I think that the history of ethnic clubs in major Australian cities adds depth to the game. The problem here is that if you include a team which many people still consider a Greek team, you will get support from the Greek community, but nowhere else. I don't like the franchise model at all, but if they want one or two teams in the city and 20,000 people a week every week they need to be more inclusive. At the moment it looks like it is failing anyway, but I can understand what they were trying to do.
The real problem is that due to the costs involved, you need to be getting 20,000 a week to stay viable and grow the comp. This isn't helped by the fact that there really are no local derbies to make things interesting or to share the effort of getting people to games and marketing the game. The product is poor now and was poor when I watched the NSL. I'm done with paying to watch the A-League, it just isn't value for money. To get people to games you need to draw on the ethnic communities and the local derbies and the history, so the real problem is: how do you run a viable national competition with the number of people interested in soccer in the country and the tyranny of distance in this very large country.
I much prefer the old capital centric model. In an ideal world, I would have done something like this, 5 teams per major city.
e.g. for Brisbane
Brisbane Lions (Hollandia, western corridor out to Ipswich)
Brisbane Strikers or Rochedale Rovers (Southside if strikers would use Logan base)
Gold Coast Knights
Peninsula Power (Northside/Sunny coast)
Brisbane City (City centre/inner suburbs)
Suggestion for Melbourne (don't know the history or geography or who are the powerful teams at the moment)
South
Knights
Heidelberg
Team 4
Team 5
Sydney
Marconi
Sydney United
Olympic
Manly
Sutherland
Whatever, I'm just picking names out.
Then you play as follows - each team plays the teams in their city 4 times - 16 games and a total 32 local derbies per season.
Each team plays an away games in each other city - 5 games.
Each team plays a home game, hosting a team from each other city - 5 more games.
26 games and then at the end you have a finals series with the top teams from each city.
This way, crowds and interest are maximised by the number of local derbies.
Costs pertaining to travel minimized by the fact you are only traveling interstate 5 times/year.
