MELBOURNEfc built the foundations of what is football, the MCG and the soul of Melbourne. So all serious football fans will to some degree be dismayed that in its 150th year, Melbourne's credibility is under real pressure.

Post the failed plan to merge with Hawthorn, and faced with an unsustainable financial position, the AFL agreed to financially assist the game's original club out of its financial quagmire. The general strategy involved improvements to the club's revenues, growing membership, extracting more from the Melbourne Cricket Club, finding a permanent administration and training centre, and focusing on the Melbourne-ness of the brand.

After three years of progress - membership and club-sourced revenues up more than the average of Victorian clubs, some stability, apparent unity, a 50% reduction of a $5.5 million debt and a new home underway in Olympic Park - the club was a long way from Relaxed Street, but it was navigating its way out of Disaster Avenue.

A year ago the club was gearing up for the 150th year as the oldest, continuous elite sporting club in the world: this was promoted internally as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity/must to heal all previous wounds, to engage the whole club network, galvanise a renewed passion and club-wide commitment to agreed strategies, continue the progress made on the business, get the club behind the Dean Bailey-Chris Connolly football department, and leverage the steady building of new facilities.

This was a club-wide call to arms for the board, coterie, past players and the MCC to start acting on board-endorsed strategies, and respecting and implementing board-endorsed decisions and processes.

But internal politics within many clubs is challenging, and at MFC it was of Middle East complexity. So many people had been in one war or another over such a long period - the Norm Smith War, the Merger War, the Gutnick War, the Woewodin War, the MCC war - there was an oversupply of disappointment, disenfranchisement and disengagement.

It was easy for people to profess support, but even easier to justify holding back. Perhaps the calls for action and more urgent unity of purpose gave rise to some unrelated subterranean forces. In any event, the board elected to change CEO pre-season. Then the chairman and most of that board were surprised to be forced out. Now that replacement CEO is gone, and the well-regarded CFO has had enough. The financial setback will be real. While the club has achieved a record near-30,000 members, it will report a significant loss due to a cost blowout (boards moving on contracted CEOs is not cost-free), changes and uncertainty contributing to an inevitable decline in fundraising/merchandise/event revenue, and continued issues with under-performing gaming venues. As a result of the revenue decline, the club's bank debt will have inevitably risen.

The real loss is that of club respect, and much of the progress made in the previous three years, and those who have been sitting on the fence in terms of support have another excuse/reason to hold back. On-field, the professionalism and internal goodwill generated by the process to recruit Bailey as the coach to build a younger team list, with the support and return of Connolly, has been offset by events around the board table.

So what are the issues, and what might be done?

The core issue is that despite the enormous efforts of many good people, Melbourne has not been able to sustain a consistent period of progress in the professional era since it left its MCC origins and amateur halcyon days of the 1960s.

When it has been going OK on-field, it couldn't consistently sustain those results or match it with improvements off-field. When off-field was starting to improve, on-field went pear-shaped.

Despite improvements in fundraising, memberships and sponsorships, the club remains one of the smallest in the AFL in almost all economic criteria, and with modest resources. The support provided by past players, coterie groups, MCC, business networks, former directors etc has been given focus, but the results have been impacted by bad memories and low expectations and, therefore, limited outcomes. Despite progress in promoting the Melbourne brand into schools, community and China markets, the progress has been held back by lack of resources, the X factor of team success, or fulsome support from key players within the club, AFL and MCC.

The AFL is in something of a bind. It is aggressively pursuing new teams in south-east Queensland and western Sydney. One doubts the AFL management would lose much sleep if two of the weaker Melbourne sides went to the wall, and allow a more balanced, and cost-effective, national competition. But because the new teams are a few years away, because it's the 150th year of football, because Melbourne remains a pillar at the home of football, the AFL Commission will again be forced to financially support it, perhaps more than it would like.

It will presumably impose tougher strings, perhaps including formal approval over the choice of new CEO and CFO, ensconcing an "observer" at the board table to directly represent their stakeholder interests.

In many ways, Melbourne illustrated in the 1950s amateur era what could go right if you did everything right, and since then in the professional era all that can go wrong if you don't. Success demands total alignment: unity and active engagement with and by all club stakeholders, consistent and parallel improvement on and off-field, decent strategies implemented by disciplined boards and management teams, strict performance criteria at all levels, and a dose of luck.

Steve Harris was CEO of MFC from 2004 until March 2008. He is a former Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Age, and former Editor-in-Chief of Herald Sun.