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Jesse Fink

It's a perverse world we live in. A football federation headed up by a man who only a few years ago was being hounded by the Australian Tax Office for unpaid taxes, can't stop getting Australian taxpayers' dollars.

On Wednesday it was announced that a new western Sydney club, as yet unnamed, would be fast-tracked in just six months into the next season of the A-League and financially propped up by the federation itself. 

A federation that assures us "it is not something we have kickstarted today" and has been working on for months, yet neglected to announce a CEO, or a coach, or a director of football. (By contrast, the AFL, an organisation that knows what its doing, announced Kevin Sheedy as the coach of Greater Western Sydney Giants more than two years before the club had kicked a ball in the competition.)

A federation that has been haemorrhaging money like it's going out of style and still hasn't adequately explained how it blew A$45.6 million of taxpayer funds for one lousy World Cup vote.

A federation that put the licence for this unnamed western Sydney club out to tender not so long ago, overlooked two commendable bids because they didn't have financial backing and threw its lot in with a mob called Sydney Rovers (name and colours courtesy of FFA) who were given every opportunity to get a club off the ground - even had some of its bills paid for the FFA - but couldn't get their act together enough to put up a website.

A federation that spent a lot of time at Wednesday's press conference banging on about "community engagement", yet had a tight-knit community in North Queensland that was desperate to keep its A-League club, the Fury, but was then told they had no money to help and gutted the people of Townsville like a fish. 

A federation that 24 hours later announced it was killing off another expansion club, Gold Coast United, in one of Australia's highest growth areas and one which rival codes the NRL and AFL have managed to get right.

So forgive me for crashing the party, but this is not a "significant day for the game", to use the words of the FFA's spectacularly ineffectual CEO, Ben Buckley. 

It's a significant day for Buckley's career because nothing will save him unless he can get an improved TV deal when the current rights expire in 2013. 

This was what the press conference was about. Nothing else. Adding "value" to the A-League "product" when the FFA sits down at the negotiating table. 

Has the FFA not learned anything from the lack of due diligence it has already demonstrated in its past cock-ups? 

Has it even looked at the checks and balances that Major League Soccer has in place for prospective teams even before they'll consider granting a franchise licence?

Clearly not. Because the FFA is a fundamentally incompetent organisation steered by people who years ago should have been told to gather their possessions and removed from the building by security guards.

Which is especially galling when you consider Frank Lowy, FFA's chairman, places such emphasis on due diligence in the growth of his shopping centre business. Read his biography. It's a tome on the importance of doing your homework before you so much as lay a dollar down.

But who needs due diligence when you have a servile government in the thrall of one of Australia's richest men?

Who needs due diligence when that same government is happy to kick in taxpayers' dollars every time the FFA goes through its pockets and finds nothing there?

Western Sydney richly deserves a football team. But not one cobbled together in six months to save Buckley's bacon. 

And especially not one owned by the FFA: the federation failing Australia.