If the issue with the old club-based national league was the boom or bust spending strategy clubs adopted, perhaps a combination of a club-based league centrally funded by NZF would work?
The theory would be:
- NZF get a big lump of funding from one or multiple trusts.
- Each club the achieves the level gets a chunk of money.
- They can supplement that from sponsorship or gate takings, but not from additional gaming machine money.
- Relegated teams get a parachute payment (maybe).
If the league is funded sustainably in this way, one of the driving purposes of the franchise league (insulating clubs from spending beyond their means) should drop away.
I agree with that. I've got no problem in principle with a club based model as long as the money is kept under control (and the egos are kept out of it). You could throw a player points system in there as well to further remove the temptation to spend on player payments.
Quite interested to see how the Aussies actually manage to implement that player points system though.
One of the key differences between what FFV and FFNSW are doing seems to be how they treat social or community clubs. In Victoria an NPL club cannot have any social teams but is aligned with community clubs within its boundary which are it's feeder clubs. In NSW an NPL club can have a community component but the teams are referred to as 'sub-junior' and maybe subject to some different rules? Closer to home Team Welly obviously started out as the FFV model but has morphed into something closer to the FFNSW model, which ACFC has really been all along (although an ASB Prem franchise is still a separate legal entity).
EDIT: actually I can see a couple of problems with the above scheme Smithy.
First of all, if you go back to a club based league they will all have legitimate reason to apply for pokie funding for things other than funding the first team. Not sure how you separate that out. Maybe you just rely on other mechanisms to keep the need for pokie funding under control (including actually enforcing the existing rules around pokie money not being used to pay players!).
The other potential problem is that it's all good to remove the need to spend up big while in the national league, but how do you control the spending of clubs trying to get there?
Neither of these problems should be impossible to solve though.