'What are we? What do we stand for?' Few are better placed than Paul Trimboli for this analysis on Australian football

Australian football has never been short on ambition but finding the money to sustain it has often proved far more difficult. Paul Trimboli has lived through enough iterations of the game to know the cycle better than most.

From the final years of the National Soccer League to the rise of the A-League, the Australian legend has watched the game in this country evolve, stumble, recover and reinvent itself. The 458-game NSL icon has a simple way of describing one of its ongoing challenges ahead of Saturday's mouth-watering Australia Cup final between South Melbourne and Melbourne Victory - two of his former teams.

"I've always jokingly said football seems to be this environment where you make a dollar and you spend a dollar fifty," Trimboli told Football360. "Obviously, over the long term, that causes issues.

Heading into the 2026-27 A-Leagues season,negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement remain ongoingafter the previous CBA expired, while adispute involving Australian football's referees was only recently resolved. The A-League's financial challenges are also well documented, with Western United the latest club to disappear from the competition.

EXCLUSIVE:Australia Cup finalists deliver their message to the APL as South Melbourne prepares its next A-League bid Trimboli, though, does not pretend to have the answers. I have a lot of observations, like most people, said Trimboli, who is now working as Football Victoria's Executive Manager, High Performance and Pathways.

I've lived through so many different variations of the top league and how it's structured, and then the grassroots. We just never seem to have been able to really bring it all together.

Obviously, the start of the A-League brought a real energy and optimism. I'm assuming - I was probably a little bit young - but the start of the National League was probably something similar back in the day.

We've had some incredible teams and incredible players come through the system, sometimes almost in spite of the chaos of everything else. That shows you that there's still passion for the game.

But we've really struggled at times to work out: what does the professional level look like? What are we trying to be?" It is a familiar contradiction in Australian football.