Owners of the newest A-Leagues expansion teams should be announced within weeks, Australian Professional Leagues (APL) chief executive Danny Townsend has told ESPN.
Townsend also said that a bumper patch of player sales would spur the league to eye further investment in its transfer infrastructure.
Coming off the back of significant public interest in the FIFA Women's World Cup, the A-Leagues launched their 2023-24 fixtures on Thursday, commencing with a standalone A-League Women (ALW) round -- the first time in the leagues' history that the women's competition will start before the men's.
Both competitions will feature 12 sides -- Central Coast Mariners' admission into the ALW meaning that 2023-24 will be the first in which the league will feature a full home-and-away slate -- but the men's and women's competitions will both grow further in 2024-25.
- View the full A-League fixture: Men's | Women's
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The APL announced its intention to expand into Auckland and Canberra last March, with Canberra United's ALW side to be absorbed into the new licence in the Australian capital, and the new New Zealand team set to enter with both men's and women's sides.
Townsend told ESPN that the process of finding ownership groups for the Auckland and Canberra franchises was going "well, really well, actually," and "we'll make some announcements in the coming weeks."
When pressed if this announcement was regarding ownership groups coming in, Townsend responded with a simple "correct." It was a one-word answer he reprised when asked if that meant the APL was in the final stages of negotiations with preferred parties, for both licences, and if the leagues asking price -- $AU25 million each -- had been met.
"[The expansion fees] stay in that ecosystem and continue to fund our growth," Townsend said. "We've got a business plan that takes us through our next TV deal. We want to make sure that the business is well capitalised to do the things that we know it needs to do to continue to push those metrics north."
The leagues having previously done preliminary work on the logistics of how the new teams would operate before going to market, an imminent ownership announcement would roughly mesh with the target leagues commissioner Nick Garcia previously set to ESPN of putting the foundations of the two new teams in place "probably 14 to 16 months" before they start playing.
Meanwhile, the significant success that A-League Men (ALM) clubs have enjoyed in the international transfer market this offseason has the league exploring how it can make greater use of the significant money to be made in selling its best and brightest talent overseas.
Reflective of long-term investment and planning in Australia's youth space, Melbourne City's Jordy Bos broke Australia's outbound transfer record with a move to KVC Westerlo, only for his teammate Marco Tilio to quickly surpass the mark when he moved to Celtic.
Among others, Samuel Silvera and Nectarios Triantis left Central Coast Mariners for Middlesborough and Sunderland respectively, Keegan Jelacic moved from Perth Glory to KAA Gent, and Calem Nieuwenhof swapped Western Sydney Wanderers for Heart of Midlothian.
Townsend said the offseason had given the leagues their best return on the international transfer market but more work was needed to maximise the fees clubs could demand before they released their best talent; this is one aspect of long-standing questions surrounding A-League recruitment.
"The Socceroos performing well in the World Cup helps, and our Matildas performing well helps," he said. "People are thinking about Australia as a football destination and a talent pool that they can tap into relatively cheaply.
"The thing that we've got to do now is actually start to ratchet up the transfer fees that we get for our talent because they are attractive.
"What we are looking at from an APL standpoint is how we centralise some of the resources and tools that we can give those clubs to be more proactive on player monetisation. It's a difficult thing to resource properly.
"If you look at the European clubs; their player monetisation departments are enormous. Most clubs here don't have a dedicated resource for player monetisation; they're using the recruitment officer.
"So a little bit more focus, a little more discipline, [and] we think there's a lot more money that could be made for Australia."