd, there were over 272,000 paying Kayo subscribers, due primarily to "cancellation and/or postponement of sports events as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic" http://footyindustry.com/?p=15702

incredible that 272,000 have hung onto Kayo

Imagine the loss of revenue that represents.

News Corp and Telstra took a 1.4b and 300m impairment for Foxtel. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-to-book-300m-foxtel-stake-impairment-charge-547921

Vision, planning? All things of which you have no proof of not happening. But what about the disastrous supporter relations that Lowy and Gallop left the game in? There’s some solid proof of how not to run the game. 5 years on and still the game has never recovered. What a state of affairs. 

Vision, planning? All things of which you have no proof of not happening. But what about the disastrous supporter relations that Lowy and Gallop left the game in? There’s some solid proof of how not to run the game. 5 years on and still the game has never recovered. What a state of affairs.