Perth Glory owner & chairman Tony Sage echoed the sentiment of the bulk of Australia’s football public when he labelled the Australian Professional League’s decision to sell the A-League Men’s & Women’s grand finals to Sydney for the next three years as a ‘fkn joke’, in the hours after Monday’s announcement.
Five of the APL’s ten board seats are filled by representatives from A-Leagues clubs; while the Glory do not hold a seat they are represented by the board, and Sage expected to be made aware of what he labelled a ‘seismic change’ to the league before it went public.
‘I got a phone call from my CEO a week ago saying this was being planned, and that they’d called an owners meeting in Melbourne next Thursday (15th), which we’ve never had at Christmas time. I just assumed it was going to be voted on then’, Sage told Box2Box.
‘When I woke up this morning I was in complete shock that the deal had been done and announced. I got woken by another owner, from Adelaide, who said ‘do you know about this?’ You saw my announcement immediately after.
‘I then got a call from an executive saying ‘what the hell are you doing?’ I said this is a momentous, seismic change to the way we view football in this country. One of our uniquenesses from the AFL & NRL is if you finish on top you get a Grand Final at home, not only for the players but for the fans from each state.’
Brisbane Roar Executive Chairman Chris Fong inadvertently muddied the waters further late-Monday, contradicting APL boss Danny Townsend’s assertion the board decision had been reached unanimously. The Roar do hold a position on the board, but in an email to a fan Fong expressed surprise, and stated they’d ‘expected broader consultation’ before the confirmation.
Sage agreed this seemed to indicate fragmentation among the APL’s decision makers; the organisation has held control of the A-Leagues for less than two years following the official unbundling of the competitions from the then-FFA in late 2020.
‘It looks like there is… Chris Fong is not a liar. I had assumed they’d had a board meeting and approved it, subject to the owners meeting scheduled for Thursday. That’s all I can assume if Chris wrote an email like that.
‘My views are well known. I’m frustrated, I’m pretty upset, my own fans are upset thinking I made this decision, so I want to make that clear to my [club’s] fans. I’ve read all the social media and even Sydney FC and Western Sydney fans are upset. They couldn’t even get their own constituency to be happy about the decision!’