Was there anything specific people disliked about Superclub?
Though I don't think it is a direct comparison, as I think we played some meaningless Plate round whilst the national one took place - which would have had advantages in knowing the length of the season.
The general standard of play got worse as the top players spread around more clubs.
This is the key concern for me. Best players spread around more clubs, and clubs throwing money at players in an attempt to get to the 'national' stage of the competition. That in turn will just inflate player prices, so even average players who have no business being in the national league will have silly money thrown at them.
The end result could easily be worse standard of play but no reduction in costs (and possibly an increase for quite a few clubs).
talk through why you see that as being a bad thing
The quality won't be concentrated. If you have 100 top players in the country capable of playing in a national league, theoretically you should get a better standard of competition if you fit them in 8 teams rather than 15 or 20. And opening it up to that many clubs just means that more donkey ends up playing the national league and getting paid for it.
The flipside is that under the current arrangement the best players aren't evenly spread across the 8 teams, so it just ends up being a race between ACFC and TeeDubs, with ES coming in to join it over the last 2-3 years. But the overall standard of the national league has notably lifted over the last 4-5 years, and I can see it crashing down in no time under a superclub-type model.
what do you want out of the league?
Watching strong teams play? Fiscal sustainability? Development opportunities for players and coaches? Experienced players guiding players with potential? Locals playing?
currently there is eight teams of mediocre quality (HB on weekend), not geographically spread (any more), full of imports (covid has helped), big wages, poor crowds, big egos, minimal football community buy-in.
Feasibly you could get a higher standard in the National Payoffs than the current National League. The best in-form teams in the country - rather than those obliged to fill a slot in a league - something two teams couldn't even do this year.
From my side, I want the national league to serve as a genuine stepping stone to professional football (and I think that Handy Prem is heading that way, there's been a few players make that transition already) - so player development is the number 1 goal for me. I accept that it may not be for a lot of others. This means that best players in the country have to play against each other, which is I why I think you need to concentrate that in a smaller number of teams. How you do that so that they're evenly spread across all the teams, I don't know. I think the best players will naturally gravitate towards Auckland and Wellington for a whole range of reasons, I don't think that can be stopped regardless of the model.
I don't have a strong affiliation to any club, or even region now. I don't really care which team wins the national league (though I'm sure alot of people do care). But I do like watching young players develop here, then hopefully head overseas. That's why I really enjoyed Eastern Suburbs winning the league. A team of mostly young Kiwis, a big number of whom are now playing abroad, and since that GF win, many have been capped for the AWs.
To me this is the Handy Prem at it's best. Young kids developing and learning as they battle it out weekly against old heads like Jake Butler, Reira, Gulley, Clapham etc.
I'd like to see both Weenix and Ole/Western Suburbs automatically be in any national league, whatever format it is. Going forward these 2 academies are going to develop the majority of NZ's football talent. They should be helped, not hindered as they do that.
The days of strong club football, with long standing club rivalries, as clubs like Mt Wellington, ChCh United, NCR, Gisborne City - littered with AWs battle it out are long gone. Better to the recognise any national league format for what it should be, a development league who's main goal should be helping Kiwis head overseas, plus work in with NZ age group sides. No doubt it really helped Buckingham with his U20 side, that the core of that team came from NZ (Weenix & ES) - and those players had a summer of football honing their combinations, against NZ's best domestic older men's players in the leadup to their World Cup.