Notes from the 2018 AGM

Another year, another overdue AGM.

Held in the social club on Thursday night, this one kicked off to a poor-to-middling turnout, depending on your point of view of 30-40 attendees. But since our quorum is apparently a mere 20 members for a meeting to be valid, we were in no danger of not having it go ahead.

This was president Leo Athanasakis' last AGM as president. During the meeting, he officially handed over the reigns over to Nick Maikousis. Gabrielle Giuliano is the new vice-president, and there were some new board members who will join the board following the AGM.

Bill Papastergiadis is chairman now, and unlike previous board members holding that role in recent years, he attempted and largely succeeded in ruling the evening with an iron fist. More on that later.

Of the two AGMs to be held on the night. the South Melbourne Hellas AGM was first, as is customary; and is also custom for these AGM reports, I will not report on everything as it happened, but rather group the varying matters by theme.

Financials
Taking into account that the data presented is now seven months out of date, our financial position seemed reasonably steady, but keep in mind that I'm no accountant. The club had a turnover of over $2 million, up from $1.8 million from the previous financial year. It was the first time the club's financial turnover has gone over $2 million since the NSL.

The club made a small surplus of about $10,000. The club claims that its debts have been reduced, and that it is making an effort to eradicate those debts as quickly as possible. Although there was an overall reduction in our debt levels, there was an increase in director loans. When it was asked from the floor whether these director loans would attract interest, the answer was 'no'. When I asked, only half-jokingly, whether there were actual paper contracts to make sure of this - to avoid a repeat of the Toumbourou affair from a few years ago - the answer was 'yes'.

The club earned about $110,000 from the Sydney FC FFA Cup game from 2017. It was noted that our former major sponsor, Luvarc - whose current operating state seems a bit iffy to this observer - does owe us money, and that we are seeking to recoup the owed monies.

The club's ongoing enterprise as a provider of school programs is providing what seems like a steady stream of income; in effect, we are diversifying the business, functioning in part as an education and training provider.

There was little discussion that I can recall - or at any rate, discussion that ended up in my notes - about other sources of income, including the use of the social club and futsal court. This was a bit strange, considering the outsourcing of the social and futsal court to an outside operator who was there on the night, as well as the hiring of the futsal court to the taekwondo people who've been using it for their elite training purposes, and who were again there later in the evening. Perhaps this will count for more in the next AGM.

In terms of our ongoing government stipend, there are eleven years left of the current funding arrangement, with approximately $2.5 million due to us at the present rate - keep in mind though, that the stipend is attached to CPI, and thus it will increase over the remainder of that time. It is worth noting - as was clarified by the board in response to a question from the floor -  that our Lakeside lease period is separate from our government income period. The stipend is counted as having begun before the lease agreement was put in place.

When the funding agreement comes to an end in eleven years, there will be the opportunity to renegotiate a new funding agreement, or to seek alternative pathways which were a little unclear to me in how they would operate - something about going to market. The fact that there was the possibility of this funding arrangement continuing was news to me, as I'd assumed that once the initial funding period was over, that would be it.

Governance
As noted earlier, this was Leo Athanasakis' last AGM as president before stepping down. There had been some suggestion among members of the hoi polloi that Athanasakis may have sought to remain on the board, but this is apparently not the case.

Tass Roufos and Peter Kokotis have joined the board. Roufos' company, Commercial and General, will be the club's major sponsor this season. It was also noted that Roufos' strength will be in networking and government liaison work. Peter Kokotis, a former general manager of the club, will be the (senior men's?) football director. In seeking clarification on an earlier press release on the matter, it was made clear that Kokotis is a director, and not an employee of the club.

Even if it was not explicitly stated on the night, much of what happened with regards to the relevant board changes seemed to be an attempt to show that an orderly transition of power had occurred between Leo and his successor. Even more subtly, there was an attempt to emphasise matters of culture and professionalism.

To that end, it was admitted that while on this occasion a late AGM was unavoidable - though why it was unavoidable was not explained - the board will be renewing efforts to hold AGMs in a more timely fashion. This was just one of a range of procedural matters of concern to some members; communication with members was another one, especially with regards to the lengths to which the club does (or doesn't) go in order to inform members of an AGM.

Now admittedly mass mail-outs are expensive, especially when you have ongoing issues with databases - another problem which is going to be solved, or so it has been claimed, again. And they are also problematic when long absent life members (of which we have many) have not updated their postal details, and thus much of the mail-out gets sent back return to sender".

There was some movement in terms of staff, with some old faces back in media and/or merchandise. The club has also hired a new full-time administrative kind of person. Technical director Strati Xynas is also moving on soon, so we will need to find someone for that role as well.

The next AGM will coincide with elections. As usual, it will be interesting to see if anything happens on this front; it usually doesn't.

Women's
Gabrielle Giuliano once again presented the women's report. Giuliano noted that while overall the women's wing of the club had done well in producing talent both for external sources and internally, the results of the various teams could've been better, and she set the very lofty ambition of wanting to win everything available in 2019. Giuliano also noted that the 'one club' process was still ongoing, as matters such as assets and such still had to be dealt with.

Perhaps most curiously, after a couple of years of taking a backseat during AGMs, Gabby put forward an unusually frank and forthright statement asking for respect for board members (and vice-versa), and that there needed to be a raising of behavioural standards across the board at the club; again, hinting towards the broader cultural change the board is seeking to implement. This statement was also coupled with a call-out for more volunteers from the members.

Youth
Andrew Mesourouni gave this presentation, which was just about his only contribution to the night's proceedings. This was unusual, as Andrew usually has a bit more to say on a variety of matters at an AGM.

The news that Mike Valkanis was working with us from overseas was a bit of a surprise when it was announced last year; at Thursday's meeting it was revealed that Valkanis approached us about working with him. There was some discussion about potentially facilitating the move of talented boys through Valkanis' Dutch connections. I wait to see what this will look like.

As usual, there was a reiteration of the standard desire and/or aim of having players coming through from our juniors to our the seniors, which we have historically not been good at.

Senior men's team
The board was upfront with the fact that it had chased John Anastasiadis hard for the senior men's coaching gig, and that Con Tangalakis was a gentleman in how he conducted himself during that time. Tangalakis will be on a three year deal with bonuses and renewal of his contract to be judged annually, based on predetermined KPIs.

Player wage costs will come down, but apparently that was not a priority when making our signings for 2019. Wage creep and bonuses had meant that the cost of the former squad crept up over a number of years; in some ways, this new squad is an attempt (again) at a refresh - new, younger talent, but also ridding ourselves of a player culture that had suffered significant deterioration. To emphasise again the attempt at a cultural change off field and on, it was noted that part of our recruitment was on players "of good character with good habits".

Another key word with regards to the senior squad was that it was going to be 'competitive'. When asked for a more explicit expectation - specifically whether the aim was to make finals - the answer was 'yes'.

Other observations
The two meetings went for about an hour and a half in total. The first meeting started only a little late, and the second meeting started before its listed start time of 8:00pm. We were more or less done by 7:45pm. I can't remember the last time that South Melbourne AGMs were over so quickly - there often even used to be an intermission for a smoke break, and the combined SMH and SMFC meetings could take three or more hours to complete.

Much of this was down to the control exerted over the meeting by chairman Bill Papastergiadis. Where in the past questions, comments, and comments posing as questions would fly freely from the floor, this time much of this phenomenon was nipped in the bud. This was done via calls to adhere to due process - in this case, there being no formal "other business of which due notice shall have been given".

While the chairman did acquiesce to a degree to allow some questioning, it's a signal to members of the club that they will need to be more organised and prepared to deal with a board that, at least on face-value, will seek to adhere more closely to "the rules". While woefully unprepared myself for such a shift in approach from the board, I was a bit surprised that members who were involved in off-site supporter meetings last year didn't have anything prepared for these AGMs.

That lack of preparation was reflective of a sort of defeated, lacklustre mood in the room on Thursday night. While some of the usual suspects did their thing, asking some good questions about governance, financials, and member communications, the feeling in the room was a largely subdued one. A disinterested and disillusioned membership is a not a good thing, and one of the key tasks for the revamped board will be to find ways to energise the membership base.

Things left largely unsaid
There was very little said about the A-League bid, except for two things. First, that the club would maintain a commitment to participation in a summer competition, whatever that means. Second, that Ross Pelligra - the would be major private investor of a South Melbourne A-League bid - had misspoken when he said in a recent interview that the club would be re-branded for acceptance into the A-League.

There was no discussion about plans for celebrating the club's 60th anniversary. There was little discussion about last year's issues with the senior men's team, apart from subtle references about culture. A question about what the difference was between a "director" and a "board member" - apparently everyone on the board is a director, when in the past that wasn't always the case - highlighted that even very basic elements of the club's organisation need to be clarified, especially if it has legal and regulatory ramifications.

Not that any of that matters

So, no A-League for South Melbourne.

Look, I'm not going to say "I told you so", mostly because I didn't tell anyone so, and we should all know by now that no one equivocates on South Melbourne Hellas matters more than me. That it was a long-shot would've been obvious to anyone who's followed the South Melbourne exodus saga these past 14 years, but exactly how long those odds were could only be tested by putting forward a bid. You've got to be in it to win it, otherwise people will always ask why you didn't even try. But there are at least a couple of journalists floating the idea that South was never even close to being seriously considered by FFA, which of course makes one think in a conspirational way.

In 2004, thanks to being in administration we were in no position to put our hand up to even try to apply for the inaugural A-League Melbourne licence. Since then there has been the Southern Cross bid, attempted buy-outs of Melbourne Heart, Central Coast Mariners, and Wellington Phoenix, and now this attempt to get in under our own name under our own steam, with some outside investment help. The funniest thing though is that each time we play the game, FFA gets something out of it. They get to push up a licence fee, force a minority shareholder to go the whole hog, or put pressure on an existing franchise that they don't really want to sort itself out. They can put forward the illusion of a contest, a fair process, or engagement with 'old soccer'. So we play the game, because we feel that we must, but it's not our game.

So we're still left out in the cold. Only the people directly involved with the bid know how good it actually was. Most South supporters are left to do as they always do, which is speculate based on what limited information we've been made privy to, and then filter that through our preexisting prejudices.

Speaking with one former board member way back when about our chances in this bidding round, they acknowledged that the real value lay in information gathering. That pragmatism wasn't something reflected in the way the bid was presented to the public or to the broader South Melbourne family, but maybe this reconnaissance can be taken to the next bid, or perhaps more realistically, to the push for the second division and promotion relegation. Granted, I'm not a believer in the viability of promotion and relegation in Australian soccer (though I'm more cautious on a standalone second division, a discussion for another day) but there are people who do believe in those ideas. Considering the effort put in to this bid - an effort more than a few South fans consider was expended to the detriment of the core business of the club - it would seem negligent to cast aside the value of that information and experience.

