'Other sports can only dream of our opportunity' - but now it's up to football to seize it in a season 'something needs to change'
Most sports end their season with its climax. For the first time, football in Australia has a pleasant problem to avoid: not starting with it.
It is going to be hard to top the emotion, atmosphere, drama, fanfare and loaded tension of the Australia Cup final last weekend, the largest ever crowd for a sports fixture at AAMI Park. It's funny, isn't it, how football is the sport that tends to hold those records.
Perennially derided, yet when the big moment comes, the interest is transcendent. But that's the sport's domestic challenge in 2026-2027, to harness that momentum and build on it but in doing so, openly address the areas that do need to be looked at to continue to move the sport forward.
It's the great paradox of the potential and the reality. The problem is,as Building Blocks host Matt Windley noted in Football360's podcast at AAMI Park on Saturday night,we now head to our domestic seasons with the team that captured the imagination, South Melbourne, now effectively sent out to pasture in a second tier that they, technically, cannot escape from and which runs in parallel but not in conjunction with the top tier.
Fair play, because the Sydney Derby is a clever way to continue that momentum and the optics from an A-League point of view. But what happens next is the hard part.
The Sydney Derby skippers face off. As much as we here at Football360 absorb and love the league and exist to ensure its stories are elevated and problems are challenged, the wider traction for it remains problematic.
But it is no longer just an awareness issue that is the problem on its own, no longer solvable simply through better story telling and engagement with a terrific cohort of young stars. The jungle drum beating for change will remain one of the underlying storylines throughout the season.
How does the competition become financially sustainable? Are we going to continue to skew younger and younger?
Will the belt tightening continue to see top players squeezed out of the league, be it to Asia or to grassroots football? As Ben Garuccio and Stefan Mauk pointed out while doing their season preview on Football360 this week, while the competition is incredibly even, which is great for season long engagement, it was hard to pick out too many out and out stars or even Socceroos Asian Cup bolters.