You have to wonder if there would be any entrepreneurs out there who’d want to do something like have a big event weekend where both men’s and women’s teams play and there is naming sponsorship rights, international coverage and perhaps some related festival type events…or a 3 team tournament with Fiji, a bigger international team of the ilk of South Africa or Jamaica and New Zealand over two or three venues and a week or so…
I’ve always thought we should try get the island nations more involved. It doesn’t benefit anyone to roll them 7-1, 5-0 etc, especially if we then have to play a Germany or a Spain at a World Cup afterwards; ideally we need the island teams to be able to really test us. To get better they need more games, they play far less than even we do, let alone other confederations’ teams. It’d be far cheaper to bring them here than a ‘bigger’ team, and you could assemble a reasonably cheap All Whites squad by just using NZ/Aus based players. It would get more games here, help the island teams improve, and help get fringe players in the AWs get a chance to stake their claim in a full strength squad. Given the teams could be all locally sourced, you wouldn’t be bound to using international windows, so you could play the game any time during the A League off-season. I’d be surprised to see it happen, but I can’t really see a downside.