Then again, there's also an argument being made that the expansion course taken by FFA this week makes promotion and relegation less likely to happen in the short term. I have said that part of the reason that FFA decided to take up the expansion course was due to the pressure which came from outside the A-League, namely the Association of Australian Football Clubs, who managed to bring matters to a head. Part of the game then became who would be able to shape Australian soccer in their own image fastest. While all reports suggest that the AAFC are still aiming for a 2020 start to their national second tier competition, FFA's particular choices in expansion are designed to further entrench the existing ownership and operating model. And while there will be changes to the latter when the A-League achieves its independence from FFA next year, it's basically more of the same of what's 'worked' lately for FFA: growth corridors, lots of cash, rejection of small markets.

To be fair, FFA had a difficult choice to make under difficult circumstances, albeit some of those difficult circumstances were of their own making. They have a league that has the feeling of stagnation, disgruntled licence holders who have lost millions propping up their teams and the league, and a television audience that seems all but maxed out. They don't want to expand, because they cannot afford to; yet they cannot afford to not expand. Under pressure from fans, extant licence holders, player unions, broadcasters, and myriad other groups, FFA were offered a dozen or so choices for expansion, all flawed in one way or another, all encompassing some degree of risk.

It was fairly obvious that in the context of Australian soccer's culture wars, our bid was a risky proposition for FFA. Not much has changed on that front for more than decade. But on another front, picking South would've been a conservative, risk-averse decision for FFA to make. An imperfect but nevertheless extant stadium; a supporter base with finite potential for broad engagement and growth, but nevertheless a supporter base that was somewhat tangible; the inclusion of a club that offered something familiar, and yet with also enough of a point of difference so as to add something new to the A-League.

But if people think that the two successful bids - Western Melbourne Group, and MacArthur South-West Sydney - are absurd, illogical choices, destined to fail - let us never forget that famous old mantra which haunts the rhetoric of the 'bitters' even more so than "No South, No A.P.L.", that being "three years tops". The goalposts for the A-League's imminent demise keep moving, but the league keeps going. And maybe these new teams will succeed, proving everyone on our side of the fence wrong again.

Only a few will ever know for sure why the South bid was rejected, and the circumstances in which that happened. At some point our bid team will be briefed by FFA on the process; maybe FFA will tell the truth, or only a part of it. It could just be a case of, in the words of the AAFC on their own second tier model, "what may be good for football may not be good for your club". I doubt that we pleb supporters will ever find out the reasons, which means that rampant rumour-mongering will continue much as it already has during the process. Let us not forget the refrain from some people that Team 11 had it in the bag, that Southern Expansion's largesse would see them through despite their absurdity of their three home ground bid, or that Brisbane City would get it for Queensland derby-metric purposes.

More than every other failed attempt to re-join the top-flight, this failure sees South Melbourne at a significant crossroads. Ideologically, does the club at last abandon its plans to work within the system for its own progress? If so, does it throw its weight more openly and wholeheartedly towards the second division and promotion-relegation push? Structurally, what does the next board of South Melbourne look like? With long-serving president Leo Athanasakis set to retire from the board and the presidency - and under whose leadership this return to the top-flight strategy has been enacted - will his successor make a clean break with this approach?

And will A-League bid chairman and Hellas board member Bill Papastergiadis stick around? Initially brought in to sort out the contractual mess with regards to our leases at Lakeside, Bill stuck around to try and achieve something many of us dream of even while we doubt its plausibility. It's required non-stop politicking, but now that that's over, what is his role?

The reaction from South fans on social media has been a mix of disappointment and anger, with more than a dash of the sort of squawking, entitled petulance that's straight out of 2004/05 era TWGF. In its naked, shameless display of raw emotion, much of that outpouring of grief has been hard to look at directly; it has a pathetic quality, both in the sense that one might feel pity and sympathy, but equally in the alternative definition of something miserably inadequate. It hasn't been helped by our failure resulting in all the anti-South trolls coming out to play.

Remember that four of the other bids in the final six didn't even exist as actual teams, being scarcely more than concepts no-one really asked for. Their existence was entirely conditional on winning an A-League licence - and thus the only 'fans' making serious arguments online for or against something were either 'neutrals', or Canberrans and South fans. And the vociferous nature of some of our fans on social media, along with the PR stunts and boasting of our own bid leader, made us an easy target for ridicule and scorn.

(and as I and others have previously noted, there's a certain irony in South board members imploring our supporters to not embarrass the club with poor behaviour during games this year, when the bid team's antics arguably did as much if not more harm to our reputation, and the behaviour of some of our fans on social media made us look simultaneously arrogant and desperate)

But if nothing else, FFA's decision at least put to bed the value of those clickbait internet polls which benefited only the ad revenues of those news agencies running the surveys, showing the importance of Australian soccer's social media argle-bargle to the game's decision makers being close to zero. As I noted two years ago:

The discussions around the future of Australian soccer which take place online are very niche discussions. Within those discussions there even more niche discussions, which while promoted with quantifiable passion, make no ripple whatsoever on the greater whole of Australian soccer. Promotion/relegation, second division, NCIP, the NYL - like those people who keep making petitions to bring back Toobs or the KFC tower burger - their enthusiasm and its attendant clamour more often than not obscure the fact that there are not actually very many of them: it's just that they're louder.

The episode on Facebook with the Greek Orthodox priest from Moonee Ponds was the most farcical point, encapsulating the most crucial problem of this saga - and not just the last two years, but the past 15. We go back to a bit from an older post:

In time the greatest betrayal of the ethnic clubs, if one can use such a provocative term, comes not from their own or the governing bodies' incompetences, nor the disinterest of the general public who had no obligation to follow them, but from those younger supporters who turned their back on their fathers’ clubs.

It's not just the young people of course. The broader point is that if we actually had the support we claimed to have - or that we used to have - we probably wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. If we had 2,000 people turning up to games instead of 200, the quality and vitality of our optics and our metrics would all be harder to ignore, or to treat as a fabrication.

It's worth revisiting this point for an interesting micro-phenomenon which has taken place during the immediate aftermath of this failed A-League bid. There have been current and/or latent South people vowing to give up their A-League season tickets and come back to South. This sounds grand, magnificent, like the beginning of a movement which could make Hellas great again. Even more appealingly, it's a positive move, not just more useless complaining, but actually doing something for the betterment of South Melbourne.

Except human history is littered with short bursts of mass penance after a disaster, most of which never lasts. I'm reminded of Agathias' comments on part of the aftermath of the devastating Constantinople earthquake of 557,

Agathias also claimed there was a short-lived effect on the attitude of the population: the wealthy were motivated to charity, doubters were motivated to pray, and the vicious were motivated to virtue, all in an apparent effort of propitiation. Agathias reports that soon enough everyone lapsed into their former attitudes.

So while we all hope that people come back to South, and stick with South, the reality is that the numbers will likely be small, and most of those returnees unlikely to be permanent. It's going to be a massive challenge for the club to appeal to people to come and support it, or to continue to support it, when so much hope was invested in the A-League bid and the promise of a brighter tomorrow, and soon. Instead we're back to another season of NPL, our 60th anniversary season set to be spent crossing from industrial back-block to fringe suburban paddock, alternating that with our presence at a boutique stadium which we are destined never to fill again, except on very special occasions.

As the dust settles on this latest attempt at regaining our former glory,  these are the things that matter.

Για την Ελλάδα, ρε γαμώτο! Or not! And Britain too, I think! I'm not sure

I'm starting this piece by way of one of my standard unnecessary preambles. Earlier this week I was at my day job, attending one of the daily stand-up meetings that management is using to tell us how great their latest project is. 

To help prove how important and interesting this new endeavour is, one member of management referred to a PowerPoint slide linking to positive news articles (I assume positive, because why else would management link to them otherwise), not caring that they were behind a Murdoch paywall, and probably not caring or perhaps even oblivious to the fact that a room half-full of humanities academics is probably the last group of people likely to be taken in by such obvious PR guff passing as journalism.

I begin with that pointless anecdote if only to ask the question of whether we as South fans could do with looking at the news we consume with a bit more caution and a detached critical eye, rather than interpreting even the slightest ambivalence about our A-League bid as a call to furious arms.

To wit, a situation was created by what was and is a rather straightforward article of little consequence about A-League expansion; a summary of what to the jaded and the unbiased alike are the obviously lesser hopes of the Canberra and South Melbourne A-League bids in securing one of the two expansion licences on offer. It was an article written by Michael Lynch, The Age's chief soccer reporter, and someone I've posted my occasional criticism of during the past eleven years on here, and before that, too. And if I'm being honest and fair, Lynch is someone whose forté is beat writing rather than dense or lyrical analytical pieces.

That's not a crime, but it does acknowledge a historic structural issue in the relationship between Australian soccer and the media. Australian soccer has been and remains an also-ran insofar as its treatment goes in the mainstream written press. It might not be a palatable fact, but it is true. And even as that relationship goes through peaks and troughs, each daily newspaper tends to end up with one and only decicated soccer writer, who is expected to cover all angles of every issue, even as the space allotted to them to do so is limited, and even as they are expected to be all things to all people - beat reporter, political analyst, on-field tactician, and quasi-historian.

These days you can add click-bait writer to those functions, a less than appealing idea for any news writer with a semblance of self-respect, but utterly necessary when newspaper revenues are in such steep decline.

(And incidentally, this is one of the reasons why I took out a digital subscription to The Age - yes there are noble sentiments in this somewhere about being part of the solution rather than the problem, but it's also for the chance to be smug and note that as a subscriber, the concept of the click-bait reader is marginally less applicable to me because of the $4.?? I allocate to this weekly expenditure.)

In the article, Lynch points out that Canberra and South are perceived - both in the public sphere, and within the behind-closed-doors decision making sphere - as being the obvious outsiders compared to the other four remaining bids. Lynch rightly asks the question about Canberra's previous poor history of soccer at a national level - both on and off the field - and the feedback he has received from current Canberra soccer followers that times have changed, especially with the nature of the city itself. Lynch compares Canberra's difficulties of being a regional centre (and thus having doubts about its ability to raise sufficient sponsorship, as well as getting a new stadium), with South's troubles of being perceived as an ethnic/old soccer throwback with limited broad appeal.

Now, Lynch is clearly not saying that he himself thinks South should be excluded from an expanded A-League because of 'ethnicity'; only that, rightly or wrongly, such perceptions exist, and that they will be a factor in the decision making process. While singling out ethnicity as a drawback factor for us, along with Canberra's tainted 1990s national league history, Lynch puts these issues into the perspective of representing:

... interesting arguments about the history, diversity and geography of the game in this country. 

These are arguments which Lynch doesn't expand upon on this article. Like I said, it's neither his speciality, nor do the constraints of time, space, and editorial line allow for something more effusive on what multiculturalism actually means in Australian society, and the way in which Jim Cairns' dream of a pluralist Australian multiculturalism persisted beyond his term in government most notably via deliberately and inadvertently insular ethnic soccer clubs. In short, history can be a launching pad, but it can also be an albatross, and if you want to read something with more expansive intellectual heft on these issues, read Joe Gorman's book rather than a quick semi-throwaway article designed as much to leverage your anger as your sense of reason.

