https://keepup.com.au/news/why-sydney-is-the-new-home-of-the-a-leagues-grand-finals
From 2023, A-Leagues fans will be no different, as Sydney becomes the home of the Isuzu UTE A-League and Liberty A-League Grand Finals for the next three seasons.
- A-League Statement, 12th Dec 2022
The A-League in a process that is as mystifying as it is senseless, decided to award the Grand Final to the Sydney Football Stadium on a permanent basis for a period of years. Although this does add a degree of permanence to the finals, as Australia is vast an unwieldy, doing this is a great inconvenience to anyone who isn't Sydney, Western Sydney, Macarthur, the Central Coast, or Newcastle. Amazingly, this squeaked through with majority support of the clubs; which I can only take it to mean that the clubs who were okay with this were Brisbane, Melbourne City, and Obligatory Western Melbourne FC. For everyone else, this would have them hopping mad.
I can understand Football Australia's desire to want to establish tradition because so much of the world that we live in, is built upon tradition and collective story. Tradition and story both work better when they repeat themselves on a regular basis. By doing so, tradition and story benefit from a past which is predictable and reliable. The problem that the A-League has is that in wanting to sever itself from the ethno-cultural shackles of the past, it kind of had to invent its own future. It did this at a time when there was no proper national Cup; so cam to the then logical conclusion that the people would want a finals series after a regular season. A structure like this is fine if you have one league with no hop of promotion and relegation, or perhaps many conferences which is what exists in the United States but that's all that that structure should be used for. A finals series is sensible if you have a multi-group stage followed by a knockout phase, which is what the World Cup, European or Asian Champions League do, but for a league, it is unnecessary and silly.
The cultural centre of Australian football is in principle, either a cousin of the English, or broadly European. With the exception of Switzerland which has its own insane and unique way for deciding who its league champions are, all leagues in Europe play a league without a final series and the champion is the team with the most points at the end. There is nothing wrong with this at all. It is sensible.
The cultural centre of Australian sport generally though, has been slightly different. Both the AFL and Rugby League have had finals series for quite some time; so nobody questioned the sensibility of having a finals series in principle or even if it was fit for purpose. I suppose that the A-League wanted some sense of carnival for its last game of the season and having a Grand Final was the vehicle to do that. This is despite the fact that a Cup format already has that by nature and once the Australia Cup was established, it should have been that carnival.
If I were Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else, then football in Australia would be organised with a League in which everyone plays each other twice or four times, both home and away, or three times where the number of home and away games that the sides get are all equal. It would be 4 points for a win; 2 points for a score draw; 1 point for a scoreless draw; 0 points for a loss. The league champion would be the team who has earned the most points at the end of the year. This is far more sensible as it means that teams end up playing all the way until the end of the season. Granted that this can mean that a team might be crowned champions-elect well before the end of the season but the truth is that if that happens, then such a team is deserving of being league champions. However, I am not Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else and the solution arrived at, appears to be a solution in search of a problem. My solution for the Grand Final of the A-League, would have been to eliminate it on the basis that it is silly and pointless.
As for the Cup, well we have one of those now. It is possible for a rank amateur team of tradies and butchers to win the Australia Cup, although it is highly unlikely. The structure of a cup is such that everyone must win every game that they play and because it is a knockout competition, by its nature it produces a Cup Final. This is also sensible. Maybe there is a place for the Cup Holders to play the League Champions in a Charity Shield type match but I do not think that this is necessary.
When it comes to Cup Finals, in most cases in Europe, the Final is played at a ground which is not home to anybody. If this was the case in Australia, then the Cup Final should rightfully be played at Bruce Stadium, Stadium Australia or the MCG but all of these places are equally bad for watching football in. Olympic style stadia have weird ends that are perfect for athletics and oval sports but not football which is played on a rectangle. Of these grounds, my choice for playing the Australia Cup Final would be Bruce Stadium; not only because it is mutually horrible for everyone but as it is in the nation's capital, that seems to me to be the logical home for it.
All of this is quite apart from the fact that neither Football Australia nor any of the clubs in the A-League own their own grounds. This is one of the perpetual problems for sport generally in Australia, where teams are tenants of their grounds rather than owners. I find it insane that AFC Wimbledon which is a third-tier English football club can own its own ground in London but professional teams in Australia are either unwilling or unable to. I would have thought that from both a cash flow and taxation perspective, that it would make more sense to pay for and own an asset rather than pay for the rental of one and have no say in the running of it at all. From that perspective, the best answer would have been for Football Australia to build its own ground somewhere and then lease that ground out to tenants while it is not in use. If I could pick anywhere in the country, then an 80,000 seat stadium in Albury would have been the perfect venue.
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