While expansion is the hot discussion topic at the moment, fans and clubs in the lower tiers of Australian football are also excited at the prospect of joining the A-League.

But Gallop, who was speaking to EON Sports on our FourFourTwo Saturday program, said promotion and relegation was still some time away.

“It will happen in Australian football, but I do think it’s a fair way off,” Gallop said.

“We’ve got to make sure that investment that our current owners have made in the A-League in its 12 seasons is really important and it will be important in the future and uncertainty around that investment could create some problems in the next period.”

A problem Gallop foresees about introducing an open league system was the situation of a current top flight side being relegated.

“We all know the desire to have a game that’s big enough to have a second division that would be feasible to move up and down in,” he said.

“The geography of the country makes that a particular challenge and you can run the scenarios of the difficulty that it could create where certain geographical locations in the current sides were in danger of dropping out of the first division unless a second division was strong.

“So it’s a fair way off but it’s certainly an aspiration.”

But before all the tiers of Australian football can be joined together, FFA’s current focus is on expansion and Gallop said the governing body will start looking at potential new teams in 2017.

“There aren’t really bids in the system yet, just a few expressions of interest,” Gallop said.

“We said at our launch at the start of October that we do want to move sooner rather than later to bigger than 10 teams.

“There are lots of interested parties and they’re starting to realise that we don’t want to move into a phase of looking into this seriously (until) the New Year.

“I imagine there will be more as we get further into it, at the moment, I wouldn’t say there are any formal bids in.”

Gallop also said that FFA will have a criteria that will decide where expansion will take place.

“Certainly when we do get to that, then the standard of facilities will be a part of it,” he said.

“If you try and boil it down simply it’s about somewhere that can be sustainable in its own location and in its own financial position but importantly also we’ve got to look for franchises that will grow the overall pie.

"That means being attractive to broadcasters and our national sponsors and making sure that that we are not slicing up the same pie more ways.”