Now Canberra fans seem to be able to handle this casual dismissal of their A-League chances better than South fans. Not having a race issue attached to that exclusion certainly makes things less emotive, but we should also note that as far as controlling their tempers online goes, South fans have been garbage at it since they first got access to the internet. I say that as someone who when they were 16 years old would use school computers to act like the prototypical uncouth online Hellas knob. Things have only gotten worse in the ensuing years, as the experience of exponentially increasing irrelevance combined with the faintest whiff of hope from FFA's Pandora's Box sends fully grown men into a collective apoplectic rage whenever someone considers South to not exactly be a prime candidate for A-League expansion.

And thus Lynch's Twitter feed went into (relative) overdrive with people wanting to hammer him and correct him. The response from Lynch to that, er, 'feedback' is made up of several tweets amalgamated by me.

So I cop the usual vitriol from the usual suspects for writing a piece about South Melbourne and Canberra's A League bid and why they are up against it for different reasons. Now the South fans claim I am racist for mentioning in the piece that they are a club formed by Melbourne Greek immigrant community. I point out the club's history, tradition and great success, and say that is both a strength and a weakness in the current FFA environment as they are battling to counter the prejudice they are a ''Greek'' club. Both are statements of fact, both are material parts of any discussion of South's candidacy. South have strong points to their bid - the fact they exist and have a lease on a ground already being one - which I also pointed out. But it seems to me that their own fans want to discount their own heritage. Do they?

Hardly ironically, Lynch's article predicted such blowback:

It is not dissimilar to the arguments that South fans – often the most vociferous, if at times intemperate – make on social media when the plausibility of their bid is questioned.

But somehow being accused of being a racist by the very same people he described as borderline nutbags surprises him. Irony dies in the deep dark internet sea. It's not like he's the first journalist either in recent times to cop that kind of abuse merely for reporting what he hears that the public is not privy to. Recently hired Sydney Morning Herald soccer writer Vince Rugari has also copped his share of social media hate from some South fans for making similar observations about South's outsider status, with those South fans being unable to grasp the idea of confidential sources, much as the same people will willingly accept obtuse answers and impossible to verify information from South Melbourne board members.

No surprises though about who one of the ringleaders of the anti-Lynch lynch-mob was, a fact one can surmise by several "tweet not available" notices (because I'm blocked by him), but disappointing if not surprising that several other South fans chose to follow that particular lemming over the edge of the cliff. To be fair though, there was a higher than usual dose of bewilderment from South fans as well, wondering what all the fuss about Lynch's article was.

Of course our lovable larrikin soon-to-be former prez Leo Athanasakis also jumped in with his own 'facts'.

Fact:
SMFC formed in 1959
Merger of 3 Clubs
South M United - British Club dating back to 1882 playing in Albert Park.
Hellenic & Yarra formed by Greek migrants.
Our British heritage seems conveniently ignored or not even acknowledged as fact by people who should know better.

— Leo Athanasakis (@LAthanasakis) December 1, 2018

Facts which are anything but of course, and which are easily debunked only if you actually know what you're talking about on these matters. Unfortunately such knowledge is limited to a mere handful of people, most of whom have nothing to do with Twitter or social media and even when they do, they are rightly reluctant to wrestle with metaphorical pigs.

[And while no doubt well intentioned, the other bloke who said it was a four-way merger including a Jewish club is also peddling half-truths at best - because let's be honest, the 1980s merger with what was left of Hakoah was little more than a takeover by South which probably mostly served to secure us a few more grounds in the Middle Park area. And I'd love to be corrected but it was my understanding that the Hamilton (named after either former South Melbourne United and founding South Melbourne Hellas committeemen Des or Bill Hamilton, or perhaps even both) award for club best and fairest was actually a supporters group initiative, not an official award from the club.]

For starters, the 1959 date - which South Melbourne FC uses as its foundation date - is the birth of the Hellas club, which was a merger of the struggling (and still very young) Greek-Australian Hellenic and Yarra Park clubs. The new entity they formed, Hellas, amalgamated with South Melbourne United, an Anglo-Celtic Australian club (what you might also term an Australian club, for lack of a better term, to describe a club founded by non-migrants), at some point in early 1960, ostensibly to get access to Middle Park, the home ground of South Melbourne United (and also Melbourne Hakoah).

To make the merger more palatable to the supporters of the small United club, the Greeks of Hellas throw a few bones United's way. They add 'South Melbourne' to the front of the Hellas name, inadvertently making the thing sound more poetic while also being unusual in being an ethnic club in early 1960s Melbourne with a ready-made and self-selected and unforced district name. They keep United's white jersey with a red vee. And they allow some committeemen from United to be on the new South Melbourne Hellas committee.

It's an arrangement which lasts a mere half decade or so. Soon enough non-Greek committeemen are a thing of the past, United's red vee is gone, and all pretence that this club represents anything in the South Melbourne area apart from the Greek migrants who live there is over. Since that time, in its glory days the club had mostly been content to gloss over that early history and the Anglo connection. This is not a judgement call - whether what happened is right or wrong is for someone else to mull over - but it is an acknowledgement of what actually happened.

Later, toward the end of the NSL era there were the beginnings of attempts to recognise that early history, though I always get the vibe that it was a minority of forward thinkers rather than staunch traditionalists responsible for those efforts. As the club found itself in the (now seemingly without end) rut of being simultaneously abandoned by the Greek-Australian community (its core supporter constituency) and alienated from its identity of being a big fish in a small pond (which had begun to attract its share of non-Greeks, but not quickly enough to form a critical mass at the critical moment), one of the flailing measures taken to recalibrate the club's identity saw some people engage in bumbling and not entirely intellectually honest attempts to leverage elements of the club's history (and parts of pre-South Melbourne Hellas history) that had been neglected (and sometimes derided) for decades.

This led to some people trying to link South Melbourne Hellas directly to the very earliest soccer clubs with the name South Melbourne, as part of an attempt to claim something that is not ours to claim. As I have noted in several places, at best South Melbourne Hellas can lay claim to being the most important club in the South Melbourne/Albert Park/Middle Park precinct; at a stretch it can perhaps lay claim to being the most notable current custodian of a local soccer culture going back to 1884.

But since we know of no formal connections between the 1884 South Melbourne club to the South Melbourne club which was almost formed to play after soccer was reformed in Melbourne in the early 1900s, and certainly no known connection to the 1920s/30s South Melbourne, can we really claim a legacy that fragmented and uncertain? Never mind also that the 1920s/30s South Melbourne was a totally different club to the Middle Park Schoolboys junior club which eventually became South Melbourne United in the mid 1930s (with United thus being more aptly classed as an Anglo-Celtic Australian club than as a British club).

These are, in the greater scheme of things, annoying and pedantic points of history, wielded here by me not to show how smart I am - because at any rate, most of the work in this area has been done by others - but rather as an illustration of how utterly stupid discussions of history are, especially when they are made by people who have no respect for something they claim they have respect for while also claiming that others have no respect for that same history. In other words, as much as I'm drawn to the facts of what happened pre-1959, these bits of trivia become less important in a situation like this than the reasons and manner in which they are deployed -  too often in a shallow way to score cheap political points, ironically mostly in an environment where most supporters of Australian soccer see history as neither burden nor blessing, if they think about it at all.

Not that any of that matters, of course.

Hmm, I don't remember a bowling alley being there

Last week I remarked at how eerily calm everything seemed to be, and how I didn't want to hear anything to the contrary, if for no other reason than that I was (and am) busy marking essays, making corrections to my thesis, and generally trying to earn a living by pretending that I am an actual productive member of society until the end of October when my sessional teaching contract effectively ends.

Well, starting last Friday the club did a great job making headlines, even if they weren't all part of some greater plan. Now that the dust has settled on a few of these things - and since I have just enough time on my hands to write up some nonsense on all of it - let's recap what's happened over the past week or so.

Hail to the Chief
As reported on the official South website, which has otherwise been near comatose in the off-season - so much so, that by comparison it's made the necessarily semi-dormant South of the Border seem like the proverbial hyperactive kid dosed up on red cordial - we have a new president and a new vice-president. The director primarily responsible for senior men's football, Nick Maikousis, has been elevated to the role of president, while the director responsible for women's football, Gabrielle Giuliano, has taken up the role of vice-president. I'm not sure and I can't remember who the previous vice-president was, and going off the most recent update to the club's board of management web page (see above), it seems like the club was pretty much in the same boat as me. Who is even actually on the board apart from Nick and Gabby? I don't even know anymore. I'm assuming they've got their minimum requirement of seven.

I'm not privy to the behind-the-scenes machinations to know if it was an orderly handover of power; I'm not even sure that really matters. I wish Nick all the best, because there's this vibe around the club that we're in this real deep hole, and someone or some persons have got to take responsibility for what's going on. Anyway, Leo got to thank everyone and wish them well at the presentation night last week, so it can't have been too traumatic an experience. For his part, Leo says he always intended to leave his post at the end of 2018, which might be news to a lot of people. Though he did add this idea into the mix.

“If we do make it to the A-League, I will take a position on the A-League Board, but not as a chairman or in any leadership role there. I will continue on the Board until South Melbourne goes to elections,” he says, reaffirming that another SFMC board member, Bill Papastergiadis, had already put his hand up to be the Chairman of the A-League team.

Not that any of that matters, of course.

That's right, there was a presentation night last Saturday
It wasn't exactly a secret, but at the same time it was barely promoted as well, at least in online places that I visit. Given the events of the day before - and more on that in a later segment - a few people who didn't go to the presentation night later spent their time scouring the club's increasingly elusive social media presence looking for clues as to which senior men's players weren't completely pissed off with us, coming up with no one apart from old reliable Leigh Minopoulos. Later updates at least showed us Brad Norton was in attendance, along with most of the women's team, and... you guys who went need to tell me who else showed up, because I wasn't one of those slinking around social media like a madman looking for clues which would up at the RAND Corporation and the reverse vampires.

Anyway, Leigh won the Theo Marmaras award/prize/medal for our best and fairest, which just quietly, I think is a good choice, not that the club would or should take any advice from me on such matters.

Do we have a coach? And do I have to read the Greek papers to find out?
While everyone has concerns about everything going wrong at the club, some concerns are more equal than others. Those of us with only small barrows to push - or even no barrows at all, because I've either misplaced mine or loaned it to someone and I can't remember who now - only really want to know who we've picked to be the senior men's coach for 2019. It's something that really should be a run-of-the mill decision, and something that probably should've been sorted out by now, especially once John Anastasiadis made the decision to stick with Bentleigh.

The rumour had been going around that Con Tangalakis has been offered a three year deal. In true South Melbourne fashion that rumour had been reported as hard fact by a few people, showing that we'd learnt nothing from the previous week's antics. Other people have said that it has actually been reported in the Greek press, but it certainly hasn't come up in our club's once legendary social media presence. I guess the club must have lost its social media profuseness somewhere between a couch cushion in the last couple of months.

