Promotion and Relegation in Australian Football
The promotion relegation australia football debate explained: why the A-League is closed, what the NSL did differently, and what FIFA requires.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Below the A-League18 min read
- Promotion and relegation in the A-League
- None, since 2005
- Last national competition that used it
- National Soccer League, 1977 to 2004
- Most A-League licences run until
- 2034
- FIFA rule invoked
- Article 9, principle of promotion and relegation
- Year a chairman called it inevitable
- 2014
- Chairman's later estimate
- Unlikely before the mid-2030s
- Places open to sporting merit today
- Eight of sixteen, in the second tier only
- Member federations that set their own rules
- Eight
The promotion relegation australia football argument is the longest-running unresolved question in the Australian game, and it is not really a football question at all. It is a question about who owns a place in a national competition, and whether that place can be lost on a Saturday afternoon.
Every level of Australian football has promotion and relegation except the one people watch. Victoria runs seven senior tiers with automatic promotion, automatic relegation and play-offs between them. New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia run four or five each. A club in the Victorian State League can, in principle, climb to the top of the state pyramid on results alone. What it cannot do, at any point, by any margin, is reach the A-League.
That discontinuity is deliberate and it is twenty years old. The A-League launched in 2005 as a closed competition with licensed clubs and territorial exclusivity, and it has stayed closed through expansion from eight clubs to twelve, through a change of ownership structure, through the arrival of a national second division in 2025, and through the termination of one club's licence. This page sets out how the closure happened, what the arguments on each side actually are, what FIFA does and does not require, and what would physically have to change for the pyramid to open.
Where Australian football sits today
Start with the structure, because the debate is frequently conducted by people describing different pyramids.
A-League Men is the first tier: twelve clubs in the 2026-27 season, ten of them Australian and two based in New Zealand. Entry is by licence. There is no relegation.
The Australian Championship is the second tier: sixteen clubs, four groups of four, played October to December. Eight clubs are permanent foundation members. Eight places are earned each year by winning a state National Premier Leagues division. There is no promotion from it to the A-League and no relegation from it to anywhere.
The eight National Premier Leagues divisions are the third tier, run by eight member federations. Below them, each state runs its own leagues, and this is where promotion and relegation operates normally.
So the accurate description is not that Australian football is a closed system. It is that Australian football is an open pyramid with a sealed lid, and a second tier that is half-sealed.
- A-League Men, tier oneNo promotion in, no relegation out. Twelve clubs holding licences, most reported to run until 2034. Clubs have left the competition only through licence termination.
- Australian Championship, tier twoNo promotion out and no relegation down. Eight of sixteen places are permanent foundation memberships; the other eight are re-earned every year through the National Premier Leagues.
- National Premier Leagues, tier threeFull promotion and relegation with the state leagues below, on quotas set independently by each of the eight member federations.
- State leagues, tier four and belowFull promotion and relegation throughout. Victoria runs seven senior tiers on this basis; New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia run four or five.
Describes the position as at the 2026 season. Movement means a club changing level as a consequence of results. Licence decisions, expansion grants and terminations are excluded because they are administrative rather than sporting outcomes.
Australia used to do this
The closed model is not a permanent feature of Australian football. It is a decision taken in 2004 and 2005.
The National Soccer League, which ran from 1977 to 2004, used promotion and relegation with the state leagues for much of its existence. In 1981 St George were relegated as wooden spooners while Preston Makedonia, Sydney Olympic and Wollongong City were promoted. The mechanism was disrupted badly by the split-conference experiment of 1984 to 1986, after which clubs discarded by the restructure and clubs permanently relegated were returned to their state leagues, and the arrangement was never restored with any consistency.
Two things follow from that history. First, when advocates say Australia should adopt promotion and relegation, they are asking for the restoration of something the country previously had, not the importation of a foreign idea. Second, the version Australia had was not a success story, and its collapse is part of the case against.
The NSL's problems were financial and structural: clubs concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne, tied to particular community identities, playing in front of small crowds with limited broadcast value and no reliable revenue. Promotion and relegation did not cause that, but it did not fix it either, and by 2004 the competition had lost its television deal and its credibility.
The 2005 decision
The A-League was designed as the opposite of the NSL in almost every respect. One club per major market. New identities not tied to any community association. A salary cap. Private investment. And a closed membership.
The reasoning was straightforward and, on its own terms, coherent. Investors were being asked to build clubs from nothing in markets with no existing football infrastructure, in competition with the AFL and the NRL for attention, money and players. The pitch was that a licence carried a guaranteed place in the national competition. Remove that guarantee and the asset becomes speculative.
