"If Australia needs to go on a different trajectory as a competition then that could be a really great opportunity to reposition the league and connect it more closely to the community, to young talent.

"These are narratives which I think resonate with Australian football fans – but equally might actually be more aligned to where we're at in the global pecking order.

"It's not even a negotiable point that we need to have an elite professional national competition... but how we position and define that competition needs to be fit for purpose.

"That needs to fit into economic opportunities, our economic context and the production of high quality players.

"I think whatever impact this has on the league, it gives us the opportunity to reposition ourselves for the better."

However, Didulica - a former veteran of both Sydney United and Melbourne Knights - warns against shoehorning clubs into a new model and wants to see it create more naturally and holistically.

"One of the flaws in our thinking is often about designing a conceptual model and then reverse engineering it into reality," he said. "We need to continually look at our competition design across Australia.

"It's not just about what the A-League looks like, and how other competitions intersect with that. We need to have a broader debate about the national footprint. How we can connect...

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"The great thing about football is there is so many of us and we're an incredibly diverse group – and when we try to have this homogenous football model, it works against us. Our community's eclectic so maybe our competitions need to be a little more eclectic.

"We need to connect people to our elite stream of football who may be a little more geographically disconnected, culturally more disconnected – and then we need to design around what we can do economically.

"Competition design can't just be, 'We're going to have this A-League and let's see how everything fits around it...'