Though my Greek is getting rustier by the day, I think somewhere in this article is confirmation that Con Tangalakis has been appointed as coach... but you know, wait and see and all that.

And you want to be my A-League franchise / And you want to be my hard-hitting Australian soccer news-breaker 
Late on Friday afternoon a news report was published with the eye-catching headline accusing the club of wage theft. The story quoted former player Liam McCormick, a former employee of the club in Despina Donato, and an unnamed current player. The club, via outgoing president Leo Athanasakis, claimed that the allegation that staff and players are owed money is false.

(As an aside, I wonder if Leo made that comment with the endorsement of the rest of the board, or felt that he could do so in his capacity as president even as he was soon set to leave the post. Eh, it probably doesn't matter.)

Some people say you shouldn't laugh at things like this, and I won't. But I will note a few things which I find hilarious, in that grim, clenched teeth kind of way. First, Clement Tito, the journalist who wrote the story, was attacked by some South fans for doing his job, as opposed to our fans asking relevant questions of the club. Now where have I seen that kind of behaviour before? Oh yes, the time a young photographer was hauled over the Twitter coals for taking a photo of Kristian Konstantinidis jamming his fingers where he shouldn't have.

I mean, I get the innate desire to defend the club - and there are times when we should be doing that - but there are ways of going about this which are more effective (and ethical, if that's a relevant consideration - it probably isn't) than others. Our normal online fan behaviour in such situations tends to be of the foaming mouth rabid dog variety, but every now and again people surprise you - like here, where one pseudonymous supporter provided evidence contradicting McCormick's claim that he was owed money.

How about this signed document that clearly shows Liam McCormick was owed $0! Correct not owed a thing!

Can also advise Liam's father was banned from Lakeside for attacking a supporter with Downs!!! pic.twitter.com/IZSVMLLXdv

— Mr Football (@MrAusFootball) October 12, 2018

That such information was posted online by a pseudonymous character is a bit of a concern - where did they get the document from? It has to be either someone from the club, or someone connected to the board. It doesn't seem like the best way to play the game, especially when board members have often been critical of the anonymous posters on this blog - but why should I apply my own flawed notions of ethical purity onto others? It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and since I prefer the aloofness of cats, it's probably not my place to cast aspersions.

Though another possible interpretation is that McCormick was owed money at the time of his departure, but agreed to waive his rights on those matters in order to get a clearance to different club which, by the dubious sources I rely upon, was going to pay him a lot more than what we were doing anyway.

Still, the line being run by some people that the article was part of the great masonic anti-South Melbourne Hellas conspiracy was, as usual, a bit over the top. Tito was accused by some South fans of writing the article in order to damage our reputation and by extension our A-League bid (not that any of that matters), and taunted him and the website which published the piece with the threat that he'd be sued. Tito didn't do himself any favours by not actually standing up for his work (at least on Twitter). Maybe he has better things to do than hang around on social media all day and argue with people, and good luck to him if he does. But my feeling on these things is that if you're going to post incendiary material like that under the guise of being a professional journalist (as opposed to the hackiest of hack bloggers, such as yours truly), you should probably be prepared to defend your work, especially if your mates come to your defence and you kind of leave them hanging.

Unless of course Tito has another article up his sleeve, and wouldn't that be fun to read?

Insofar as the wages and benefits owed to Donato (who is no longer at South Melbourne) and other staff members and volunteers (who are still at South Melbourne) it is pretty much an open secret that various staff have been or are owed money or benefits, though I'm not as up to date on these things as I used to be. Maybe all those issues were sorted out ages ago. I do know that former and current staff members have taken different paths in dealing with these issues, and it's not my part to judge how they go about collecting what they're owed, if indeed they are owed anything. Suffice to say that Donato and any other staff member owed money is fully entitled to be paid what they are owed according to their contracts and the law, and if the club is in the wrong, then it deserves just about every bit of grief it receives.

As far as what the players may be owed, since I don't talk to them about such things - and unless personally approached, I never would - it's always going to be rumours as far as I'm concerned. McCormick's pisspoor attempt at getting back at the club aside, the fact that another, current player has spoken out (albeit under the promise of anonymity) should be cause for concern. As a general rule, whatever players say to each other in private about wages, they rarely come out and talk about such matters in a public forum, especially in cases where they could be theoretically identified. That they have done so here should be ringing alarm bells.

The situation with regards to the player payment situation takes me back to the comments section in this post from just over a month ago, where an anonymous poster claimed that "Players have not been paid in over two months. PFA has been contacted apparently. This season is turning out to be a nightmare for the club." Another anonymous poster responded with "What a pathetic rumour to post, well done Paul." for my approving the original comment, but with nothing more than competing allegations/points of view, it was pretty much a case of the irresistible force against the immovable object cancelling each other out. Until Tito's article came out anyway, and then the club responded, and then nothing happened. I'm not saying it's a letdown, just an anti-climax.

The funniest thing though by the length of the straight is thinking back to the A-League information night a few months ago, and the pleas from Bill Papastergiadis to the fans to not do anything stupid which would embarrass the club. Well our fans being who they are, some of them did engage in some less than stellar behaviour - at least according to the club - and were banned from Lakeside for various indeterminate lengths of time. But even the worst of those fans would have been doing well to drag our club's name through the mud in the way it has been here. Still, there's always new depths to plumb.

As alternately horrifying/comic as this situation turned out, it is also worth putting things in some perspective. Most clubs in Victoria who pay players go through periods where they struggle to resolve their wage bills. Some clubs end up making the difference at the end of or after the end of a season, and plenty of others never even get that close. Some players have enough street-smarts, or have been around the block enough times, that they know how to work around the issue, or are content to cut their losses and move on. A special few talented players know precisely the value of their on-field worth, and can wield their reputations both to collect their owed moneys and move on to another club to start the process again. Probably everyone else is content enough to move on with whatever they've managed to squeeze out of clubs, considering that below the NPL2 level players aren't meant to be paid at all, except for expenses.

It's easy to target South Melbourne, because who cares what "insert other no-name brand club" does in this matter? But people should care. Wage inflation in Victoria has gone bananas, and since a good portion of clubs in our fair state are supportive on a second division - and wages will be an important part of the increased costs of such - it would be worthwhile actually having a mature debate on the probably untenable salaries being paid to part-time footballers playing in front of very few people, and bringing in very little revenue. But again, some people who promote the pro-rel argument also promote the live and die by the sword manifesto as it applies to soccer, and the idea that there'll always be some club available to replace one that fails. If that's the driving philosophy, then let the wage recklessness continue.

But just because these things happen on an all too regular basis across the state leagues, it doesn't mean that it should happen. It especially shouldn't be happening at a club with top-tier aspirations even if the vast majority of funding from any A-League bid attached to South would be provided by private interests. And how stupid did those internet heroes look trying to make out as if this would actually have any bearing on South's A-League ambitions, especially when they already claim to believe that we're no chance anyway. It also doesn't even matter if these things have happened in the A-League with their own alarming regularity. South boasts of its on and off-field professionalism, and even the suggestion that it fails to live up to those boasts doesn't do the club any favours.

I'm not enamoured either of the idea put up by some fans - even if it was an idea largely made in jest - that because the players didn't do well this season, that they don't deserve to be paid anyway. That's a crock. The fact is we've made legal commitments to players in the form of professional contracts, and we are obliged by the law if not common decency to honour those commitments. Any other response is flat out immature.

The club did eventually release a more formal response to the article, hinting at players breaching contractual obligations, as well as accusing Clement Tito of declining the opportunity to check the club's accounts in person. But really, the biggest mistake Tito made - apart from relying on McCormick as a source - was getting the article published on the same night Usain Bolt was pissfarting around against park footballers. Who cares about South Melbourne Hellas' sideshow antics when you have the three ring circus in town?

Also, geez man, if you come at the king, you better not miss.

Preparations for 2019
If I understand some of the things I've read correctly, we've been invited by Newcastle's Hamilton Olympic to go up there for a preseason game, though I can't see if we've actually accepted that invitation. Seemingly more certain is that we're doing a preseason game in South Australia early next year against West Adelaide. Whether we have a team to take up to either locale is another wait and see proposition.

South gets another red rose in A-League Expansion Bachelor(ette)
Well, well, well. After some people said last week (and don't people say so many things) that the FFA had decided who they wanted to be their A-League expansion franchises, and that it wasn't us, Ray Gatt noted yesterday that the Wollongong and Ipswich bids had been turfed, and that the

Six left are: Southern expansion, team 11, WMG, south Melbourne, Canberra, south west Sydney.

— Ray Gatt (@Gatty54) October 16, 2018

Not that of any of that matters, because apart from clearly just being strung along for laughs and/or an insurance policy in case the FFA and A-League's preferred bidders turn out to be hollow nothings, will expansion even happen next year? There's plenty of talk (always so much talk) that the FFA or whoever ends up running this process is going to Honey Badger (why do I even know what that is?) the process and not pick anyone, or make them wait another year.

Which is fair enough in my opinion, because like a puppy, an A-League franchise is not just for Christmas, although most puppies probably have a better anticipated lifespan than some of the A-League's former and possible future franchises.

Lastly, good to note this particular extract from a recent Vince Rugari article on all these things.

"It's believed some A-League clubs would view their (@smfc) inclusion as a retrograde step for the competition. The proximity of their home ground, Lakeside Stadium, to AAMI Park is also a concern." 

That sounds a lot like something you'd read on the FourFourTwo forums or from a columnist on The Roar. Which is not having a go at Vince by the way (and congrats to him on getting the Sydney Morning Herald gig), who like others obliged to cover these events is only reporting what he's being told. It's just an observation on the kinds of things being fed to journalists, and the ways in which they sometimes seem to align with tropes used on popular discussion boards populated by people even less credible than South of the Border's chief correspondent. 

Unless... what if those forums were also being used by people connected to competing bids, extant A-League licence holders, and/or FFA? Hmm, I'll have to consult the positions of the sun, the moon and the stars, and maybe read the φλιτζάνι to see the likelihood of that being true. Not that any of that matters.

NPLW (Minor) Premiers - Bulleen Lions 2 South Melbourne 3

 No idea if FFV chartered a chopper to fly the plate between Keilor and Bulleen.
 Photo: Paul Mavroudis.

Trundled out to the Veneto Club last Saturday to see the South Melbourne NPLW side take on Bulleen Lions in the final round of the home and away season. At stake was what I still call the minor premiership, casting me as a walking talking anachronism in that regard, because it's all about premier's plates nowadays. The situation was that South had to win the game in order to finish the regular season on top of the ladder - and with second placed Calder United playing Heidelberg and likely to win that game comfortably, anything other than a win would almost certainly consign the senior women to a second place finish.

After doing the requisite meet and greets with various movers and shakers, I parked myself in the grandstand up toward the southern end where we ended up shooting in the first half. The first forty minutes by us wasn't great. Erratic play, no cutting edge, nothing seeming to be working. Bulleen making the most of a bad defensive error to take the lead, and even though Bulleen are also finals bound, I know we are favourites in this game and it's been such a let down so far. The last five minutes of the half look a bit stronger, but still we were down, not up, and that's not where we wanted to be with Calder doing the business against the Bergers.