Territorial exclusivity worked the same way. A club granted the Perth licence, or the Brisbane licence, was guaranteed not just a place in the league but a monopoly on the market. That is a valuable asset, and it is a valuable asset precisely because nobody else can win their way into it.
This is also why the debate has an emotional charge that the economics alone would not explain. The clubs excluded in 2005 were not marginal. South Melbourne had won four national championships and played at the FIFA Club World Championship in 2000. Marconi Stallions had won four. Adelaide City had won three. They were told that a competition they had won was closing and that a new one was opening without them.
What FIFA actually requires
This is the most frequently misstated part of the argument, in both directions.
Article 9 of the regulations governing the FIFA statutes is titled the principle of promotion and relegation. It states that a club's entitlement to take part in a domestic league championship shall depend principally on sporting merit, and that a club shall qualify by remaining in a division or by being promoted or relegated at the end of a season.
The article exists because of a specific incident, not because of an ideological commitment. In 2007 a company bought a Spanish second-division club, moved it to another city, renamed it, and tried to keep its divisional status. The Spanish federation objected on the basis that divisional status must be earned on the pitch rather than purchased. Article 9 was written to close that gap.
Paragraph 2 of the same article provides flexibility for member associations, and that flexibility is where Australia and the United States sit. The point was tested directly: in 2020 the Court of Arbitration for Sport considered a challenge to the United States structure and found that there is no enforceable obligation on a member association to implement promotion and relegation.
So the accurate position is this. FIFA states a principle. FIFA does not mandate compliance, and the only arbitral test of the question went against the mandate reading. A Football Australia chief executive can say, correctly, that sporting merit is a principle of the global system that cannot simply be contracted away, and an A-League licence holder can say, equally correctly, that no rule compels a change.
Both readings are made in good faith and both are defensible from the same text.
| The principle reading | The compliance reading | |
|---|---|---|
| Status of Article 9 | A binding statement of how football is meant to work | A statement of principle with an express exemption in paragraph 2 |
| Effect on a closed league | Creates an obligation to move towards an open pyramid over time | Creates no obligation at all, only an aspiration |
| What CAS decided in 2020 | That the principle stands even where it is not enforced | That there is no enforceable requirement on a member association |
| Who tends to argue it | Second-tier clubs, the Association of Australian Football Clubs, supporter groups | Licence holders and the professional league body |
| Practical consequence | Australia must eventually open the top division | Australia may keep the licence model indefinitely |
The licences, and 2034
The practical obstacle is contractual rather than philosophical.
Most A-League clubs hold licences reported to run until 2034. That does not make relegation legally impossible, but it makes it a negotiation. A club that has been guaranteed a place in the competition until 2034 and is then told it can be relegated in 2029 has lost something it paid for, and would expect either compensation or a very long transition.
The public positions have shifted with each administration. Frank Lowy, as chairman, described promotion and relegation in 2014 as an inevitability. A later chairman, Chris Nikou, suggested it was unlikely before the mid-2030s. Asked directly whether the licences prevent relegation, chief executive James Johnson answered "No. It doesn't," arguing that Australia operates within a FIFA-regulated system in which sporting merit cannot be contracted out of existence. He also confirmed that no formal conversation with the A-League clubs about access had taken place.
Those three statements are not contradictory, but read together they describe a decade of intention without mechanism. There has been agreement in principle to discuss access. There has been no agreed model, no timetable, and no negotiated compensation framework.
- 21Seasons without relegation
- 0Clubs promoted on results
- 0Clubs relegated on results
- 2034Reported licence expiry year for most clubs
Counts completed A-League Men seasons from the competition's launch in 2005-06 through to the start of the 2026-27 season. Clubs removed counts licences terminated or withdrawn rather than clubs relegated. The licence expiry year is the reported position rather than a verified contractual date.
The case against opening the league
The arguments against are usually caricatured as owner self-interest. Several of them are stronger than that.
Investment risk. A-League clubs were built with private money on the express promise of a guaranteed place. Relegation would remove value from that asset immediately and would make future expansion licences harder to sell.
Geography. Australia is enormous and thinly populated. A relegated Perth club has no comparable competition to drop into and would face a state league with a fraction of its cost base. A promoted Tasmanian or Northern Territory club would face national travel that its revenue cannot support. This is not a problem England or Germany has to solve.
The New Zealand problem. Two A-League clubs are based in New Zealand, in a different confederation. Relegating Auckland FC or Wellington Phoenix into an Australian state league is not coherent, and relegating them into a New Zealand competition would remove them from the Australian pyramid entirely.
