KEY POINTS:
Over the months that we have been watching New Zealand football scrape together an A-League franchise, there has been a wondrous contrast.
Over 12,000 miles away Chelsea FC, the defending Premiership champions, announced their annual loss of £80 million (NZ$221m). This was generally regarded as a success, given
that they reduced the loss from £140m the previous year. Meanwhile, here in one of football's backwaters, we endured a tedious struggle to find a franchise that could afford the $1.2m to get the ball rolling. I am not really trying to compare Chelsea with the Knights or whatever the new A-League franchise will be called. On the one hand, we have Chelsea's Russian owner Roman Abramovich, reputedly worth £22 billion (NZ$60bn), spending over £500m (NZ$1.4bn) on his club and basically buying two titles.
On the other hand, we have an as-yet-unnamed A-League franchise whose new owner, Terry Serepisos, came to light because he was apparently at the barber's and heard a radio news item.
Perhaps the best analysis of Chelsea was given by Arsenal coach Arsene Wenger who has made something of a science of developing and buying inexpensive young talent that no one else has recognised and who oversees an effective youth programme.
Wenger said: "I believe that, when you have £10, you do not spend £11. I have always respected that in my private life as well as in football. I feel an economical responsibility. At Chelsea it is different. There is no economical responsibility. But I must tell you that, if I won the championship for this club and they lost £200 million, I wouldn't feel very proud. I'd want to win the championship with the club making £50 million. Then I would have done a good job."
Chelsea and the Wellington Knights - if I can call them that - have one thing in common: the principle that a football club is generally a big hole in the ground into which money is poured. Those deluded souls who talk of an A-League owner making "an investment" need to stand under a long cold shower and scrub themselves with pumice until they are thinking more clearly.
But never mind the investment - it was the woeful process of finding a new A-League franchise that really made me cringe.
You may remember - first there was a Wellington bid. Then there was an Auckland bid. Then there was a deadline. Then an extension. Then a deadline, then an extension, deadline, extension... you get the drift. It was like watching a glacier progress.
Throughout all of this, details were at a minimum. We knew the Auckland bid was headed by Alan Sefton but little else. We knew the Wellington bid wanted to get the go-ahead first and then it would find the money. We knew the A-League wanted a New Zealand team in it.
For weeks and weeks, the no-details saga dragged on and on. Now that it has all come to pass, it turns out that we only have a new franchise because a barber happened to have Radio Sport on. This makes me think of a large rodent usually associated with Disneyland.
What an opportunity missed.
Why not take the bids and make public property out of them? Use the bargaining, the various issues and the to-ing and fro-ing to build public interest in the franchise and the sport? Build the momentum, the expectation, the public involvement and use the interest generated in the media.
Instead we got New Zealand Soccer boss Graham Seatter speaking in strangled, be-careful-what-I-say tones before and after NZS got clipped about the ear by the Australian controlling body, the FFA, for not shepherding the process well enough.
I am not just blaming Seatter, a canny operator usually, although NZS has not come out of this covered in glory. New Zealand sport in general has this weird attitude that things must be done in secret and out of the media.
Ironic, isn't it, given that we only have a franchise because the new owner happened to be tuning in to the media?
Sure, some things can't be said. But I was told during this hair-tearingly frustrating process by one of the Wellington principals that he didn't want his name associated with the bid because he might get egg on his face.
What egg? What face? There's no disgrace in being associated with a losing bid. Especially when the winners win the right to lose lots of money.
No, a real chance was missed to reclaim some of the ground lost by the woeful Knights' demise. And to build interest and a sense of following in the sport and a sense of ownership in the new club, instead of a lingering feeling of doubt that a franchise born of secrecy and financial scrambling may soon go the way of the last.
Then, to paraphrase Arsene Wenger, they would have done a good job.