The second half started off better, We leveled! And then we conceded, from a blistering counter attack exposing a vacant left hand side. Then Lisa De Vanna came on, and while not the catalyst for everything that came afterwards, her appearance didn't hurt. By that time the pattern was already set anyway, with our girls pressing hard onto the Bulleen defense, who couldn't handle the pressure, struggling to play through the high South press. But there was always that risk of the counter attack, and it was one of those classic scenarios, the team leading but fading, their opponents raining shots and chances on their goal, all of it coming down to who would land the next decisive blow.

It was us! Then we took the lead, and good luck to Bulleen after having to chase the game. Full time whistle went, and time for celebrations! Everyone seemed happy, except for the security guard who didn't want people going on to the field after the game, and I guess he was doing his job and all, but in the context of things he was still being a bit of a killjoy. I slipped on my media pass and acted like an official journo person for my one token moment of any given calendar year

Now onto the finals, this Saturday at Lakeside against fourth placed Alamein, with a 4:30 kickoff  - there are also under 19 and under 16 curtain raisers involving South. For some reason the top two don't get the benefit of the double chance.

Why have the @nplwvictoria finals format changed this year. Last year we had a qualifying final & elimination final;1v2- winner went to Finals-loser played the winner of 3v4 (elimination final)Doesn’t seem right that you can play 1 game and go straight into the finals.#Myopinion

— Socrates Nicolaidis (@socratesnico) September 12, 2018

One wonder why you even have a finals series under such circumstances, really.

Leo Athanasakis announces retirement from South presidency and board
What is it about South Melbourne Hellas and Saturday morning bombshell announcements in 2018? First we sack Chris Taylor while some of us were still munching our corn flakes. Now we get this big announcement while watching Saturday morning cartoons in our pyjamas.

So what to make of it? Was he pushed or did he leave of his own volition? Theories will abound, but I'm going to go with exiting unwillingly, due to pressure from within the board, but that's on the increasingly few mumblings I'm privy to. There had been murmurings about such a thing happening or at least needing to happen for at least a couple of years, but since nothing happened, it was all idle talk. But now one way or another, it has happened, or rather will happen - Leo is staying on until the next AGM which the club claims will be held this December.

From what I gather, Leo joined the board sometime in the late NSL era, and became president at probably the club's lowest ebb at the end of 2007, unless you think the club;s lowest is right now, a not entirely unjustifiable position to take. Back then we'd gone through three presidents in more or less three years. The naive idea of the VPL being a way to get some crowds to watch the old derbies and such didn't last long. The even more naive hope that winning championships would be the key to bringing back crowds, or proving who knows what else, didn't materialise. Lakeside as a venue was in an increasingly dilapidated state, and the lease was running out. The club's playing arms - seniors, juniors, women - were in three different pieces.

Anyone coming into fix that situation was on a hiding to nothing. Leo's listed what he believes his achievements are on the club website, and on the face of it, its pretty impressive. People have and will continue to question that legacy, but that's only fair and natural. When you're in charge for eleven years, you get enemies, people get cynical, but you also get things wrong enough times that that's what people will remember.

The expectation seems to be that Nick Maikoussis will take over the presidency, and some will be satisfied by that, while others are baying for more blood. I could go through a huge list of the things that annoyed me about board actions under Leo that have pissed me off, but I'm too tired to fight right now. One can't help but feel that the old me, that is the younger me, would have raged harder on here, done a presidential retirement spectacular. These days I'm amazed the club actually still exists.

Farewell Tony Margaritis the board member, welcome back Tony Margaritis the ordinary supporter
More board resignations than you can poke a stick at. Also, who are all these people poking sticks at things? Anyway, word on the street is that after ten years Tony Margaritis will be stepping down from the board. What can you say about Tony's time on the board? Whenever there was something that needed to be fixed, Tony was always there to do it, or at least organise someone suitable to do it. He was responsible for our merchandise, and worked the merch booth for years. His work on the social club was immense, giving up huge amounts of his own time and labour to complete the job. At a club known for its longstanding tradition of having its board full of suits, Tony provided a necessary dash of blue collar.

Most importantly, Tony has looked after me in so many ways that I know of, and probably in countless ways that I don't. He even bought a handbag off me one year, and even though all of that money ended up back in the club, I appreciated the gesture. I haven't always returned that favour in kind, which is partly because of the nature of writing South of the Border, but mostly because of inexcusable character failings on my part. But even if it's selfish of me to do so, I think it's better to choose to remember the better times, of which there were many and hopefully more than enough to redeem those times when I screwed up.

Maybe there aren't, but this isn't about me, it's about Tony's contribution to the club in an official capacity over the past decade, and unofficially for years before that. So here's to Tony's retirement from the board, and his return to the plebeian existence of the mug punter.

A few brief comments on FFA announcing a review into their National Club Identity Policy
There was intermittent discussion a week or two ago about FFA announcing a review into its National Club Identity Policy, and all of a sudden I found myself back in 2014, sitting in a theatre somewhere in Jeff's Shed or the Melbourne Convention Centre - and based on that stunning lack of suitable recollection, good luck to any future Heinrich Schliemann types looking for the site of such a momentous occasion three thousand years or so from now.

I remember sitting through so much nonsense, my cynicism unleashed to the fullest for no good purpose, waiting for the chance to get my hands on the microphone being passed around for audience Q&A. I did get that microphone, and I then made a bit of an idiot of myself (in the manner of my outrage if not quite in the complaint's content) by questioning the FFA panellists on the National Club Identity Policy. The rest is history, so to speak. People agreed, people disagreed, nothing changed. Was there even any minor valour in taking a small stand? Could it be that one small voice doesn't count in the room?

Anyway, I think most of what I've written and said over the years about the FFA's introduction of the NCIP over the years remains valid, though as with other issues I have mellowed over the years. That's right, I used to be cool, now I'm just old. It happens. I still despise any restrictions on what ethnic paraphernalia an Australian soccer club can use to identify itself with, but more so I despise the culture which created the possibility for this kind of ideology to take hold. Most of that resentment is directed at mainstream Australian society, with a small bit leftover for specific members of the ethnic soccer fraternity, who over the years weren't able to be mature or disciplined enough about such matters, and gave everyone who hated them every excuse in the book to try and ban this stuff.

Historically, those prohibitions were applied differently across state lines and across different football governing bodies. They were rules applied to some clubs and not others for reasons that were sometimes obvious, and just as often not. In some ways, you can see why FFA wanted to implement a policy that would standardise and supersede the contradictory and piecemeal regulations, even if I doubt that anyone really thought it was necessary.

Then the FFA Cup arrived, and there was all this good feeling around bringing the old and the new together, and for some reason FFA decided this was a good time to introduce their policy. They can claim all they like that some obscure and never-to-be-named Western Australian soccer official asked for it, but the timing of the announcement of the FFA Cup and the introduction of the NCIP were just too close together.

And yet still nothing was definitively resolved. Melbourne Croatia tried a sort of punk manoeuvre with that chief sponsor on their jersey, and I think when we're all old and grey it'll still be stuck in the Human Rights Commission inbox. Gwelup was sometimes Croatia, and sometimes not. Hakoah always got be Hakoah for some reason. Journos old and new called us Hellas, Hellas fans chanted Hellas, but we were not allowed to display Hellas. This year the historically least likely Victorian Italian club to ever be half relevant was forced to black out an Italian tricolour on the back of the shirts, while the same basic pattern in their logo was fine. Little Charlestown Azzurri tried making waves.

Even FFV came out and said the NCIP was a junk policy, though did they mention what existed in their own state before the NCIP came in? If they did, I must've missed that. And that perhaps that many of the big players involved in FFV and all sorts of other similar places now would've argued for de-ethnicising policies back then to be trendy, or out of necessity?

Look, who knows what lies in human hearts at any given moment, and it's quite possible that decisions made at one time are just as right as rescinding those same decisions twenty years down the track when most people are no longer really sure how we got here. What we can say is that FFA's self-proclaimed search for procedural consistency has been a demonstrable failure, though since failure has seldom been something alien to Australian soccer, is that really such a thing to be worried about? It failed on two fronts.

First, consistency - as noted, the application of the policy, in part because of the tacking on of a non-retrospective clause, meant that all sorts of anomalies worked their way through into the public eye, most of which were handled badly, because since when do handle matters of ethnicity well in Australia? Exactly. Second, demand, or rather the lack of it. No one actually wanted this. Of all the things that were happening in Australian soccer at the time the policy was brought in, this would've seen so low down the list of priorities of anybody remotely sane. But then FFA made it an issue, and it's burbled away when really it should not have existed. Most ethnic soccer clubs had accepted their fate of being publicly neutered of any visible intellectual property oriented signs of difference, and powerless because of irrelevance, had chosen to stew in a bath of their own impotent resentment.

But here we are anyway, where things are being "reconsidered", whatever that means. Some people have asked here, if the policy and its affiliates were abandoned, would South fans want South to go back to being Hellas, or would they prefer to be SMFC? And it's a question which would be applied across quite a few clubs. I would say, really, it's up to the supporters of each club to decide for themselves. And it would be their decision. Would I go back to South Melbourne Hellas? Sure, but not for the reasons some might think of. I'm no nationalist, but I respect the club's heritage. Also it's a really beautiful name, one that has poetic quality that SMFC just doesn't, But would I be upset if the club didn't go back of it had the chance? No.

What I would love to see in the event that the policy is rescinded is choice, and maybe the acknowledgement that many clubs have more than one identity. One from the past, one from the present. Maybe some days, like om special occasions they want to remind themselves and others of their origins, and for the rest of the time they're happy to exist in a less-confronting public relations manner. Is Australian soccer mature enough for that kind of reasonableness? History says no, but if we've learned nothing else, it's that stranger things have happened.

Nothing in particular
I stopped listening to 3XY ages ago. I quit most forums except the South forum and soccer-forum.com, and even the former is a bit of a slog nowadays. I rarely visit Facebook anymore. I don't follow almost any of the soccer podcasts, and on Twitter I seem to mostly only follow funny people rather than angry people. And I tell you what, it's been good for my mental health. It's helped me calm the fuck down a bit, but it does mean that I'm more out of the loop than I've ever been with whatever the latest outrage or conspiracy is doing the rounds. And since I no longer get drip fed info like I used to - those days are so far back in the rear view mirror, that nowadays it feels uncanny that I ever even actually knew anything - just about anything that happens at South behind the scenes is as surprising to me as it is to most of you, if and when we ever find out about. So where we end up from here, I can really only blindly speculate, and what's the point of that? And really, what's the point of writing this section down anyway? I don't know, but don't mistake it for resentment, perhaps just the sense that South of the Border should periodically note where it sits in the pecking order of things, which has always vacillated between low importance and lower importance; which is how I like it to be honest. I'm not good with confrontation, as I think I've mentioned before.

