I felt as if I were being taken for a complete rube. After all that is how carnival folk refer to their audience and, with Clive Palmer in the role of P.T. Barnum, the Football Australia media conference certainly resembled a circus act.

It wasn’t the greatest show on earth by any means and I also don’t wish to imply it was unruly; rather it was a sideshow designed to keep the media’s attention firmly on the former Gold Coast United ringmaster who’d come to realise his recent postulations hadn’t quite resonated with the Australian football public.

Hence he repeated them. And then repeated them. And then repeated them some more.

Now P.T. Barnum, arguably the father of modern marketing, public relations and circus freak shows, once astutely quipped, “Without promotion, there is nothing.” Yet with Football Australia it would appear that it’s more a case of, “With nothing, there is only promotion.”

As it stands, I am not convinced that Football Australia stands for anything since on Thursday afternoon it failed to outline to my satisfaction exactly what it hoped to achieve.

The contradictions between what was presented in the media release – “It is Football Australia’s intention to replace Football Federation Australia” – and the subsequent denials that this was the case by those who stood at the lectern demonstrated as much.

Archie Fraser and Clive Palmer then spoke of fuzzy concepts like transparency and accountability, but without sufficient detail.

When pressed by the media for a clarification of its agenda, Football Australia effectively said it had none; that it would instead consult with various football stakeholders to ascertain what the agenda should be.

Which stakeholders? Why, any and all of them, it would seem – players, supporters, club owners, sponsors, groundsmen, ticket-rippers, ball boys, kit men and perhaps even the janitorial staff.

Now, I may not be a circus connoisseur – I’m just not a fan of clowns, okay? – but I believe I can safely say a travelling show won’t get very far by hitching the cart in front of the horse.

Of course there will be some estranged members of the football family who, like attention-seeking adolescents, see running away with the circus as the solution to all their problems. And I won’t argue that the A-League revolution didn’t disenfranchise some who had long-standing ties to the game in this country.

But these people were, like Clive Palmer and P.T. Barnum, self-seeking promoters. The very same people who, after some 25 years of the National Soccer League and even more years than that of state federation one-upmanship and backstabbing, took the game to a point where the centralised model we have today became a necessity.

The fact that some supporters seem to not recall the darker days of being a football fan in this big, brown land is testament to what Football Federation Australia and the A-League has achieved in recent years.

If Football Australia wants an agenda to appropriate as its own then they are welcome to have that which belongs to these maudlin malcontents. They were left by the wayside once before and, judging by the media commentary and public opinion to Palmer’s new project, soon enough they will be left by the wayside again.

You see, to raise a big top it is necessary for all that man the ropes to pull together, to heave and to ho in unison. If one rope goes slack, and it will once Football Australia finds itself having to choose between competing ideologies and vested interests from ‘old soccer’, then the whole thing will collapse upon itself.

It is not only my expectation that this will happen to Football Australia – it is my fervent wish.

I acknowledge Football Federation Australia has made its share of mistakes but, as the governing body recognised by FIFA, AFC and the federal government, it is still better placed than Football Australia to affect real change in the game.

The federation is not a circus that offers cheap ploys and tawdry thrills to whip up fervour amongst the football faithful. And although some will suggest that the failed World Cup bid and a scattering of failed A-League franchises suggests differently, I believe the federation’s intentions, no matter how naïve in retrospect, were to operate in the best interests of the game.

I don’t believe the same can be said for the intentions of Football Australia since five days on from its formation these intentions are still somewhat ill-defined.

On a personal note though, one good thing has come from all this madness. While Clive Palmer may fancy himself as a P.T. Barnum, his organisation’s media conference last week has started to change my opinion of clowns.

After all, as I stood among the media throng at the launch of Football Australia, it really did take all my willpower to not burst out laughing.