Along with Foster, fellow SBS presenter Les Murray and other football and community leaders have joined the St George, Sutherland and South Coast football associations to form a Southern Sydney team.

While the Sky Blues have been on the record saying they would prefer not to have a third club in the region, Foster believes such thinking is contrary to the interests of the game.

“Firstly, football is about competition and the Sydney Southern region and the South Coast are an extremely important stakeholder and partner,” he said speaking to FourFourTwo.

“A third metropolitan and regional club delivers six more derbies a year. Where is all of our best crowds, engagement, excitement and atmosphere coming from the game right now? It is in our derbies. So, in fact what would happened is that everyone would benefit including Sydney FC.

“Secondly instead of saying who wants to bid for a club, we’d be better off asking where are the key markets with massive participation, huge population base, massive business and corporate support that are currently underserviced, where the potential for massive growth and uplift in crowds and infrastructure is huge?

“One of them is the southern Sydney region. The game is not doing a good enough job in one of our key participant areas and one of the biggest population centres in all of our country in the biggest city.”

The executive of the NSW PCYC, Chris Gardiner, is also part of the bid while the licence is being financially guaranteed by property giant the JiaYuan Group from Zhejiang, China with $12 million guaranteed in capital.

With those kinds of finances and plans for a purpose-built football stadium in the region, Foster says the Southern Expansion bid should lift the bar when it comes to the FFA’s final criteria.

“I hope that it does,” he said. “One of the things that bothers me most about the game right now is that we are talking about expansion but we don’t have a clear picture of what the future of the competition looks like.

“I’m hoping that by talking about this publicly that it really drives the discussion about what infrastructure spend a future club must have. What ambition for investment must our future A-League and W-League clubs have.

“That is the important point where as at the moment everyone is focused on 10 bidders. I don’t care if there are 100 bidders, what I want to know is what is a realistic or what does an aspirational bid look like?

“What do we want for the future of our game? That is why I keep turning the discussion back to that matter because I believe the way we have put this expansion bid together is perfectly in line with where I see the future of the game going.”