Final thought
Sometimes it's only right to go back to the beginning and remember the moment when someone decided to put their hand up...

Thanks @LAthanasakis 4 everything you've done 4 @smfc. Not many can appreciate the personal sacrifices you & your family have had 2 make or the difficulties faced along the way. Be proud of what you accomplished. Hard to believe this started with a phone call & meeting at the pub

— Kartsi (@pkartsi) September 8, 2018

A-League bid news that you won't be surprised by

Normally I'd just wait until after the weekend's match in order to just lump this kind of news in with everything else, but this is kinda momentus, whether you believe in this particular cause or not, or whether you think we even have a chance.

It does say a lot about me that this is what I immediately thought of when I saw the original tweet:

Attention. This is President Athanasakis, your president, with a message from the president's office.

Anyway, yes we have submitted an expression of interest for the A-League's expansion program. The board said they would, you wanted them to - well, at least most of you, probably - so they've gone ahead and done it, complete with a hundred page bid document. No word though on whether the bid document is double-spaced, is in the form of a double-sided print job, is presented in a suitable font, nor whether the referencing and citations are up to scratch.

By Zeus, I hope they remembered to put their name and student number in the header and on the title page.

In the announcement there's reiteration of how awesome we were (and my god, we were indeed awesome), how that past awesomeness doesn't matter nowadays (and my word, how much does it not matter), and the steps we've put in place to become awesome again (I'll need to see the bid document for myself to verify those claims).

More to come "towards the end of June". Not that any of that matters.

Summary of March 2018 AAFC roadshow Melbourne edition

Introductory remarks
Derisory as I am of the idea of promotion and relegation in Australia, attending the Association of Australian Football Clubs roadshow event in Melbourne last Thursday seemed like a no-brainer. This meeting was meant to be held in Sports House in Albert Park, but a text message received while I was on the train up there said that a burst water pipe had necessitated the relocation of the event to the South Melbourne FC social club.

Of course. What else could they have done at such short notice?

Nursing my gin and tonic I had not intended to tweet much about the event, but rather take some brief notes on my phone (I'd not bothered to bring pen and paper as I do for say, South Melbourne AGMs), but after getting a polite request and checking that I had enough battery left on my phone, I decided to give it a go. I did note that Shouty Mike was also in the room, and though long since blocked by him on Twitter, I guessed he would tweet at least some of what was happening on the night, so there's always that if anyone wants an alternative view of proceedings.

There were also summary notes taken by freelancer/interested onlooker Matthew Galea, if one cares to go back far enough in his time-line, and there has been a positive overview of the night by journalist Jonathan Howcroft on Football Nation Radio. Also on Football Nation Radio is an interview with Tom Kalas.

Through my limited internet trawling, there appears to have been very little comment made about any of the roadshow meetings outside the Melbourne event. I'm not sure why that is the case - was the roadshow not publicised well enough, or is there just inherently more interest in these matters in Melbourne? One thing which came across during the Melbourne meeting is that there were at least slightly different messages given to different AAFC constituencies. This makes sense because, as I'll reiterate later, each state's experience of the National Premier Leagues, let alone Australian soccer, is quite different from each other.

The crowd built up to about 40-50 people, mostly in casual (non-club) gear, with a few exceptions. I recognised (and learned over the course of the night) that there were representatives present from South Melbourne (Andrew Mesourouni and Leo Athanasakis), Northcote, Heidelberg, Goulburn Valley Suns, Bendigo City(!), and North Geelong, but not much more beyond that. There were some non-club representatives - that is ordinary fans, and one bloke from local Greek media who I see around a lot but don't know the name of nor who he works for - but otherwise the audience seemed to be mostly committee members of various NPL teams.

It is interesting that more ordinary fans didn't show up. That being said, AAFC only has a couple hundred more followers on Twitter than I do (I have no idea about their reach on Facebook), so maybe this was actually about as good a turnout as one could expect. Indeed, we were told on at least a couple of occasions that the Melbourne meeting had the biggest attendance of any of the AAFC roadshow sessions up until that point, with only Newcastle yet to come. Why was that the case? I suppose it helps that Victoria has one of the larger NPL setups in terms of numbers of clubs, at over 30, and more NPL teams means more people likely to turn up.

(As an aside, when AAFC representatives were asked who were the Victorian NPL teams not under the AAFC umbrella, it was noted that Whittlesea Ranges and Sunshine George Cross were among them. Ranges I could understand, I guess, from their Victory/sponsor connections - though Moreland Zebras/Victory man Joe Mirabella was in attendance on the night - but the Georgies one has me a bit stumped to be honest.)

There's also a continuity in recent times in terms of Victorian clubs getting together to fight the establishment, namely, the (mostly) united front by leading and aspirational clubs against Football Federation Victoria's original NPL framework. Indeed, two of the key figures in that campaign - Tom Kalas and Nick Galatas - are now key members of AAFC. There's probably other factors for the larger turnout too, like the more obvious seething antipathy in Victoria for Football Federation Australia compared to other states, which would extend to the general distrust of New South Wales' dominance of Australian soccer. Neither do Victorian clubs, even the powerful ones, have anything like the facilities (on field or off) of the wealthier New South Wales clubs. Add in existing under the Aussie rules hegemony, and I guess everyone feels a bit more vulnerable than they'd like to admit.

(As another aside, FFV president - and according to one source, also currently acting FFV CEO - Kimon Taliadoros was absent, due to a competing engagement. FFV had some representation at the meeting in the form of Gary Cole, recently hired by FFV as "Manager, Football Strategy and Special Projects". While an FFA representative attended AAFC's Queensland roadshow meeting, it was speculated out loud that FFA were not likely to attend a Victorian meeting due to the hostility they were likely to receive from members of the audience.)

Representing AAFC on the night on the front table/panel of sorts were Dean Hennessey, current Pascoe Vale technical director, ex-coach and TD of a few places; Tom Kalas, ex-South Melbourne board member, interim AAFC chairman during parts of 2017 and frequent spokesman for the group; Nick Galatas, South Melbourne chairman until very recently; and AAFC chairman Rabieh Krayem, one time Northern Fury chairman. Oddly, of those four only Krayem offered any significant contribution to the night's proceedings, with Krayem at times sharing the stage or delegating proceedings to AAFC treasurer Christo Patsan of Northern New South Wales.

From then to now
The evening began with an address by Rabieh Krayem, giving an overview of AAFC's progress and success up until now. He outlined the reasons for the establishment of AAFC, a summary of AAFC's rise to (relative) prominence, and noted the ongoing unity of AAFC member clubs. This theme of unity was returned to throughout the night, out of a certain degree of truth no doubt, but also in its own way acting as a polite reminder to AAFC member clubs that anything which would undermine that unity would be detrimental to their collective aims.

But as with so much of what AAFC is about, it's about adding a positive spin to everything that they do; thus extolling AAFC's ability to unite so many disparate soccer clubs, and celebrating an unprecedented collective effort in "putting football ahead of self-interest". This was reiterated by comments such as the unity of the AAFC clubs apparently confusing FFA. Added to the repetition of the need for continued unity were the virtues of focus and patience; not everything would happen at once, and the keenness for reform from NPL clubs needed to be properly directed.

Krayem went on to list the three broadest issues which the NPL clubs suffer under and which AAFC hopes to fix:

1. Unsustainable NPL model. 
2. The high costs of junior soccer. 
3. The limitations on growth for NPL clubs under the current system.

Some of these issues were covered in relative brevity, either by the night's two main hosts, or during the workshop period of the meeting. As best as I can recall, no specific details were offered in terms of fixing points 1 and 2, but point 3 was addressed in detailing what AAFC hoped to achieve as part of its aim to help create a truly national second tier.

The Championship/Second Tier discussion
After announcing its initial framework for a second tier model (among other demands) last year (see my take here; or the guest point-counterpoint here), AAFC announced at the roadshow meeting that it is in the process of creating a working model group for the second development stage (out of three) for its second tier/Championship model. The intention is to finish this stage by June, and seeing as how AAFC met its own October 2017 deadline for releasing its original/stage one proposal, we can be optimistic that we'll see the results of stage two sometime in mid-year.

Sceptical as I am about many facets of this plan, one development (or the absence of) I was interested in seeing was whether other relevant Australian soccer parties - federations, players, etc - would become involved in trying to develop a second tier model. And this is where one of the more interesting - and as it turns out, also contentious - parts of the meeting took place. AAFC claimed that it would be working with FFV, Football New South Wales, and Professional Footballers Australia to develop the model; indeed, that those three groups would also provide funding for the necessary research. Apart from the (however vague) political vote of confidence that such a collaboration implies, the news that there would be pooled funding for the working model group caught the attention of a few onlookers both at the venue and among those observing online.

Later on though there emerged conflicting reports about whether FFV had actually agreed to provide funding for the working model group, as opposed to merely providing moral and/or logistical support. In communications I had with different people, from the AAFC side there was insistence that FFV (and even FFA) had committed to funding the working model group, while two sources from the FFV side insisted to me that no financial commitment had been made by FFV. Confusing things further, from the AAFC side I later received "clarification" that AAFC was still in discussions with the different groups about the possibility of funding the working model group.

When combined with the suggestion, made at the Adelaide meeting, that AAFC member clubs would be asked to contribute financially to the working model group, there seem to be mixed messages floating around about how the working model group will be funded.

Not doubting Paul but FYI - at the Adelaide stop of the roadshow it was suggested member clubs of AAFC would be asked to contribute to cover this instead. I think it was $500 pa per club up from the token $100 it cost to first register w AAFC. All attending seemed to agree to it.

— Mathew Doolan (@mdoolsy) March 8, 2018

So far, AAFC has apparently spent $90,000 on research - originating I assume from a mix of club donations, but principally from the generosity of some of its wealthier patrons. It's an expensive business getting together not just the conceptual framework for your new competition, but also putting together the mechanics of how you claim it will all work.

It's also necessary, not just from a "prove the doubters wrong" aspect, but also from a "putting in a competing framework to the only one that currently exists" aspect. When the NSL Taskforce Report was released many years ago (perhaps the most overlooked document in Australian soccer history, because everyone keeps focusing on the Crawford Report, the latter of which was related to governance, not the league), it had the added heft of being based on the research of the PFA, at the time "the most stable and cohesive institution within the game" according to Joe Gorman. The PFA model is what the A-League was born from, albeit not in its pure form; nothing is ever taken straight the shelf, much like the FFA governance model wasn't a direct lift from the Crawford Report.

The main point however is that long ago the one prominent organisation in Australian soccer that had not been sullied by Australian soccer's reputation of mismanagement and corruption was the only one that came up with a plan, funded by itself. In a moment when confidence in Australian soccer's leading institutions is once again at a low ebb, AAFC has the opportunity to do something similar to what the PFA did in the past, by transitioning from being a fledgling advocacy group to something which has its own intellectual property in the form of a firm plan - not just ideas - about how to improve the game in Australia. In an environment where the best ideas anyone else can come up with to rejuvenate the A-League and by extension Australian soccer are "maybe we should add a couple of teams, maybe..." and "all we really need to do is have an independent A-League" - as if either of those alone would be anything other than short term solutions - a bold, costed, detailed and logical plan would stand out.