Second-tier readiness. Relegation requires a division capable of receiving a relegated professional club and a promoted club capable of meeting professional standards. The Australian Championship is two seasons old, runs for eight weeks, and is made up of semi-professional clubs. Nobody, including its advocates, argues it is currently ready to exchange members with a professional league.
The landing-place problem. This is the most technical objection and the most decisive in the short term. Each of the eight member federations sets its own promotion and relegation rules. Nick Galatas, chair of the Association of Australian Football Clubs, has pointed out that a club relegated from the national second tier would drop into NPL Victoria if it were Victorian, while a club from another federation could fall out of the national structure entirely. Before any relegation is possible, eight federations have to agree on where a relegated club goes.
The case for opening it
Competitive stakes. In a closed twelve-club league, a club out of finals contention by February has nothing to play for until the following October. Relegation is the mechanism that gives the bottom half of a table meaning, and its absence is visible in crowds and interest in the back end of A-League seasons.
The stability promise has not been kept. The closed model was justified as the price of financial stability. Clubs have collapsed anyway. Western United's participation agreement was terminated after Football Australia found it did not meet licence requirements, and it did not play in 2026-27. The competition has contracted, expanded and contracted again. If clubs are going to leave regardless, advocates argue, it is better that they leave on results than on administrative decisions.
Access for the historic clubs. South Melbourne, Marconi, Sydney Olympic and Adelaide City have national championships and continuous memberships stretching back decades. A closed system means those institutions can never return to the top level however well they are run, which is a permanent political wound in the sport.
Participation and pathway. Australia has very large football participation numbers and a shallow professional structure to absorb them. An open pyramid gives ambitious clubs a reason to invest in facilities, coaching and youth development at levels three and four, which is where most players actually are.
What the other codes do, and why it matters
Neither the AFL nor the NRL uses promotion and relegation, and neither has seriously proposed it. Both admit clubs through centrally granted expansion licences, and both have used that mechanism repeatedly — the debates over NRL expansion and new clubs are about which market gets a licence, never about which club earns one.
The AFL's state-level competitions work the same way. The SANFL and the WAFL are strong independent leagues with their own finals and their own histories, and no club in either has ever played its way into the national competition.
This matters more than it first appears, because it shapes what Australian administrators, broadcasters and investors regard as normal. In England, a closed league would be a scandal. In Australia, a closed league is simply how sport is run, and every commercial partner a football competition deals with has been trained on that model. The football argument is therefore not only against club owners; it is against the default assumptions of the entire domestic sports market.
The one Australian code with a comparable history of institutional exclusion is rugby league, where the Super League war split the competition and left clubs outside the eventual settlement. The parallel is imperfect, but the emotional residue is similar: clubs that were in a national competition, are no longer, and cannot get back by winning.
What partial merit looks like now
Football Australia's practical answer has been to build sporting merit into the second tier rather than to argue about the first.
Eight of the sixteen Australian Championship places are earned each winter by finishing top of a state NPL division. Those clubs are not promoted in any permanent sense; they qualify, play, and have to earn the place again the following year. Half the qualifying field changed between 2025 and 2026.
The governing body has described those eight slots as the substance of promotion and relegation — places accessible through sporting merit. That framing is defensible as far as it goes. Its limits are equally clear: the other eight places cannot be won or lost at all, the mechanism operates entirely below the professional level, and a club that wins the national second-tier competition receives an Australia Cup place rather than a step up.
Western United, and why expulsion is not relegation
The clearest recent illustration of how a closed league actually removes a club came in 2025 and 2026.
Western United, admitted to A-League Men as an expansion club, ran into difficulty over the conditions attached to its licence. Football Australia determined that the club did not meet the requirements to retain it. The Australian Professional Leagues subsequently terminated the participation agreement, and the club did not take part in the 2026-27 A-League Men or A-League Women seasons.
The competition therefore lost a club, contracted from thirteen to twelve, and reorganised its fixture — all of the things relegation does. What it did not do was connect any of that to results. The decision turned on facilities, finances and licence conditions, assessed administratively, on a timeline set by the governing body rather than by a season.
Both sides of the argument read this episode as supporting their case, which is what makes it worth setting out carefully.
Advocates of an open pyramid point out that the closed model was sold as a guarantee of stability and did not deliver one. Clubs still fail. The competition still shrinks. The only difference is that the failure is resolved in meetings rather than on a ladder, and that no club below the A-League benefits from the vacancy.
