The chair of the A-Leagues has said that no club will go under despite the annual distribution to each outfit dropping from $2m to $530,000 for the coming season. Clubs were informed of the final figure on Wednesday after months of speculation that led many football fans to fear for the future of the A-Leagues, which were split from Football Australia only four years ago. Stephen Conroy, chair of Australian Professional Leagues (APL), which operates the top-tier domestic competitions, said no club has indicated it is facing financial ruin. “We’ve just finished a briefing with every club and while clubs are obviously hurting by the size of this reduction, no one gave any indication of that level of problem in the meeting at all,” Conroy said. “Obviously they weren’t dancing a jig, but no one said, ‘right, that’s it, we’re shutting the doors’.” Commissioner Nick Garcia – who took over running the leagues from chief executive Danny Townsend at the start of last season – said the APL would work with the clubs individually to address any financial concerns. “We’re going to have one-to-one meetings between APL and club management and leadership to really understand what this means to them and just identify ways that we can support them centrally through it, because it’s challenging, right,” Garcia said. The APL has spent much of the $140m invested by private equity firm Silver Lake in 2021 on running Perth Glory and pursuing a major content enterprise around the Keep Up app and website. Conroy – who took over as chair last year – said the level of investment on Keep Up was a mistake given the timing, and the APL had now largely abandoned the initiative. “Launching into Covid was not the moment to go for a big, bold, ambitious strategy,” he said. APL’s losses has been “significant” in the last couple of years, Conroy added, but the distribution reduction, together with other cost-cutting measures, would help the APL break even in this financial year. Both Conroy and Garcia were optimistic about the future prospects of the league, citing an 11% increase in viewership and 33% rise in memberships last season. “They’re the sort of numbers that give us a spring in our step when we start to talk to our broadcast partners,” Conroy said. Channel 10 and Paramount have the rights to broadcast the A-Leagues until the end of the 2025-26 season. Garcia said staff were already looking at ways of making the A-Leagues become more sustainable, and flagged that work would mean positioning the competitions more as development leagues and potentially increasing places for young players. Conroy, a former Labor senator for Victoria, said the next year would be “tough”. “We’ve had to stabilise the business, we’ve had to get it back on an even footing. we were targeting that to be the case this financial year, and then we’ve got to ensure that we don’t run too fast, as has happened in the recent past.”