Interestingly that week often gets a bump in attendances.  It depends on who the home teams are.  Some years there has been a 30-50% jump in attendances compared to the week or two before other times it is the same or even slightly lower.  

Generally speaking, by the 27th, a lot of the compulsory family stuff is out of the way.

With the covid cases announced by Victoria (today 2 cases only) ellimination close everywhere else, I would say stadiums will be open to spectators everywhere by 27th Dec.

I have just come back from two weeks holiday on the NSW far north coast and there are people everywhere on holidays all up and down the coast. I think there is going to be a huge amount of people travelling/holidaying (within limits) this Christmas/NY period given the year we have had.

Team No	Name	Plays 3x	Plays 3x	Plays 3x	Plays 3x
1	Perth	2	11	4	7
2	Adelaide	1	3	9	11
3	Western United	4	5	2	12
4	Melbourne City	3	5	1	10
5	Melbourne Victory	3	4	8	7
6	Macarthur	7	8	9	12
7	Wanderers	6	8	5	1
8	Sydney	6	7	5	9
9	Mariners	10	6	2	8
10	Newcastle	9	12	11	4
11	Brisbane	1	12	10	2
12	Wellington	11	9	3	6

Did a quick prediction on what I thought the extra games over and above the 22 rodada might look like.

Don't know why they couldn't have just gone to 27 rounds and have the NSW/QLD clubs play each other a third time and the VIC/SA/WA/NZ clubs do the same. Would have ensured three derbies in Sydney and Melbourne, kept travel costs pretty low and made a lot more sense than a random four extra rounds. Hopefully this is the last season with such nonsense and in 2022 they go to a full triple round-robin again (33 rounds).

That's not a bad way to go about it.

Or 14 teams in the Near future and play 30 rounds, instead of 12 teams playing 26 rounds.

The Wellington to Perth trip is one of the longest trips in world football and crosses a number of time zones. 
It would be more likely that Wellington would be included with the NSW teams and Brisbane would be included with the Vic/SA/WA grouping.

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/football/aleague-victorian-derbies-being-saved-for-later-in-the-season/news-story/0839b9c390f0f240ff86b2bca3669e43

A-League: Victorian derbies being saved for later in the season

VICTORIA could be starved of matches in the early stages of the A-League season to avoid games being played in near-empty stadiums.
As the majority of A-League clubs return to training ahead of the December 27 season start, Football Federation Australia is playing a waiting game with confirmation of fixtures due to different COVID-19-enforced restrictions in each state.One scenario that Melbourne City, Melbourne Victory and Western United are bracing themselves for is having to play several away games in the opening weeks of the season due to severe restrictions on crowd numbers in Victoria.
With more people allowed to watch games in the rest of Australia, City, Victory and United face several weeks on the road.And while they hope to be able return to Victoria after each match, City, Victory and United may have to travel back and forth on the days of games when flying in and out of Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide.
Playing a host of away games early would ensure all the Victorian derbies involving City, Victory and United would be contested in front of bigger crowds later in the season.


The Victorian situation is improving, some restrictions lifted, but there is still a lot of uncertainty, especially around big crowds and interstate travel, so I would think that the Dec 27 start date would see at least a tiny bit of displacement (in the best case scenario).

With teams playing each other 3 times it’s not a good idea to do that to the Melbourne teams imo.

Agree that the lopsided draw needs to be eradicated asap and am also generally against metrics-oriented tinkering with the draw but with the reasonably high chance of Victorian teams having to play interstate or behind closed doors in the early part of next season I think it's a pretty reasonable call, and a nice change from blowing the derby load in round 1 as is the normal practice.

play the games in regional victoria?

Geelong, Ballarat, Warrnambool, Shepparton, Morwell, Bendigo

But where do you draw the line?
12 teams means 22 rounds plus 4 games. Melbourne teams will be playing derbies.

There is a chance Melbourne teams will play each other 3 times before they have played another team twice.

Imo the teams you play 3 times should be in round 1-4. It means 3 derby matchups in Mel and Syd (6 derbies in 4 rounds) and it is probably the fairest way in an unfair league draw.

That's actually quite a good idea. Much better than sending them interstate, that's for sure.

The logistics involved will probably be in the "too hard" basket for this league, though.

But but but... distance derby!

I get what you're saying, but for a start I think Brisbane would prefer to play NSW teams more, and secondly Wellington-Perth is just one fixture. The rest of the travelling would be a lot less with what I proposed.

Why? They've played games in those towns before.

I also wonder what it means for WU's home ground situation. Before they looked set on moving to Melbourne (I presume Whitten Oval was the front-runner), but now they may choose to stay in Kardinia Park if they can have crowds in Geelong (they certainly won't have any issue with capacity restrictions there).