The club held a full-day debrief for all coaching and administrative staff on Tuesday to assess the season gone by and, more importantly, plan a busy season ahead on the domestic and continental front.

Not only will the sky blues be defending their title in season six, the A-League will expand to 11 clubs and a 30-round schedule with the addition of Melbourne Heart.

And in March next year, the Australian double winners will return to the continental stage for the first time since 2007 with the kick-off to 2011's ACL.

With most of the coaching and backroom staff remaining virtually intact from this season, the club's football operations boss Stefan Kamasz says he's confident that this season's success won't be frittered away through bad planning and mismanagement.

 "The first thing we have to do with the club is maintain stability, and we thinked we've achieved that," Kamasz told au.fourfourtwo.com today.

"It's the first time in the club's history we've managed to maintain all our staff.  And our new owners have indicated they're committed to the long-term, which is a minimum of three years."

The club has put together a three-year plan on the commercial and football side of the club. Both are run separately and Kamasz is confident it will be continue to reap benefits.

"We're in a far superior situation to where we were 12 months ago," he said. "Our goal is to  become the pre-eminent club in Australia and one of the strongest in Asia... we are already studying ACL documentation."

Stability is a modus operandi that has worked well at Melbourne Victory and Sydney now say they've seen the stability light. They've even begun dialogue with their southern rivals about the pitfalls of combining A-League and ACL commitments.

Speaking of Melbourne Victory, the difficulty of scheduling of A-League finals and ACL group games was underlined by Tuesday night's 4-0 capitulation in Tokyo against Kawasaki Frontale.

It's understood to be Asian governing body, the AFC, that has blocked any attempts to change ACL games from away ties to home games in order to cut down travel for A-League clubs involved in the finals.

Sydney will hope to convince AFC to play more home ties in the early part of the ACL group stage during what is likely to be another A-League finals series, but that would appear a longshot.

It may be that the flexibility will have to come from the FFA when the finals come around in 2011 - assuming Sydney FC qualify for the play-offs.

Meanwhile Coach Vitezslav Lavicka was given a special reception by the Czech consulate during the week as news of his success in the Harbour City has reached back home.

Lavicka and a host of the club's hierarchy were on hand this morning in Sydney to welcome new keeper Liam Reddy on a three-year deal.