Foreign money is reshaping the A-League. The benefits come with strings attached

October 23, 2026 — 3:41pm

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When the A-League launched in 2005, Matthew Galea tried to embrace Melbourne Victory. But for whatever reason, it never really felt right to him. It wasn’t until five years later, when rivals Melbourne Heart were introduced to the competition, that he found a team that did.

Melbourne Heart was specifically conceived for people like him, as if they were presenting a slightly more cerebral, European-flavoured alternative to Victory, whose early identity was pinned to star players such as Archie Thompson and Kevin Muscat.

Heart were a bit of a work in progress, and that is what appealed to Galea, who nailed his colours to their mast. He went to games with mates, joined pre-match marches to AAMI Park and found something of a community within the Heart’s fledgling fanbase.

Then, without warning, everything changed.

On January 23, 2014, it was announced that Heart had been purchased by the City Football Group, becoming the third club in CFG’s sprawling international multi-club network, alongside Manchester City and New York City FC.

Nobody in the game had any inkling this was coming. Galea remembers the day well; he was working as a journalist for the Shepparton News and looked at one of his colleagues, who was also a Heart supporter, with confusion.

At first, even as a long-time Manchester United fan, he thought he could live with it, if it meant stable ownership for the club he had grown to love.

Then, a few months later, the club’s name was changed to Melbourne City, and their colours from red and white to Manchester City’s light blue – the same shade he had spent many years hating.

That severed the connection for Galea.

“Once the colours changed, I’m like, ‘Well, this isn’t what I started supporting,’” he said.

“The fact that it’s now a club that I loathe just made it that little bit easier, I guess – but they could have changed it to yellow and given it another name, and I would have felt the same way.”

City became a more stable club, and much more successful on the field. They had not won anything as Heart, but as Melbourne City, with CFG’s resources and worldwide connections behind them, they swiftly became an A-League powerhouse, with facilities and systems envied by the rest of the competition.

Their involvement within the Australian game has had enormous benefits for players like Socceroo Patrick Beach, who now plays for Troyes, CFG’s club in France, and coaches like Ange Postecoglou, who relaunched his career after leaving the Socceroos at Yokohama F. Marinos, a CFG partner club.

But Melbourne City’s average crowd numbers have declined since the Heart days, despite the trophy-laden years that followed, suggesting that success in and of itself is not enough to foster a connection between a club and its support base.

People like Galea, who still follow the A-League, but no longer support a club - were collateral damage; the unfortunate price of Melbourne City’s transformation.

A necessary evil for the A-League?

Alienating supporters is just one of the risks when a football club becomes part of something much bigger than itself.

Multi-club ownership has exploded over the past decade. Football Benchmark estimates there were 152 MCO groups involving 380 clubs worldwide in 2024, up from just 18 groups and 40 clubs in 2012. More than half of the A-League’s 12 men’s clubs are either part of a formal MCO group, are owned by parties who also hold stakes in clubs in other countries, or have some kind of ongoing cooperation agreement with a foreign club.

The benefits are obvious. Australian soccer is chronically short on capital, and locally based ownership groups are increasingly difficult to find. The A-League needs reliable club owners who are prepared to lose money, but who also have deep and sophisticated knowledge of how the game operates, here and abroad, to assist with development, recruiting and player sales to leverage the global transfer market.

MCOs tick all of these boxes, and the A-League is ripe for this model. Licences to play in the competition are cheap by global standards, operating........

© The Sydney Morning Herald