The club alliance emerged from a meeting in Melbourne with an FFA representative on Tuesday confident the governing body will intervene if relations between the warring parties continue to deteriorate.

A meeting between the FFV and clubs has been canned and South Melbourne reiterated their intention to slap the state body with a court injunction next week to stop the roll-out.

Club director Tom Kalas said he anticipated further meetings with the FFA, describing today’s briefing as “extremely encouraging”.

“The clubs have been keeping FFA fully aware of what has been transpiring,” Kalas said. “The FFA will obviously intervene if this issue is not resolved or if the issue escalates.”

The national second tier league has already kicked off in other parts of Australia, with Victoria and Western Australia slated to jump on board in April.

On Monday, 17 clubs signed a letter to FFV officially withdrawing their Expressions of Interest in the existing NPL model. Of those, Northcote City FC has since pointed to the “massive risks financially”.

Waverley Wanderers, Malvern City, Kingston City, Seaford United and Fawkner have now opted out. From the top tier Victorian Premier League clubs, the action group says only Richmond remains in the race for an NPL spot.

Driving financial concerns are four key sticking points:

  • Loss of sub-junior players
  • A lower cap on registration fees
  • Complex, and potentially expensive, club restructuring 
  • Added travel costs.

According to Kalas the first two alone are enough to see clubs face a $140,000 annual deficit.

Unlike other states, the FFV model strips NPL clubs of their sub-junior ranks (U7-U11s) putting a serious dent in registration income, sponsorship and fundraising potential, while cutting the heart out of the volunteer base.

Registration fees for juniors (U12-U20) are capped at $1700 plus GST compared with $2400 under the Football NSW model. FFV also prohibits any ‘extra’ charges for private sessions or any other “add-ons”. Financial modelling by the Victorian clubs puts the “break-even” point for juniors at $2351, close to the NSW cap.

FFV CEO Mitchell Murphy has described some of the modelling by dissident clubs as “inflated” and said he was confident clubs could work viably within the NPL structure.

Earlier this week he told au.fourfourtwo.com: “I also believe with some strategic thinking around that model in terms of sponsorship and revenue that they can get more dollars in through those avenues.”

But clubs say as revenues tumble they’ll be hit with additional costs with the introduction of mandatory minimum coaching standards, the appointment of technical directors and the move to an extended 10-month training and playing season.

"Most community clubs have between 100 and 200 kids in that (sub-junior) age category," said Kalas. "It’s the most populous part of a club and that’s where most of your members and volunteers come from.

“New South Wales and Tasmania allow NPL clubs to have sub-juniors. In Victoria you can’t. So automatically clubs have to push out of their club all these parents and children.

“You can pass them onto other community clubs that might take them or you can split your club in two and call one a community and one an elite club.

“If you split your club in two you come up with all these legal issues. You have to create separate committees run by different people and you have to give them parts of your infrastructure to train on.

“So not only are we fighting for infrastructure with footy and all the other codes, now we’ve got to fight for allocation of space amongst entities we’ve created within our own clubs.

"It’s a massive legal and costly headache for what purpose?”

The FFV said having NPL U7-U11s would “rob community clubs” of their best players.

South Melbourne charge $3200 for youth league registrations but Kalas said he had no problem with putting a cap on fees. “You can cap (registrations) at $1700 if you give the clubs the sub juniors and so forth,” he said. 

“(Under the NPLV) you can only have one team per age group from 12 to 20. That’s the same in NSW but they’ve kept their sub-juniors and increased the cap to make sure the budget works.”

And there is another factor clubs say – the move toward a more geographically expansive league.

“You’re going to have metro clubs travelling to Shepparton, Wodonga, Ballarat, Bendigo, Casey, Surf Coast and Geelong let’s say,” Kalas added. “That’s buses up and down Victoria every second week.”