This week Football Australia announced the launch of a new national competition.
The home and away National Second Division has been put on ice, and in its place the FA has announced a 6 team champions league style competition, to be played post-season for the nation’s top NPL teams.
Although we’ll consider whether a full review of the format is required on this blog in due course, while the iron is hot we see one glaring opportunity that we feel needs to be considered.
The current announced format (Format A) comprises a group stage (comprising of four groups of four teams) and a three week finals series.
Instead of this we feel the format (Format B) should be tweaked to comprise a group stage (comprising two groups of eight teams) and a two week finals series.
Although Format A sees home and away legs for each fixture we argue that it limits the interest of the competition whilst delivering a competition balance feature which is not required.
The A-League and Champions League have done away with home and away fixtures in the group/regular season stages as the follow on knockout/finals stages renders these somewhat irrelevant.
The benefit of larger groups means there is more cross-club interest in fixtures i.e. a fan of a club has to keep an eye on the seven other clubs in their group, rather than just three others.
The second benefit is that there is more variety in fixtures and more likelihood of big derbies or rivalry games.
The third benefit is that this will feel more like a home and away style season that clubs and (supposedly) the FA are wanting to build to.
Finally, it creates a higher bar to qualify for finals. Rather than 50% of teams making the Quarterfinals (2/4 in each group of Format A) only 25% of teams will qualify for the semi finals (2/8 in each group of Format B), this may lead to more dead rubbers near the bottom of the table, but it will also lead to higher quality football required up the top of the table.
Considering the above we ask all stakeholders to tweak the format and consider Format B as proposed!
Example of Format A based on last season’s NPL
Example of Format B based on last season’s NPL
The Beautiful Game 