It has been another bruising week for Football Federation Australia. Caught in an untimely pincer movement between emboldened A-League club bosses and the world governing body, FFA is battling to retain its influence over the game.

In a desperate scramble to appease Fifa ahead of an end-of-March governance reform deadline chairman Steven Lowy and chief executive David Gallop have been forced into a frantic game of administrative speed dating. A fortnight after high-level meetings in Zurich, FFA’s top brass have been locked in negotiations with state federations, A-League clubs, and Professional Footballers Australia, preparing the ground for an extraordinary general meeting sometime next month to broaden the overarching FFA congress.

An expanded governance model is imminent. The key question that remains is how much influence A-League clubs will have on the reconstituted congress. Reports indicate FFA is offering clubs an increase from one in 10 votes to three in 17, a deal club bosses are yet to accept.

Negotiations have been forced upon FFA at a time when A-League clubs have leverage to shift the status quo, and a financial incentive to do so. And they’re not only interested in governance reform.

“The time for change is now upon us,” Melbourne Victory’s Anthony Di Pietro told a room full of football heavyweights, including Gallop, recently. He went on to assert that A-League clubs not only needed a greater say in the running of the game but also a greater financial return, commensurate to their role generating an estimated 80% of FFA revenue. The 10 A-League clubs recently formed the Australian Professional Football Clubs Association to lobby as a bloc, so while Di Pietro was speaking in a Victory club tie, it’s safe to assume his message was not unilateral.

Dissent has been building since before Christmas when FFA announced the latest pay-TV broadcast rights agreement worth $57m per season for the next six years. With a free-to-air component still up for sale (one Saturday night match per week) the total figure is expected to come in around $70m, an increase from the current $40m per year arrangement, but short of the $80m target.

A-League clubs are unimpressed with the deal, one they were not involved in negotiating. This ill will lurks in the background of the clubs’ demand for an increase in the broadcast revenue returned to them from the central pot. Each club currently receive $2.5m, a figure they want to see rise to $6m to reflect their role as primary content providers in the relationship. FFA is resisting, arguing it has to fund the game at all levels in Australia, not just the A-League.

A devolved but not fully independent A-League has been put on the table as a bargaining chip to reduce the likelihood of mutiny. This stands to have win-win possibilities with clubs taking greater control of their destinies and FFA reaping increased gains should the league take off but retaining enough governance to underwrite a catastrophe.

Gallop told the Australian a new operating and ownership model for the A-League and W-League was being discussed although no specific plan had been identified. Gallop sees opportunities to “increase the value of the licences for the current owners and to encourage new investors in the current clubs and any new ones”.

This confrontation exposes the intractable challenge at the heart of all administrative disputes involving football in this country – finding enough money to go around.

FFA’s revenue for the last financial year was $103m. Out of that has to come all the costs of operating a national association and its myriad obligations. Once a quarter of that budget is passed on to A-League clubs and a quarter is paid to staff in salaries and benefits, it leaves precious little to invest in what we might recognise as the grassroots, marketing, or game development. For comparison’s sake, the AFL has five times the amount of money to spend on fewer responsibilities.

So while the current stoush might manifest as a power struggle, at its core is a perhaps necessary debate on the best way to generate and distribute money to make the meaningful advances for which the football community is so impatient. The boutique stadia, subsidised registrations, elite coaching, visible marketing presence and so on all require funding. It is cash the game simply doesn’t have.

The assumed wisdom of growth has focussed on the virtuous cycle principle whereby football’s massive participation base is converted into engaged consumers, in turn driving other commercial gains such as broadcast rights and sponsorships. The marketing campaign featuring Yoshi, the supposedly typical young football fan yet to align himself with an A-League side, is the most recent example. Unfortunately for FFA the tipping point for such a strategy to succeed remains some way off and until it does, it seems piecemeal and ineffective – a response magnified by the visibility of cash-rich rivals speculating during what was supposed to be football’s seasonal window of opportunity.

Saturday night’s Sydney derby attendance of 44,843 proved that if the recipe is right there is an appetite. FFA just has to figure out how to afford the ingredients.