The Weekender: Should the AIS stay in the VPL?

The Weekender: Where else can the players from the AIS play?

Paul Mavroudis is a passionate South Melbourne fan and football blogger. and Paul is making the journey to Canberra this weekend for his sides Sunday VPL clash with the AIS.

Paul writes the Weekender this week:On Saturday, I and 30 odd other South Melbourne fans will be making the trip up to Canberra by bus.....

On Saturday, I and 30 odd other South Melbourne fans will be making the trip up to Canberra by bus, to watch our team play the AIS in a Victorian Premier League clash. If you predicted this scenario a few years back, you'd have been locked in the crazy house, and rightly so. But it's true, and here we are now, two sides with very different goals and cultures, yet aiming for the moment at least for the same prize.


The inclusion of the AIS in the VPL has not been one universally welcomed by the league's regular clubs. They bring no crowds, exacerbating a problem which already hurts the VPL enormously.

The regular clubs require expensive trips up north for which the expenses allocated for it come up short. The AIS pays no transfers and no wages. It does not need to maintain the costly standards that other clubs are required to do, of press boxes, lighting and everything else that comes with running a club.


Worse still, there was the feeling that last year at least, the AIS mixed and matched its squads too frequently, as part of its quest to develop players rather than win championships.

Of course, this ended up producing quite varied results and performances, where teams would be blown off the park one day, and then come up with an easy win. And further adding to the uncertainty they create is the possibility of them leaving the competition, or even perhaps getting relegated.


The former scenario means that especially if they leave their decision to leave until late, a relegated club who may receive a stay of execution for a year due to that decision may have already lost several players to other clubs.

If as in the latter scenario the AIS do get relegated - which is highly unlikely this year, but was a possibility last season – no one in their right mind would have them playing amongst the clubs in Victoria's State League 1 competition, therefore meaning that a club that finished higher on the table may get relegated. Not an ideal situation.


There are good and bad rationales for them being in the VPL in the first place. The good is that they get to play regularly against sides looking for wins, in what is probably Australia's best 2nd tier competition, against bigger and more experienced bodies, and indeed against players with NSL or A-League experience.

One complaint that comes up about junior players is that because they spend too much time playing against each other, they are then unable to make the step up to senior competition.


The bad is that for perhaps similar reasons to those mentioned earlier, Football NSW doesn't want them, where their inclusion would make more economic sense, and many people down here in Victoria believe that their inclusion in the VPL is not only detrimental to the league and its clubs, but was made as part of a solution to the messy problem of who would get relegated in 2006, a situation many see the FFV as largely responsible for.


And yet, where else can the players from the AIS play? Participating in the National Youth League, as they used to do in the NSL days seems like the obvious solution, and it'd give Canberra some default if not ideal national representation.

But if the costs are near prohibitive for travelling to Victoria every 2nd week, how would they cope with travelling to Perth and Adelaide on multiple occasions? In the NSL days, the AIS played against predominantly NSW based opposition, but that is not an option in these times.

With the deal with the Wellington Phoenix seemingly falling through, the kids need to play somewhere - and even in the NYL, 18 games a year would probably not cut it - but it appears until there's a sudden injection of funding to make that possibility a reality, the AIS are here to stay in the VPL, bringing with them all their anomalies.