Why Australian soccer’s new second competition is a philosophical rival to the A-League

To an outsider, it would seem unwise to create a second national league at a time when the first is battling to stay alive.

The beleaguered A-League has shrunk to 12 teams, after the collapse of Western United, and all of them are bleeding money. The outlook for domestic soccer in Australia is challenging. Now a rival has emerged from within.

The Australian Championship launches on Friday night. It is the result of years of debate between soccer fans and administrators about the absence of promotion and relegation from the A-League, and relentless lobbying from clubs that were banished to the state leagues when the old National Soccer League collapsed.

Australian soccer, they argued, was missing a trick with the closed shop model: there was no incentive for aspiration outside the A-League, and no punishment for mediocrity within it. Promotion and relegation would make everyone better, address the A-League’s alleged stagnation, and repair the disharmony created by the old soccer v new football divide. The advent of the Australia Cup proved there was an appetite for these ideas. More than a decade later, here we are.

Of course, many prudent reasons explain why Australia’s soccer system is not a perfect pyramid like England – most of them financial. But people want what they want, and as the global political climate of 2025 shows, you don’t have to be realistic. This is the direction of travel; get on board or get left behind.

Though soccer would prefer to be doing this from a position of strength, it’s been 20 years since the start of the A-League, and clearly there’s a need for a bit of a shake-up. If not now, when?

This is new terrain for Australian sport. The AFL and NRL have never seriously considered a second division. The closest precedent is rugby union’s various “third-tier” competitions, most recently the National Rugby Championship, which never came close to generating enough revenue to cover costs.

That is the hurdle that soccer will need to successfully clear, and that is why it is starting with a compromise model. The Australian Championship is more of an end-of-season tournament for NPL teams than a second division. Football Australia went through several tenders over several years to find clubs that met their criteria for a proper, home-and-away league, but could only come up with eight. Those are the eight ‘foundation members’, and will be joined in the tournament by eight other teams which qualified by finishing top in their respective state NPL competitions.

Should there be enough support, FA has not ruled out a move to a home-and-away season, and only after that can the thorny question of promotion and relegation be properly tackled. It seems to be a long way off – particularly given FA’s own ongoing challenges – but there appears to be some interest in this thing. There is more hype within the soccer community about the Championship than the A-League, which begins next weekend, and far more visible promotion.

FA has tried to avoid it through scheduling, but there will be times when the Championship and the A-League will be competing for the same eyeballs and bums on seats from the modest Australian soccer audience.

Nobody involved will say this, and in fact, officials stress the opposite. But the truth is, the Championship is a philosophical rival to the A-League in almost every way.

It is not branded in a way that makes it secondary to the A-League or positioned as a development platform like rugby’s NRC. The Championship is not a lesser thing, but another thing entirely.

The clubs involved are not franchises but member-based organisations, with strong histories, and they all want to compete at the highest possible level. The A-League is for people who want to support broad-based entities, and it’s not going anywhere; now is the time to test whether the nostalgia factor of ethnic clubs can be properly leveraged, too.

It will also be shown free on SBS, the game’s spiritual home on television. That, immediately, lends the Championship an air of gravitas and history; this is exactly the kind of Australian soccer people would expect to see on SBS.

And though the Championship is still technically only part-time football, the product on the pitch probably won’t be hugely indistinguishable from the A-League, since the gap between the top tier and the NPL is slowly closing, from both directions: partly because of increasing professionalism and rising standards from the best teams in the state leagues, as evidenced by Heidelberg United’s sensational run to the Australia Cup final, but also because the A-League’s ability to retain or recruit elite talent has vastly diminished. That’s not something to be proud of.

There are, of course, plenty of unanswered questions. Will the crowds actually turn up? Is this thing even remotely viable? If not, for how long can FA carry the can? Is this really the best use of the federation’s increasingly limited funds right now? Or is this just rose-tinted madness? And what do the A-League clubs think? They’re probably a little uncomfortable, but that is not a bad thing.

Competition is healthy; if the Championship further exposes some of the areas where the A-League is lacking, and if that nudges everyone further in the right direction, that is a net positive. The challenge will be whether the game’s key decision-makers can bring together the best of both worlds and create a future that everyone can get behind.

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