FFA Efforts To Sell Wanderers Miss The Mark

The FFA has sounded out various clubs in Western Sydney in an effort to offload the Wanderers as soon as possible.

Numerous media reports over the past several days have outlined several bids to purchase the Western Sydney Wanderers, and current FFA strategy in attempting to offload the club.

The Penrith Panthers made an ill-conceived attempt to purchase the club to move the club to Penrith and were rejected by the FFA, Marconi have confirmed they are going to bid for a stake in the Wanderers, and the FFA had approached the Mounties Group before the launch of the inaugural season.

In my opinion, these two bids and the FFA approach to Mounties miss a point that I believe is vital for the long-term success of the Western Sydney Wanderers:

The Western Sydney Wanderers must not be sold to a group who will use the club as a pawn to improve the bottom line of elements outside the Western Sydney Wanderers Football Club.

The Penrith Panthers unconcealed goal was to rip away the main tenants from Parramatta Stadium and move the Wanderers to Penrith, which would give the Panthers far greater leverage in their currently fruitless efforts to lobby various levels of Government to improve the Stadium for their Rugby League team. As it stands, the Panthers have a 10 year average of 12,800 per home match, for a stadium with a capacity of 22,500. Without the Wanderers, their chances of attracting Government funding over Parramatta Stadium is close to zero. The Wanderers being moved to Penrith would also assist the club by adding tens of thousands more patrons to their entertainment complex that is currently being prepared for an $850 million redevelopment.

The Mounties bid died before the club lived, but it also fails my proposed test. When I walk into Mounties I don't feel like I'm walking into a sporting club. I feel like I'm walking into a casino who sponsor local sports teams to improve their public image. I see a massive betting lounge, an endless forest of poker machines, facilities geared almost exclusively around keeping people in those poker machine forests, and a club who likely have more staff involved in gaming than they do in sports, food service and member facilities. I don't see what benefit the Wanderers as a club would gain with an affiliation with Mounties.

Marconi suffer these same issues in an almost carbon copy of the Panthers bid. Marconi would eventually push the club out of Parramatta Stadium so that the social club would benefit from the addition of thousands of spectators on match day. The only difference is location, and that Marconi might have to wait before they could move the club from Parramatta to Marconi Stadium for match days due to the poor quality and capcity of their existing stadium.

If you are a member of those clubs, or enjoy spending your time and money on poker machines, then fair play to you. I have no problem with people doing whatever they want with their own money and time, so don't think this is an attack on any of the clubs mentioned above on the basis of my dislike of poker machine gambling. But it is clear that these clubs make huge profits from poker machines and that they would be taking money from the supporters of a transferred Wanderers football team through their machines.

I also don't have a problem with Penrith having an A-League team. I personally advocate the introduction of a team in Penrith in the medium to long term. I believe that the Penrith area is a region which is large enough to be able to support a club and doing so would also improve the TV rights deal for the A-League, not to mention the addition of another set of intra-city and intra-state matches with the existing NSW teams. I don't even have an issue with the Wanderers in South-Western Sydney, and firmly believe that in the long term, the Wanderers will have a Marconi or Mounties or Penrith style social club, training facility and stadium at Fairfield Showground.

I do have a problem with these clubs trying to buy the Wanderers.

Lyall Gorman has spoke at length about his desire to push this club to become one of the biggest in the country. This cannot happen if our club is absorbed into another to help prop up the parent company. There would be no chance of having a Wanderers social club at Fairfield if we were sold to Marconi. We wouldn't be able to own our own stadium one day (regardless of location) if we had been sold to Penrith. There would be inevitable conflicts of interest that the larger, historic parent club will win that would hurt the Wanderers.

My biggest concern with the sale process is that the FFA appear to be taking the stance that the Wanderers aren't a club, they are just a football team. I feel that the FFA would be happy selling the Wanderers to an existing club, happy to see the new owners turn the Wanderers from a self-governed entity into being one part of whatever larger club bought the team. This goes against everything that was said in the building of this club.

The Western Sydney Wanderers are not a football team to be sold and re-badged like a shipping a Holden car over to England and calling it a Vauxhall or over to the US and calling it a Pontiac. The Wanderers are a club. Lyall Gorman has told me specifically that he calls the Wanderers a club and not a team because the Wanderers aren't just one football team. Instead of trying to sell the Wanderers off to Mounties, and Marconi, and Liverpool Catholic Club, and Fairfield RSL, and the Revesby Workers club, and any other potential club they could find who might have $15 million that they could consider an investment in more pokie players and bigger stadiums for their existing teams, David Gallop and the FFA should start by trying to sell the club, or a stake of the club, to the supporters.

The supporters are the people turning up in freezing conditions in pre-season. They are the ones who bought so many club shirts that Nike couldn't keep up with demand. They are the people who turned Surry Hills into a sea of Red & Black before the Grand Final last season. They are the ones spending hours talking about the club on his forum, on social media and to each other at work and school. They are the ones who have bought 15,000 full season memberships already this season.

If David Gallop and the FFA are looking for a group of people who will have the best interest of the club in mind then he need look no further than the Wanderers supporters.

If not the Wanderers supporters as a collective, then David Gallop must sell this club to a person or persons who have the sole interest of making the Western Sydney Wanderers the biggest sporting club in Australia.

To do otherwise would betray the ideals this fledgling club was built upon.