By Marcus Uhe
The bottom sides on the Premier Division football ladder will be fighting for survival in Outer East Football Netball (OEFN) this season with confirmation of a triple relegation to take place at season’s end, leaving one club president declaring that their club would need to “consider our options” going forward.
Clubs that finish in 10th, 11th and 12th in Premier Division football will be relegated to Division One, with the premier of Division One to earn promotion to the top flight as Premier Division returns to a 10-team competition, after fielding 12 in 2024.
Edging back to 10 teams will ensure an equitable 18-round fixture, with all teams playing each other twice in home-and-away fixtures, in an effort to strengthen the division’s integrity.
In 2024, each team plays each other once, with seven repeat fixtures.
Emerald, Berwick Springs and Officer/ROC were promoted to Premier Division for the 2024 season as a result of OEFN’S Competition Structural Review in 2023.
Three divisions became two, with Premier expanding from nine teams to 12, and Division One from seven teams to 11, with Division Two being scrapped.
Berwick Springs Football Netball Club president Ashley Allison said the club’s committee will need to act in the best interests of its members, eager to avoid playing in Division One in 2025.
“We’d have to consider our options,” Allison said.
“We recruited heavily on the basis of being in Premier Division.
“As a committee we’d have to decide what the right thing is for the club.
“We hadn’t had any pre-discussion (before) the Outer East board decided, there was no pre-discussion, from my perspective, that the bottom three would be relegated.”
Division One of OEFN includes teams such as Yea, Powelltown and Alexandra, requiring considerable travel for the Titans, should they be relegated.
OEFN Chief Executive Brett Connell said the intention was “always to revert to the (10) team premier competition,” given it was the preferred structure according to club feedback in the 2023 Review, and said that all clubs were consulted “on numerous occasions” throughout the process.
“The board has settled on this year, for the relegation and promotion piece, to allow clubs to plan for the season, one or two weeks into the season, they will know that if their footy finishes in 10 11 or 12 position, they’ll be relegated,” Connell said.
“To get back to a competition that has nine home-and-away games is a lot easier than working around a 12-team competition.
“It’s not ideal this year because it’s uneven, but there will be three that are relegated so we’ll get back to 10.
“We certainly need to get back to 10, that’s what the clubs wanted in the competition structure review and that’s what the board agreed to last year in moving to 12, that we’d be moving back to 10 as soon as we possibly could.”
OEFN’s By-Laws state that only the bottom team at the end of the home-and-away season in Premier Division shall be relegated to Division One and the premiers of Division One receive promotion.
However, law 8.3 states that “If, at the beginning of a season the Premier Division competition has an odd number of teams, or the number of football teams is not ten (10), the Board shall decide the relegation and promotion structure from each division prior to Round 2 of that season.”
Connell said that clubs were told of the return to 10 teams before Round 2, in accordance with the By-Laws.
“Outer East Football Netball has committed to a larger body of work to benchmark the competitions of football and netball to explore whether there is a better relegation/promotion system than what currently exists,” Connell said.
“Any bench-marking exercise will take some time to explore and then implement, and for the certainty and stability of the competition Premier Division will revert back to a (10) team competition in 2025.”