If some observers of my Twitter feed were upset by the suggestion that FFV and/or FNSW would use "junior fees" to pursue the dreams of a collection of rebellious/ambitious/arrogant clubs, it wasn't just those people that had their jimmies rustled by information provided during this segment. When a slide was put up showing a comparison of current NPL club costs compared to possible Championship model costs, some in the audience were a bit stunned by the figures of current NPL costs, thinking them too high, especially in terms of wages.

The broad range offered by the AAFC's slide claimed that current player wage bills were up to $800,000 a season; the exclamation from some in the crowd was that most clubs would be paying, at best, half that amount. Along with questions about how AAFC got those figures, reasonable comment was made from the floor that this section of the presentation should have included "bands" of spending to more accurately reflect current spending trends. And I agree that there should have been more detailed information about how many clubs were in different wage spending bands, (as well as other costs) and that this data should have also included a breakdown of these details by state, so AAFC members and interested onlookers could see a more complete economic picture of Australian soccer at the second tier level.

Of course, this means more clubs opening themselves up to the kind of scrutiny that few clubs at this level would be comfortable with, but what price the greater good?

With costs, including wages, obviously rising across the board for a national second tier model, it felt to me for a moment that for some clubs the penny may have finally dropped about how realistic participation in a national second tier would actually be for them. But then the discussion moved on to whether second tier teams would be obliged to spend that much, or whether they'd be allowed to get away with spending a lot less. And therein lies one of the problems to be worked out among those arguing for a national second tier. There is a very broad spectrum of people discussing things like a second tier and associated reforms, ranging from a complete laissez-faire approach to something much more regulated, but which side of that ideological ledger will AAFC's second tier model prioritise?

Among those who criticise the A-League, much of that criticism centres around things like the salary cap, the salary floor, minimum player wages, and the assortment of other measures which see the A-League operate as a cartel like the top competitions of the other major Australian football codes. (This includes what might be called the Rolls Royce model around fan experience, stadiums, etc). Apart from disagreeing with that cartel approach from the position of "it's not how a real soccer economy or system works" or "it doesn't replicate the global standard", the argument also claims that the cartel approach entrenches mediocrity. Teams that struggle on the park have less incentive to immediately do better in order to secure their position in the league; successful teams have artificial barriers preventing them from actually putting out the best product that they can, because they must be kept in relative check with all the struggling teams

Cost is one thing, revenue quite another. Of course a lot of the doubters are wondering where the money will come from, especially as costs increase. While some potential national second tier clubs are reasonably well placed to cope with the wage increases (and some will have the benefit of less travel than potential competitors), there will still be significantly increased costs which will need to be covered. In the discussion which reiterated the preferred administrative model for the hypothetical national second tier, there was also some discussion about pooled revenue and profit sharing. Uneducated as I am about these matters, it nevertheless seems to imply a certain degree of cartel discipline, and thus a step removed from a no-holds-barred spending model. It also says something about the fact that AAFC believes that there will be profit to be shared.

But where someone like me sees problems, AAFC sees opportunities. AAFC is frequently on record with talking about how much money is generated by its member clubs for the Australian soccer ecosystem (some would counter that by claiming that it's mostly generated by the junior fees paid to NPL teams), but also about the limitations placed upon teams outside the A-League because of Australian topflight soccer's closed shop. Almost inevitably, AAFC expects that increased sponsorship opportunities will emerge for teams participating in a national second tier. But aside from that, AAFC believes there is an opportunity to take advantage of a changing media landscape, which for me is code for non-traditional (and non-terrestrial) broadcast media.

Previously, if not from AAFC itself than from people advocating for similar outcomes, the idea (or hope) was that SBS would be a partner of a national second tier, an idea which I never had much confidence would be realised. For starters, SBS's Australian soccer content - indeed its soccer content outside of its lone EPL game a week at midnight Saturday -  has now regressed to an almost negligible existence. What could possibly prompt them to spend the necessary funds to show a second tier competition with limited opportunities for recouping any investment? This suggestion, which goes back years before the existence of any tangible second tier movement - and which was originally formulated around showing live state premier league games - has always left me stumped.

Should this subtle rhetorical shift in emphasis - from securing a traditional and established broadcast media partner to a non-traditional equivalent - concern prospective members of a national second tier? It's something that certainly bothers me, but I'm already long gone on the prospects of this thing even working. For those more open-minded on these matters however, it should still be something that they keep an eye on - every cent that The Championship model doesn't get from a broadcast deal is that much more revenue that will need to be collected from other sources to make up for it.

In terms of player recruitment for The Championship, Krayem was adamant that it was "not designed as a retirement home", and that rules would be set up in order to promote younger Australian talent. This was clearly a riposte to the geriatric progression of the A-League, but also perhaps a critique of the NPL as it currently functions with regards to player recruitment. For example, does the luring of players from Queensland to Victoria help Queensland soccer? It may help those individual players by having them play in a higher standard competition, but it also weakens the standard of Queensland soccer. And what does the Victorian appetite for recruiting players from outside Victoria - previously British backpackers, currently Queenslanders and players from smaller states - say about the lack of opportunity given to Victorian players? And in the case of bringing in players from Tasmania, might this actually be much more justifiable? It's a lot to chew on.

Regarding questions from the floor about the transfer model to be used in The Championship, and Australian player transfer reform in general (as part of the now longstanding grievances state league clubs have about their players being poached by A-League teams, including the latter's designated NPL sides), the short and only answer given was that this was something that would be worked on.

The Championship would be a summer competition, with men's and women's components. I was not able to ascertain on the night whether successful applicants for The Championship would need to field both men's and women's teams as part of their participation. (update: see the comments section for clarification) This is an interesting point for how women's soccer exists in Australia. More often than not, the wealthiest soccer clubs in Australia (below the A-League level) are those which have a long tradition of successful male teams, with their female teams, where they exist, being an afterthought. Meanwhile those state league clubs which have historically been most successful at running female teams - often by women themselves and existing in the void left by the absence of a strong senior mens' program - would struggle to find the means to support a grandiose venture such as ongoing participation in a national second tier competition.

There was no elaboration on the matter of promotion and relegation to and from the A-League, or from and to the extant NPL competitions. While perhaps this meeting was neither the time nor the place for an explanation of how the different league layers would be formally linked together, it did leave a gaping hole in the area most casual onlookers (admittedly not in the room, but among those observing online) wanted to know. Krayem said that the NPL would persist; insofar as my understanding goes, this positions The Championship as the mechanism by which Australian soccer begins to achieve a necessary realignment of the its competition hierarchy.

Christo Patsan said that the founding principles and intent of the NPL and National Competitions Review were sound and largely still relevant and worth pursuing. I'm not sure that feeling is shared by everyone. If I was to summarise what I think AAFC want, it is a nationally consistent NPL approach (and eventually second tier) where clubs have the ability to control their identity and destinies. Are the ideals of a consistent framework and the freedom for clubs to do their own thing compatible concepts though?

That the NPL competitions would continue means that there needs to be a lot of work done to sort out how this is all going to come together. I mean, that much is obvious to everyone. Even among the advocates for a promotion-relegation regime however, there are a range of views of how this would work, ranging from a "quasi-cartel, necessary criteria to be met" model, to something much more cut-throat and free-market. At the moment. it also appears that apart from Victoria and New South Wales, most states are only paying lip service to AAFC's aim of a second division. Cue the NSL conspiracy again. Should the Championship become operational, AAFC says its administration would be based in Melbourne, a deliberate challenge to Sydney's dominance of Australian soccer administration.

(And while really not important from the fact of its obvious implausibility, it is worth noting that there was also the odd call from the floor - with slightly more than muted approval from the guests in attendance - that if FFA and everyone else didn't want to get a second tier up and running, that the clubs should just breakaway and form their own competition. This idea had cold water poured on it from AAFC panel members, but it does highlight that there are very diverse views and attitudes to Australian soccer matters within AAFC's constituency.)

The most left-field proposal on the night...
Was AAFC's desire to hold an annual junior tournament for AAFC member clubs. The age range would be 13-16, for both boys and girls teams, with the event held in a single location. The annual extravaganza would also include conferences and seminars. Aiming to start in April 2020 - one assumes over the Easter break - this is a logistically bold, perhaps even insane proposal. It would require accommodating thousands of travellers (kids, parents, coaches, support staff), would cost a lot of money to organise, would require a lot of grounds, and all sorts of other things which someone like me who has never organised or been involved in such an undertaking could possibly think of.

Credit for the scope of the idea, but its scale is such that I'd love to see how this would all come together. Reading online, this idea was a hit with the Canberra people in particular.

FFA Congress progress
Another one of the key issues was the status of reform to FFA's Congress. FIFA and the AFC representatives had recently been in the country and left again, and looking in from the outside it appears that not much has changed. Naturally those involved closer to the action have a better idea than us mere plebs. In terms of AAFC's hope of getting a seat on FFA's reformed Congress, it all seemed to depend on who was speaking for AAFC. Krayem said that Victoria was the only state federation which was for AAFC having a vote on FFA's Congress, while Queensland was happy for AAFC to have observer status.

(A non-AAFC source later told me that most state federations were happy to let AAFC have observer status, until such time as AAFC could "prove themselves", whatever that means. I assume it means in part holding itself together through what will be the much more difficult phase of actually getting some of its grand schemes up and running.)

Krayem was hopeful but cautious about whether AAFC would get its seat in the FFA Congress, but Nick Galatas, making one of his rare contributions during the evening, piped up to say with uncharacteristic confidence that AAFC will get there. This belief is based on the support that AAFC believes it is receiving from FIFA and the AFC; they certainly aren't being made to feel welcome by FFA and the A-League teams, and probably quite a few of the states. This international support gives AAFC a kind of leverage that forces their inclusion into discussions.

The issue of representation
Every state and region is going to be different when it comes to its soccer experience; in fact, this is a problem that cuts across almost every aspect of Australian sport, that rather than anything resembling a uniform and universal sporting culture, we are instead a nation of micro-sporting cultures. One thing I didn't note earlier on about the make up of the audience was how overwhelmingly male it was. I don't think there were any women present at all. Intentional or not, it is not a good look for an organisation that will need to argue that its attempts to reform Australian soccer also include the best interests of women and girls, and not just high level senior male players. Indeed female football was very much an afterthought to the entire evening's proceedings, with AAFC talking heads mentioning little about the topic, and the questions from the floor referencing nothing about women's soccer at all.

