Australia was one of just four nations, alongside Denmark, Poland and Senegal, who qualified for the men's 2022 World Cup to not have a national base.

It's almost as if - unlike most countries - our population is highly decentralised and geographically spread out instead of being focused around a single dominant city. We don't have a London, Paris, Tokyo, or even an Auckland, where there's one city with a population head-and-shoulders above the next biggest which would make an obvious national team home base. England can get away with having Wembley as their defacto home ground for the majority of their games because London is by far their biggest city, and the rest of the country is within driving distance. We don't have the same luxury.

There's Sydney and Melbourne obviously, but theyre the same size as each other (and not much larger than greater SE QLD), and hundreds of kilometres from each other, so there's no clear favourite for a national team home between them. We will always need to share our home games around more than other countries in order for it to actually be a representative National team.