But all that notwithstanding, there is one nagging concern about a competition that has brought soccer into the Australian mainstream, increased its media and television profile and attracted crowds that could only have been dreamed of when it kicked off in August 2005.

The biggest problem is not the intrinsic nature of the sport (as some of its more bone-headed local critics would have you believe), the games, the clubs, or the players.

It is that, with just 10 teams and no variation, the league becomes rather boring.

Year after year we get the same clubs fronting up. The personnel changes, the owners come and go, the coaches are hired and fired and the players recycled (sometimes far too often). But there is never any change to the composition of the competition.

And until the powers that be fully embrace expansion and eventually introduce a second division with promotion and relegation, this feeling of groundhog day at the start of the new season will only be exacerbated.

Two years ago Football Federation Australia handed out 20-year extensions to the licences of the nine Australian A-League clubs, guaranteeing them a spot in the league until 2034.

The FFA's rationale was to instil a sense of certainty for club owners, to give those stumping up their cash the security of knowing they would have two decades to amortise their costs, build their business and reap a reward.

That's fine if you are building a block of flats, a shopping centre or setting up a hardware chain.

But sport is not like that. Sport thrives on tension, uncertainty and unpredictability. It needs its romance, its stories of battlers progressing and succeeding against the odds.

Clubs need incentives to develop, invest and grow. The game needs to reward those who do it well and get it right, and punish those who get it wrong and fail.

Australia, it must be admitted, is a peculiar marketplace. None of its top-tier sporting competitions – AFL and NRL – have second divisions, none have promotion and relegation where ambitious lower-level clubs get the chance to grow and progress to the top tier replacing those elite-level strugglers who are failing.

Maybe it's cultural here, and it's certainly not a problem for the AFL, which has expanded to 18 teams and is only played at a significant level in this country.

But soccer's culture is global, and the framework and references for the Australian game are influenced by soccer's culture in Manchester and Madrid as much, if not more, than by the sport's culture in Melbourne or Sydney.

Ange Postecoglou, the national team coach and a man whose status and influence grows weekly as he leads the Socceroos further up the global rankings, gets it and, in his latest book, Changing The Game, he urges the FFA not to sit on its hands and let the game stagnate.

"Consolidating at a time of growth seems counter-intuitive to me. We should be right in the middle of an investment boom," the Socceroos boss says.

"The A-League is a great product but it can't be what Australia needs it to be with just 10 teams.

"It may be enough for a financial model in a boardroom but it's out of whack with the reality of the opportunity."

Postecoglou, of course, remembers a time – as a fan and as a player – when there was an NSL which at various times had 16 or more clubs and sometimes operated in two conferences.

This produced more games, more opportunities for coaches and players and the chance for youngsters to break through and develop far more quickly than they seem to be doing in the A-League.

It's hard not to disagree with his view that there should be at least 16 teams, with two in each major city, and a longer season with more games.

For me, the FFA needs to go further and create a second division with promotion and relegation.

To do so might mean renegotiating those 20-year agreements, or arguing with any existing club owners that relegation to the second tier means you are still part of the A-League, just not the top division. And pointing out that if you regroup and do it better, you will win promotion back to the top flight.

It's a nettle that will have to be grasped. And the sooner, the better.

The game is great, the spectacle terrific but soccer can go to another level. Steven Lowy and David Gallop need to at least lay down a pathway for progress.