West given licence to thrill

The franchise headed by advertising executive Ian Rowden won the right to play in Australia’s topmost club competition from season 2011/12.

The next A-League comprising a second Melbourne team will have 11 teams.

“This is a gigantic leap forward for the A-League,” FFA chief executive Ben Buckley told a media conference.

“We are now committed to a team in the most populous football region in the country. Western Sydney is the heartland of football in NSW. It deserves a football team in the A-League and this is another milestone in the evolution of the competition.

“Of course we would have preferred to go with 12 teams next season but the team has an opportunity to be successful in the long term.

“We have to look at the Hyundai A-League for the next 10, 20, 30 years and give the team the right amount of time to establish itself. Getting all the building blocks in place is very, very important.”

Rowden, a former Young Socceroos international, said he was excited and felt privileged to be able to bring a second football team to Sydney.

His managerial team includes former Socceroos hero Charlie Yankos and former Newcastle and Wollongong player Peter Tredinnick.

“We have a good team and we are all very focussed on establishing all the components that are required to ensure that the side we ultimately bring in 2011 will be one that the A-League, the FFA, the city of Sydney and football fans can be very proud of,” Rowden said.

“We agree wholeheartedly with Ben Buckley that the right time to bring this team in the competition is in 2011, which will give us enough time to connect with the community from a commercial and structural point of view.

“If you ask me whether we could put a team on the park in 2010 the answer would probably be 'yes'. But is that our best model for success long term? No. We wanted to provide an absolute solid foundation for this club.

“We look forward with a great anticipation to our first season.”

Rowden, who was on the board of Sydney FC as recently as six months ago, said he was looking forward to some titanic derbies against the A-League’s first champions.

“There is no doubt that a very strong and deep rivalry on the field with Sydney FC is very important,” he said.

“We are going to overlap. It’s one city, two teams now. But there is a huge football community out there that will benefit from the rivalry. Great rivalries do not necessarily create conflicts in crowd attendances. They actually build crowd attendances.”

“So we will create from day one a very strong competitive rivalry. Behind the scenes we will work as best we can with Sydney FC to create partnerships where they need to be created in the community so we see the game grow and the A-League prosper.

“So there will be a definitive separation of those two strategies.

The FFA is understood to be unimpressed by Gold Coast United’s failure to draw healthy crowds in their debut season and Rowden said he was determined that every effort be made to engage the community in western Sydney.

“I am not aware that small crowds is a problem for the Gold Coast. But I can tell you that we will build this club from the ground up with the community and from the top down by signing the best quality talent to take the field from day one,” he said.

“We will be as energised about how we build our relationship with the community as we will be in finding the right players.”

Rowden revealed that the franchise was put together barely a month ago after the collapse of the Joe Meissner bid and it was too early to talk about a name for the team, its home ground and sponsors.

Yankos said he could not wait for the new team’s first derby against Sydney.

“There have been plenty of local derbies over a period of time, irrespective of the competition,” he said.

“I have played in a few in Melbourne over the years and there was a lot of rivalry there and I hope the Sydney derbies will be just as competitive which is important for the growth of the competition.”