The APL may believe the latest round of A-League salary cap cuts will help reign in unsustainable spending, but they’ve failed to consider their most important constituents – fans.
If the Australian Professional Leagues wanted a glimpse of what a future with no fans looks like, they got it on Saturday night when Auckland FC all but sewed up the Premiers’ Plate with a 2-0 win away at Melbourne Victory.
There were 13,564 fans in attendance at AAMI Park for what was one of the biggest games of the season for both clubs, yet the atmosphere was flat after members of the North Terrace announced their leadership group had been banned for two years.
That was in response to members of the active supporter group allegedly boycotting Melbourne Victory’s 5-3 Pride Round win over Adelaide United in favour of turning up to watch the club’s National Premier Leagues team go around in Shepparton instead.
A new era of the UEFA Champions League is here, only on Stan Sport.
Eight banning orders were handed out by Football Australia in the wake of an NPL clash ultimately marred by allegations of homophobic abuse – one to a supporter who was already serving a life ban for his role in 2022’s Melbourne Derby pitch invasion.
There’s a bit to unpack here and for the avoidance of doubt, let’s not temper our words.
Firstly, anyone caught using homophobic slurs at a football game in Australia deserves to be banned. There are no two ways about it.
Football is for everyone. If you can’t tolerate the game being inclusive, then find something else to do.
Which brings us to the elephant in the room.
Too many members of the A-League active supporter groups think the game is about them.
Some members of the North Terrace have been the worst culprits of this in recent years – tarnishing the Melbourne Victory brand with dangerous pitch invasions, dodgy chants, and wannabe-hooligan behaviour at away games.
Plenty of Victory fans have been sick of their tiresome antics for years, and many will no doubt be glad to see the troublemakers weeded out from the terrace.
That said, we’ve seen mass bans go drastically awry in the past, with some supporters handed banning notices for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And while that seems unlikely to be the case here, it’s no surprise to see the North Terrace publish a series of social media posts claiming they’re the victims of unfair persecution.
All of which brings us back to the APL’s new executive chair Stephen Conroy telling selected journalists last week: “What we’re seeing is what we frankly think is an unsustainable trend, in terms of their performance, their profitability, their losses.”
He was talking about clubs like Melbourne Victory overspending in what the APL labelled a “player-spend arms race”.
Wanderers fans celebrate a goal (Photo by Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)
Unfortunately for Conroy – who was appointed to the board as an ‘independent’ chair in September 2023, but who is now apparently running the show after Nick Garcia was redeployed – he neglected to mention the one group the APL consistently forgets.
Fans.
Professional Footballers Australia was quick to criticise Conroy’s announcement, with chief executive Beau Busch claiming a new $3 million ‘hard cap’ for the 2026-27 season was not agreed upon by the union and amounted to little more than a “half-baked cost-cutting” measure.
But it also won’t sit well with fans, who are somehow still expected to shell out for increasingly expensive match day tickets and Paramount+ subscriptions for a competition the APL now keeps reminding us is a development league.
And at some point you have to question just how much of a handbrake the APL can keep applying to the A-League Men before the whole thing blows up in their face.
They got lucky Auckland entered the competition with a game plan – and plenty of cash – in what has been the one of this season’s undoubted success stories.
But former senator Conroy would do well to remember the people he’s actually supposed to serve in his role as APL executive chair – namely ticket-buying fans.
