Just six years after entering the league and three years after winning the final, the A-League announced that Western United Football Club have been put in “hibernation” for the 2025-26 A-League season. The West Melbourne club’s license for the upcoming season was stripped due to financial problems, including reportedly failing to pay players and staff on time.

Since the A-League began, it has expanded from its original eight clubs, introducing eight expansion teams over its 20 years of existence. Three of those clubs, including Western United, have since failed. Expansions have always happened through a bidding process, with the league granting licenses to the bidder they deem most fitting for the league. In 2018, Western United along with Syndey-based Macarthur, had the winning bids and were granted A-League licenses, expanding the competition to 12 teams.

A-League Couch Critics co-host, Bradley Jurd, tells upstart the licence fee was a major factor when Western United and Macarthur were admitted into the A-League.

“Whoever had the most money basically got in,” he says.

SBS football commentator David Basheer has been involved in the A-League from its start, both as a commentator and a presenter. He tells upstart there were many reasons for Western United’s admittance to the league. The most notable being that the club’s home base was in a “growth corridor” and the fact that the club had planned to build Australia’s first football-specific stadium, which, he notes, “hasn’t transpired”.

Although Western United’s proposal looked good on paper, Basheer says the location of the club’s new stadium and training facilities were their biggest flaw. Meanwhile, infrastructure around the club’s training ground is missing and it would take 10 to 20 years to develop.

“I think in Tarneit, you have an area in Melbourne that, in 20 years’ time, could do the job,” he says. “But right now, is it a community that can foster an A-League club? I don’t think so.”

Jurd also criticises the A-League’s approach to expansion, saying it makes “absolutely no sense” to create expansion teams in growth corridors instead of markets with already existing high populations that are without an A-League team. Jurd says the A-League is alone in thinking that an area like Tarneit is a suitable spot for a new top-tier team.

“I don’t think the AFL or NRL would ever expand on that kind of thought concept,” he says.

So, what should the A-League have done differently back in 2018?

Football Australia, formally The Football Federation of Australia (FFA), received 15 bids from clubs and consortiums wanting to enter the A-League in 2018. Bidders ranged from historic Greek state-league team South Melbourne to Southern Expansion from Illawarra.

Basheer says a Dandenong team, called Team 11, would have been the best option, with strong council backing and a well-established multicultural community among its main strengths.

“But hindsight is a pretty powerful weapon,” he reminds us.

For Jurd, the prospect of a state-league team joining the A-League is enticing, and he “probably would have preferred South Melbourne”.

However, finances and bad relationships dating back to the FFA’s creation of the A-League are the main barriers to entry for historic state-league clubs. The A-League started in 2005, after the National Soccer League was disbanded the year prior. The A-League was the first fully professional football league in Australia. It consisted of eight teams, only one of which had been in existence for more than 10 years and three of them were brand new.

Basheer says the goal was to make football attractive to “mainstream Australians”, which it was at the start.

“Their vision was to basically homogenise the game,” Basheer says. “To take it away from an ethnic-based game which the National Soccer League was in the thirty odd years before the A-League’s inception.”

But once the novelty wore off, it became clear the A-League’s creation had damaged relationships with a core group of football enthusiasts.

“They made an enormous mistake by isolating and really pushing away the foundation of football in this country,” Basheer says.

It’s not all bad news for the A-League though. Jurd points out a shift in how expansions are handled. The A-League has moved from accepting applications from all over, to choosing where they want the teams before the bidding process begins.

“They came out about three years ago and said, ‘[the] next two markets we want are Canberra and Auckland’, which was very different to the old way,” he says.

Jurd says the recent Auckland FC expansion is a great example of how expansion can be done right and stresses the importance of community engagement. The club’s success reminds him of what he calls “peak A-League” in the early to mid-2010s, when his team, Western Sydney Wanderers, was established.

“There were people I knew that had really no interest in football at all, but they wanted to get around the Wanderers,” he says.

“They saw the active support, they saw that whole vibe, the success fairly early on and they wanted to get involved with that.”

Basheer says the competition needs smarter and more sustainable expansions. He wants the next team introduced to be from Canberra, where the A-League Women already have a team.

“In my way of thinking, Canberra is big enough to support a [mens] A-League team,” he says. “But there’s got to be the right structure.”

But structure alone isn’t enough. For any new club to succeed, it also needs to capture the local community. Fans need a reason to show up, to feel connected, and to see value in following their team week after week. That, Jurd says, is where the A-League can stand apart from bigger overseas competitions.

“I can get a general admission ticket to the Wanderers for $20,” he says. “I might have the chance to meet one of the players, get a photo, have a chat to them. You’re never going to get that experience watching the Bundesliga or the Premier League.”