Another boring football blog......

Well the Eagles won a thrilling Grand Final by 1 point. Amazing match and my voice is still a little horse. Celebrations abounded and it was a magical day. Sadly the pool lost to Bolton and to top it off there were some poor decisions – a bad call that led to the first goal and a pretty blatant push by Campo on Kuyt which should have been a penalty and make things 1 all and then interesting.

But because the Eagles won the AFL premiership I kind of got over the loss by Liverpool.

Talking about football I was thinking about the national league here – the A-League. The competition is doing well and crowds in Melbourne are really booming. Last weekend Melbourne Victory attracted 25,000 plus to its match which was on at he same time as another Melbourne team was playing another grand final (that time of the year).

Clearly there is a boom and the A-League should look to expand and grow. Thoughts abound that more teams are needed in Australia in other centres and also more teams in places like Melbourne and Sydney. True but I think we should go outside the borders.

The league needs to head north and tap into the football mad markets in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand. All markets have a lot of followers and that adds to a huge audience both at matches and on TV. This leads to greater marketing opportunities and therefore more $$$.

While overseas recently I noted there was talk about Malaysia improving itself and qualify for the 2018 World cup. OK this is a huge dream and really unrealistic but if the A-League expanded and included a Malaysia team comprised mainly of the Malaysia national team members. This team benefits from playing against good competition more regularly which could lead to them raising the quality of the football in the region.

This same formula could be applied to Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. If this experiment works then the A-League (which by now would mean ASIAN League) expands in years to include additional teams from the same countries.

In 10 years time we could have a 15-20 team competition which would rival some of the second tier leagues in Europe. The sport would grow in the region and it would boom times everywhere.

Frank Lowy and the FFA – I hope you are reading this.