Defenders of the licence model point out the opposite. The mechanism worked exactly as designed: a club that could not meet the standard was removed, on grounds directly relevant to whether it could sustain a professional operation, rather than because it lost a run of matches in March. Relegation, they argue, removes clubs for the wrong reason — poor form is not the same as insolvency, and a well-run club can finish bottom.
The honest reading is that Australia already has a removal mechanism and simply does not use sporting results as the trigger. That reframes the debate usefully. The question is not whether an A-League club can lose its place. It plainly can. The question is who decides, on what evidence, and whether the club below gets to take the place.
The models that have actually been floated
Several structures have been proposed publicly over the past decade. None is official, and Football Australia has endorsed none of them, but they define the range of what is being discussed.
Two-up, two-down. The simplest version and the most frequently mentioned. The Australian Championship winner is promoted, the bottom A-League club is relegated, and a second place changes hands the same way. It is conventional internationally and it is the hardest to reconcile with the licence position, because it removes a guaranteed place with no transitional protection.
One-up with a play-off. The second-tier champion plays the lowest-placed A-League club over two legs for a single place. This softens the risk to licence holders — a bottom club is not automatically demoted, only exposed — and it is the version most often suggested as a first step. It is also the version most vulnerable to the charge of being cosmetic, since a semi-professional side would rarely win it.
An A1 and A2 structure. A single professional competition split into two divisions under common governance, with movement between them and the existing licence holders distributed across both. This addresses the geography and travel problems better than promotion from a semi-professional tier, because both divisions would be professional and nationally organised. It requires far more capital than anything currently in the sport.
Expansion instead of promotion. The status quo option, and the one Australian sport actually uses. New clubs enter by licence when the market and the money justify it, as the A-League has done repeatedly and as the NRL and AFL do. Under this model the second tier is a development and qualification competition permanently, and access to the top level is a commercial decision.
The fifth possibility, and arguably the current direction of travel, is that nothing changes at tier one while merit-based movement deepens below it — more federation places in the second tier, a genuine relegation mechanism between the second and third tiers, and a fuller season. That is incremental rather than decisive, and it is the path that requires no negotiation with licence holders at all.
What would have to happen
A realistic sequence looks something like this, and each stage is a precondition for the next.
First, a second tier that is stable, larger, and geographically national. That means expansion beyond sixteen clubs, a longer season or a fuller format, and clubs capable of meeting professional licensing standards. Two seasons in, none of that is true yet.
Second, a consistent relegation destination agreed across all eight member federations, so that a club relegated from the second tier lands one rung down regardless of which state it is in. This is a governance negotiation, not a football one, and it has not started in any public form.
Third, a negotiated settlement with A-League licence holders. Their agreements are reported to run to 2034. Any earlier change requires either compensation or a transition long enough that the licences expire inside it. This is the stage everyone points to and nobody has begun.
Fourth, a mechanism. The version most often discussed publicly is two-up, two-down, with the Australian Championship winner promoted and the bottom A-League club relegated, sometimes with a play-off between the second-placed second-tier club and the eleventh-placed A-League club. None of it is official, and Football Australia's published position remains that the second tier has to work before access is discussed.
An honest assessment
Nothing in the current structure suggests promotion and relegation is close. The licences run to 2034, no formal negotiation has begun, the second tier is eight weeks long and two seasons old, and the eight federations that would have to receive relegated clubs have not agreed a common rule.
What has changed since 2023 is that the conversation now has an object. For twenty years the argument was abstract, because there was nothing to promote anyone from. There is now a national second-tier competition with sixteen clubs, a broadcaster and a champion. That does not make an open pyramid likely this decade. It does make it describable, which it was not before.
The most probable outcome in the next few years is more merit at the second tier — expansion, more federation places, possibly a genuine relegation mechanism within the second and third tiers — and no change at all at the first. The lid stays on, and the pyramid underneath it gets taller.
What to re-check before relying on this page
Positions here move with each administration. Licence expiry dates are reported rather than published, and the 2034 figure should be treated accordingly. Statements by chief executives and chairmen are quoted with the moment attached because they have not been consistent across administrations and should not be read as standing policy. The Australian Championship's format and qualification rules are two seasons old and capable of changing between editions. And the Court of Arbitration for Sport decision on the United States binds the parties to that case and is persuasive elsewhere rather than universally binding.
Related reading on this site: the competition at the centre of the argument is covered on the Australian Championship guide, the state divisions where promotion and relegation actually operates are explained on the National Premier Leagues page, the governance reconstruction that produced the closed league is described on the page about Australia's move to the AFC, and the national-team consequences of the domestic structure are on the Socceroos guide. The rest of the section sits under the Australia hub and the football archive.