This is a serious issue, and I don't doubt for a second that those representing AAFC don't take it seriously. However, apart from the issue of optics - never mind female participation and professional pathways being the zeitgeist of Australian sport - the lack of any almost any reference to the female side of the game plays right into the hands of those who would oppose AAFC solely on the accusation that the group was merely a front for a collective of culturally regressive ethnic clubs who had been unable to keep up with the times. And to be fair, some of those accusations would not be too far off the mark. The room was made up of at least some clubs who represent conservative or traditional ideas of what soccer is about in Australia on this and other issues. Related to those clubs would be those who, like South Melbourne perhaps, espouse a cautious modernism in its approach to women's soccer.

(Albeit a modernism as yet untested by what happens when the female program's principle advocate, in South's case Gabrielle Giuliano, moves on. The matter of cultural and club continuity has always been at the forefront of women's soccer.)

At the same time, apart from your different flavours of ethnically derived conservatism and cautious modernism, you have clubs which exist outside those frameworks, and those which go across several demographics. So while there are clearly clubs in the AAFC movement with a chip on their shoulder about FFA's treatment of ethnicity, there are also those clubs for which ethnicity is not even close to being at the top of their list of complaints. Then there are the clubs from regional areas. The ambitious clubs who have no NSL history. The clubs from states and regions which have never had national representation of any sort, and no obvious development pathway for their talented kids. All of these groups are being presented by AAFC as a unified collective with a common purpose, and not as the motley collection of clubs that this group actually is.

And it's not all smooth sailing. There was some discomfort from the floor about some of the decision making and negotiating processes of AAFC, namely that it does not consult as much as it could or should with its member clubs about key issues.

(I'd also add in the strange and sometimes unprofessional social media antics of AAFC. I think they'd be better off sticking to a conservative online approach - discussing only their affairs, and avoiding clogging up their timeline with stuff outside their immediate remit of being a representative organisation for second tier clubs. At present their social media efforts lack focus - probably operating on the whim of whoever's in control of the relevant social media accounts - while also coming across at times as petty. They need to at the very least get an off-the-shelf social media policy.)

But for the time being, in those narrow schemes where people actually pay attention to any of this stuff, AAFC is winning. It's winning the ideological battle because it is presenting a positive outlook for Australian soccer (even while often talking down present day Australian soccer); it's winning because its opponents have been successfully portrayed as out of touch and stagnant. And whatever the flaws with its social media/PR game, AAFC has also succeeded in having its public face, its front office if you will, obscure whatever disquiet and misgivings clubs under the AAFC umbrella have.

We are all in this together, but for how long?

Unity and patience are the virtues preached, but old habits and attitudes die hard. The nature of soccer in Australia has been, at least since after the migrant lead boom, one of self-interest and self-preservation. (The A-League has been the notable exception to that.) The pursuit of excellence (in all its forms) applies first to your club, and good luck to the others trying to catch or keep up.

But at one point during the meeting Krayem made the salient point - the kind of comment that can deflate a room full of fighting optimists - that "what may be good for football may not be good for your club". Amid the positivity and reinforcement of what it is that AAFC is trying to achieve, it's a message that cuts through, and it's certainly a message that we will look back on if and when a second tier gets up and it's not to everyone's liking.

Of course what the common good is insofar as Australian football goes depends on who you ask, and I'm in no good position to answer that. To me it's at best a nebulous concept, one that's been tainted because more often than not it's been used as a weapon rather than as the vague ideal that it is. For whatever it's worth, I don't think Krayem used the "good of the game" argument here in any sort of malicious way, more as reiteration that even within this group of (for now) united clubs, there would be winners and (at least relative) losers from AAFC's plans.

A word on the "NSL conspiracy"
There are some few pushing the line that AAFC and all of its associated antics are merely a front for getting ethnic NSL clubs back into the national soccer system. At the most extreme end of that argument is the accusation that AAFC is a front specifically set up to get South Melbourne Hellas back into the Australian topflight.

Such thinking (whether directed at ethnic NSL clubs or South Melbourne more specifically) requires two pre-existing notions in order to get off the ground. First, it requires the ethnic NSL teams having the necessary political, financial and grassroots clout to re-emerge from their otherwise terminal decline and irrelevance to Australian soccer (a terminal decline and irrelevance diagnosed by their detractors no less). Second, that these clubs would have the capability and competence (again, both of which their detractors claim these clubs lack) to establish and sustain such a complicated and unwieldy campaign in order to get back into the national league system. Needless to say, I find such conspiracy thinking beyond laughable. Truly, it is at the level of the conspiracies cobbled together by the so-called "bitters" of Australian soccer over the past decade and more.

Whatever else AAFC's faults, or the disagreements one may have with the aims of AAFC, it has been established and managed to succeed beyond the limits placed upon it by its detractors and opponents for a number of reasons. We have already mentioned the support AAFC is receiving from FIFA and the AFC, however much that support may be overstated by AAFC representatives. It has also managed to keep its broad constituency together for longer and greater ends than many people expected. Just as importantly, in an Australian soccer situation which reeks of stagnation - especially with regards to FFA and the A-League - AAFC is putting forward the boldest and most optimistic view of what Australian soccer could become. Whether their approach has gained any traction with people outside those few interested in the narrow field of Australian soccer politicking is almost beside the point; within the demographic that does care about such things, they come off looking more often than not like the good guys.

Something rather obvious that gets missed however is that AAFC exists to represent clubs which exist in a rather strange and hitherto unprecedented "between space" in Australia's football chain of command. The NPL clubs play under the auspices and control of their respective state federations, while at the same time participating in a system largely designed by the national federation. While in cases like Victoria, NPL clubs are able to perhaps organise well enough to exert a measure of influence over the running of their state federation - and thus alter elements of their own NPL environment more to their liking - they have no ability to act as a collective to put pressure on the body which set up the NPL framework in the first place, that being FFA.

Because of this bizarre operating system, no state operates NPL in the same way. When one person from the floor of the Melbourne roadshow complained (fairly enough) about A-League teams having more visa players at their disposal when they play FFA Cup matches against Victorian NPL teams, Krayem noted that when Victorian teams played against Queensland teams in the same competition, that Victorian teams had a PPS cap of 200 compared to Queensland's 170. Meanwhile other states have no restrictions on visa players. Not all of this is FFA's fault, and the clubs themselves - certainly in the case of the Victorian NPL - are also to blame for the mess that NPL has become.

But the point is, while ethnic ex-NSL clubs may be best placed to push for national second tier participation, they are not the only ones doing so. Neither are all of the former ethnic powerhouse NSL clubs best placed to take advantage of any changes. The goal here clearly is to start a competition which adds value across the country, and not just in forgotten suburban pockets of Melbourne and Sydney.

But still, what is it that South Melbourne Hellas is trying to do?
(I included this section because Leo Athanasakis asked what I thought was an unusual question, on the matter of potential A-League expansion and NPL/second tier queue jumping. While this was directed at other A-League consortium bids, I felt the queue jumping element could have - and indeed already has - been directed at South itself. Also South of the Border is a South Melbourne blog, so you know...)

When the campaign against FFV's original NPL model was begun by Green Gully and Melbourne Knights, South Melbourne - represented on this issue by one Tom Kalas - notably took a different tack, preferring to remain what it called "in the tent", believing that it could effect change more effectively from within the system rather than fighting against it from the outside. Then, like magic, South gradually changed its position to the point where it (and to be fair, a whole bunch of other Greek clubs) somehow became the leader of the movement against FFV and its NPL model.

Among those clubs who care to remember that this happened at all, there is understandably distrust and resentment about how that all played out; that the more obnoxiously regressive clubs on all sorts of issues who stuck their necks out on principle (however misguided that principle may have been) only for a bunch of Greeks to come in and take all the credit for getting not just a solution to the NPL impasse, but credit as being the leaders of a re-found boldness for clubs to stand up to the post-Crawford federations for their rights.

Me, I liked the fanciful idea that I invented that it was all coordinated; that certain clubs that had a more uncompromising ethos when it came to rejecting forced modernity would do the initial head kicking and grunt work, allowing more palatable alternatives - ie, us - to come in and finish off the job.

But the truth is that ever since it was compelled to vacate its position in the Australian topflight by the forces which took over Australian soccer, as well because of its own decrepit state, South Melbourne has had one distant goal in its sights above all others: to get back into the big-time, as soon as possible, and by any means necessary. So we bid for the second Melbourne A-League licence under the Southern Cross gimmick, losing out to Melbourne Heart. We tried to buy out the then failing Central Coast Mariners, under a scheme which may have included keeping some games in Gosford for however long it took for people to realise it was a stupid idea and just have all our games in Melbourne. Then we tried buying out Melbourne Heart, and failed there too. Currently, we've thrown our hat in the ring for the zombie A-League expansion process which may not even have ever existed.

They say that you miss all the shots you don't take, and when it comes to failed attempts to get into the A-League, no one's taken more shots than South. And yet, for whatever reason, South has never been at the public forefront of AAFC, other than by proxy association. To its own members, South has played AAFC and promotion-relegation issues as low-key affairs, preferring to put up a wait and see approach. The emphasis has always been on first and foremost getting into the A-League under its own steam (even if details of those attempts provided to members are sparing), and not through wholesale reform of Australian soccer's league structures.

And yet in most recent times, those paying attention to the social media contributions of especially our president Leo Athanasakis indicate a shift in our prior reticence to openly support a promotion-relegation model. Such a shift leads easily to the allegation from within the AAFC tent and from promotion-relegation fellow travellers alike that South Melbourne is not really ideologically committed to the principle of promotion-relegation; rather, South Melbourne is only committed to whatever South Melbourne believes will get it back into the topflight soonest. And if that happens, the rest be damned.

While not serious enough to threaten the unity of the AAFC revolutionary project by itself, it's the kind of fissure that people will need to keep an eye on; when persistent calls are made about unity and its virtues, any deviation from that ideal invites the possibility of infighting and sniping.

The question of heart and soul

I tried to write and re-write this section a number of times, never to my own satisfaction. So I'm going to try to keep it short and sweet.

Community, authentic, grassroots, corporate, franchise, elite. Words like these and many others can be useful in describing the cultural schisms that afflict Australian soccer. Used carelessly however, instead of clarifying the ways in which Australian soccer is divided, these words serve mostly as an act of self-justification.

By any measure, FFA and the management of several A-League teams have treated NPL teams poorly. There are countless examples of this, some of which were given on the night. But it's possible also that NPL teams are seen in a similar light by teams far lower down the food chain.

Claiming the moral and ethical high ground is a dangerous business. Anyone making claims for their own purity of support of the game is on dangerous ground. Resorting to the kinds of rhetoric which filled up forums a decade ago, and which paints simplistic pictures of an "us and them" which does not actually exist, is a tactic fraught with issues.

The focus should be on the actual examples of disrespect given by the top tier towards everything below it. Emotive language which loses sight of that should be avoided.

Final thought
During the aftermath over the next few days, it was funny to see the same info I'd received from different parties via Twitter DMs and text messages - sometimes intended for clarification, sometimes intended for further dissemination - make its way out to the public domain via other trusted vessels. It was like a proxy social media battle in the broader war for hearts and minds, except that I don't think anyone but the already interested even noticed.