The Western Sydney Westfield Warriors

Well, the second week of the A-League finals is nearly upon us and I am getting really excited. However, Football Federation Australia (FFA) chose to overshadow this excitement with yet another major announcement....A team from Western Sydney will compete in next years competition. I for one am deeply concerned about this. The AFL spent 4 years creating and preparing the Greater Western Sydney Giants for entry into their national competition. In that time the FFA have abandoned two of it's expansion teams and given an as yet unnamed Western Sydney team less than 6 months to prepare. The 'build it and they will come' approach is clearly filled with great risk. Moreover, as a football supporter (fanatic) and sports fan in general I firmly believe that part of what makes the great clubs (or any club) great is their history. It was extremely naive of the FFA to think that both Gold Coast United and North Queensland Fury would even begin to gather a large fan base in such a short space of time. The minimum time frame to gauge the relative success or failure of those clubs would have been five years and probably realistically more like ten. The FFA cannot return to these places now for decades.

As for Western Sydney, I think the FFA has set them up to struggle on the field as well (not a good way of building support). At the present time the team has no name, no coach, no sponsor and importantly no players. Surely it would have made more sense to establish them this year and give them at least one season in the state league to build cohesion as a football team. This is what the Gold Coast Suns and Greater Western Sydney both did. The World Game radio crew had an interesting discussion about the issue this week....