Last weekend a total of 17,000 spectators
attended two venues to see three games between six of the eight new
Hyundai A-League franchises, as part of the first local qualifying stage of the FIFA Club
World Championship. Neither game cracked the 10,000 figure seen as the
FFA’s preferred future minimum game attendance, and hopefully this isn’t a
portent of the level of public interest in the new A-League.

Just as worrying is the torturous progress of what should easily
be the
country’s second best funded team – the Melbourne Victory – to come up
with the necessary $5 million guaranteed funding from investors to
help underwrite the team’s initial five-year A-League existence. This
is one of the mandatory licence conditions demanded of all A-League
clubs by FFA.

But since the Victory consortium led by Melbourne businessman and
former Hawthorn club president Geoff Lord was given a rails run in an
otherwise poor field to obtain the Melbourne franchise, the club has
been struggling to raise the required capital.

The full story is on the site here.