With speculation about a 20th team increasing, I don't understand at all why anyone thinks a third WA team is a good idea.
It's not that Perth isn't capable of having another team on metrics and economics. If we did a hard reset of the AFL with 20 brand new teams, you'd be putting at least 3 and maybe even 4 in Perth. But that's not how things work, Perth already has 2 teams that most AFL supporters follow.
How does anyone expect huge numbers (an entire club worth essentially) of Eagles and Dockers fans to abandon their team for a brand new franchise created out of nothing? Particularly the diehard supporters that turn up week in, week out no matter how bad the team is on the field?
This isn't to say there aren't legitimate challenges the WA teams face i.e. travel burdens and the Eagles members wait list. But WA3 isn't the answer.
Slapping the name Joondalup or whatever on a new team which plays out of Optus anyway doesn't mean people in the northern suburbs of Perth who have been Eagles supporters for decades, in many cases their entire lives, suddenly jump over to Joondalup. And the ship has long sailed on elevating a WAFL team (or combination/merger of WAFL teams), it doesn't have anywhere near the supporter base to compete in the AFL.
And a SW WA team is probably an even worse idea - it's a region with 170k people. That's the population of Darwin but spread over an entire region rather than a city, with even less of a corporate base, and where they'd still be competing for hearts and minds with the Eagles and Dockers supporters who don't abandon their club anyway.
Even in the best case scenario WA3 doesn't grow the game, it just cannibalises the Eagles and Dockers. There's virtually no untapped supporter base like in Western Sydney/Gold Coast or if you expand to markets without a team like Canberra and the NT.
Canberra and the NT have their own major challenges that would need to be dealt with to be the 20th team, and both are far from perfect, straightforward options. But to me WA3 seems like by far the worst of the realistic options for a 20th team.
Maybe I'm missing something, or I'm wrong and there's a large percentage of Eagles and Dockers fans ready to jump ship to a brand new team?