A-League going old school, is it a good thing?

Frank Lowy is a football traditionalist. I am not.

I have more ties to “new football” than I do to “old soccer”. I certainly have more ties to the Australian game than I do to the European game. Whilst I did follow the game throughout its slender years, it was not until the Lowy-led revolution came along that I began forking out my hard earned to see the likes of Archie Thompson running around every week.

I represent a legion of fans that have made the A-League the success story it has been to date.

But this legion has its limits. It is not going to provide the FFA with the bottomless pit of money they seem to think it will. We are used to our football served 22 weekends of the year. That’s week-ends, not week-nights.

Two factors in the demise of basketball in this country were mid-week games and a shift towards over-Americanizing the game. Football should take notes of these two factors.

If what is currently being mooted by the FFA eventuates, by 2011 at the latest we will see at club level a 33-round A-League, preseason and finals matches, an FFA (or Australia) Cup, more AFC Champions League games, new leagues for both under-23s and women, a serving of international club friendlies and the FIFA Club World Cup.

And this is seven years before “World Cup fever” is set to plague our shores.

Now, as if this overload of largely European concepts isn’t enough, this weekend we hear from our devout traditionalist of a national chairman, Frank Lowy, that he wants to introduce a promotion and relegation system for the A-League before 2018.

Oh, please. Do Australian sports fans have the sort of patience to watch their clubs sit on the sidelines for a few years?

Better yet, do Australian sports fans want to see a league without a salary cap?

The concepts of restricting salaries and promotion-relegation simply cannot coexist without one destroying the purpose of the other. Not forgetting that the FFA would hate to see a Melbourne Victory or Sydney FC playing in the second tier.

The A-League is heading down the path of over-Europeanizing itself and it is doing so at the risk of alienating a large part of what has made the league such a success so far. The reason a lot of “on-the-fence” fans converted to the game was largely in thanks to the fact that the A-League was modelled toward a typical Australian sports league, not a typical European football league.

Concepts like an FA Cup-style competition may very well satisfy traditionalists, but are they going to catch on with the rest of us?

The crowd at last week’s AFC Champions League game in Melbourne says we are already being tested by mid-week games.

History even says we aren’t going to follow it for the long term. (The two dominant codes in this country both tried the mid-week knockout competition back in the 1970’s and 1980’s - the rugby league competition is now consigned to the history books, the AFL’s equivalent morphed into the pre-season affair we know it as today).

Frank Lowy can have all the ambition in the world, but without any fans there to watch the games, he will be back to his shopping centres and property developments in no time.