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Oskar Zawada is leaving Wellington. Would we take him?

ouch!

I wouldn't mind so much if we actually put up a fight to stay in the race

Yes, it hurts doesn't it? They will be in Asia next season, and in the GF here. We have absolutely nothing.

Troyes are relegated to the Championnat National.

That was either ABC news or Nine news yesterday (watched both).

Ffs Wellington

It's kinda old news now if you are referring to Angel Torres allegations...

@NewConvert Wow, hadn't seen that. References?

My belief is that CCM have a Colombian player who is currently stood down because he is facing serious allegation of sexual assault (Torres) and they have a Brazilian as well. The majority of players from Latin America tend to be from Brazil with City just having returned a Chilean player (whose name I already forgot), WSW also have a Brazilian and Colombian players. Not sure about the other clubs. Note that Rafa has Brazilian parents but Rafa himself was born in the Netherlands but grew up in Adelaide. Also the news was that the criminal organisation was operating right across Europe as well with arrest in all countries within hours of each other. Davila would definitely have been the entry point but I do wonder whether the organised crime cartel is from Cali, Colombia. In which case, Davila may not have been given much choice.

I agree with both of you. And certainly the board of directors have a lot to answer for the current debacle. If they were a publicly traded company, the board would be facing serious challenges. I read somewhere is that they are trying to emulate the Basketball model which is starting from a small base and growing it to a certain size only. However, I think that too many people in power are of the belief that they just need to go big straight away. It's like they are running a nationwide glitzy campaign for ham and cheese sandwich using supermarket bread and selling it as gourmet.

And not using other countries as examples, take Iceland, they have just about the same money involved in the game as we do and handle it much better from top to bottom. That said they are a tiny country compared to us, so we do have certain issues not many other countries do.

The biggest mistake they make IMO is that they point to junior registrations and then say that it's the most-played football in the country, the second biggest is to keep on the mantra that it's the "world game," and in doing so they continually overreach the actual support for the game at a senior level in terms of finance, government interest, and spectator interest.

For some reason the people who go into leadership roles with this sport in this country are a sandwich short of a lunchbox, the NSL started pretty well also and then stupid decisions and whatnot saw it's demise. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Absolutely. Of course we don't know the extent of it. Are there any other Latin-American players in the League? Yes, I know that Mexico is in North America, but I'm thinking of players from the Spanish-speaking countries, which, I think, is all of South America except Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guyana (the last three having official languages English, Dutch and French respectively)? Part of this problem may be that as a country we simply cannot afford more than four full-time professional football clubs. Perhaps the future also can allow for clubs to have part-time professional players? In the end we have to cut the coat according to the cloth. The other thing that I cannot get out of my mind is that the vice-Chairman of our club, Simon Pearce, someone who is not known to have any public utterance whether oral or written on record for 10 years, is one of the Directors of APL, which has overseen this debacle.

Thanks. I have thought for quite some time that the future may lie in an East Asia Super League.

Quoted the main bits

I watched him in that game because we were going to sign him, he was good, I don't think I saw a bad mistake from him.

That's behind a paywall...

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/why-the-aleague-is-on-the-brink-of-financial-disaster/news-story/6f79542963e6ba1facf6b57b40b2ba48 Might not need to worry about signings if there aren't any teams to pay.....

This was the case before they purchased the club tho. It's not as if it was a big secret that nobody told them about. This is exactly what we are to them.

It is quite likely that they may see us as a low level feeder club. That is, the club will find a few Bos and then onsell them. Whenever big European clubs are doing Melbourne tours they will charge for use of the facilities.

It is hard to when the cap is so low and there is no reason for that kind of investment if we can't even bring the players in for it.

There shouldn’t be an excuse for us, there is a minimum cap spend anyway. We pride ourselves in investment in facilities and academy runnings. We can just outspend the league again just like during the COVID days, we can become the benchmark and Petrilo is our hero again!

I'm telling you. CFG no longer have any interest in "turning us into an Asian powerhouse" or whatever it was they said. They don't care if we do well or not.