KANGAROOS chairman James Brayshaw conceded last night that the decision to spurn the AFL's Gold Coast relocation offer would place immense pressure on the club to quickly achieve financial self-sufficiency.

Brayshaw, who was chosen to head what will be a new board just before the old board was spilled late yesterday afternoon, said he expected the AFL to scale back and ultimately end its substantial flow of financial assistance to the club and seek to annul or alter the last year of the lucrative contract it has with the Roos for matches to be played at Carrara in seasons 2008 and 2009.

The Kangaroos produced a meagre profit of $100,000 this year by paying 92.5% of the salary cap and with as much as $2.6 million of AFL assistance in the form of $1.4 million of relief funding and three matches on the Gold Coast worth $400,000 each.

All of this backing, Brayshaw admitted, had been put at risk by the decision to rebuff the league, which outlined at a meeting yesterday morning that it was not prepared to accept a Kangaroos demand for a further 12 months to consider relocation to south-east Queensland, determinedly the AFL's new frontier.

The relief funding, or annual special distribution, of $1.4 million is guaranteed for only two more years and Brayshaw said he was pessimistic it would remain but, equally, optimistic the Roos won't need it by then.

"No, they (the AFL) won't and I don't blame them, either. Because the levels have been high and they shouldn't be that high going forward," Brayshaw said.

"If they're that high then we're not doing our job, so I don't think they will. I think they'll wind it back. Provided we're doing the right thing, we'll be entitled to funding if it's there but with the plan we're putting together our hope is that we don't need any AFL funding, that we'll be able to wipe our own face and get money outside of football so we're bomb-proof.

"If we can do that it will be a beautiful day in two years' time when we turn around to Andrew Demetriou and say we're self-sufficient."

Brayshaw said that without a confirmed deal on a stadium on the Gold Coast locked into the AFL's offer, it was impossible to be certain about what the club was agreeing to. This, he said, and the AFL's insistence on taking over ownership and full control of the club if the Roos agreed to go were impassable obstructions to a deal to relocate.

"A part of this AFL deal is that we completely hand the keys over and it's owned and run by the AFL. There's no North Melbourne football club in that," Brayshaw said.

"All right, we'd wear the jumper and the name Kangaroos would remain but outside of that it would be fully run and owned by the AFL. Why would you hand the keys over, hand your licence in and allow the club to be taken over by someone else when you're just going to be on subsidies for as long as you can see until the stadium deal is done.

"As far as the North Melbourne footy club is concerned, we're very disappointed that the AFL didn't accept our proposal to extend a year. There wasn't a stadium deal and we basically turned around and said until we get a stadium deal we don't think it's appropriate to turn around to our shareholders and members and say we've accepted a deal and you don't have a house for us. It's pretty much as simple as that.

"Quite frankly, I don't know how they expected us to agree to a relocation without our home being fully funded and ready to go."

A qualified agreement to relocate dependent on a stadium deal agreeable to the Roos being produced by the AFL was also not worth pursuing, Brayshaw added. "But what happens in two years' time if the government up there has a change of mind and the stadium deal is off? Do you then go back to your North Melbourne fans, 250,000 of them in Melbourne, and say, 'well, we accepted a deal to go but now the stadium deal has fallen over and we're coming back'. I just don't think you can do that."

Brayshaw, who claims to have backing for a capital raising of $10 million over the next two years that will be put to increased football department spending and the creation of non-football related income-producing assets, said he also understood that if his grand plans did not materialise the Roos would be unlikely to have the same AFL offer to turn to that it turned away from yesterday. The league was offering as much as $45 million of assistance to the club for its plan, although much of this is tied up in the stadium deal that even the league admits is yet to be bedded down.

"You take risks every day. That is a risk we take but I think we're sustainable here in Melbourne. I think we can put a model together here that is going to make this a wonderful club based here in Melbourne. My hope is that we don't have to sit down and negotiate," Brayshaw said.

"I can't worry about what they're (the AFL) thinking or doing. My only concern is getting it right. We've played in eight of the last 14 preliminary finals, so we're not fly-blown as far as our performances on the field. In fact, we've had a wonderful recent history. What we haven't been particularly good at is converting that to off-field success. We've got to be as good and efficient off-field as we've been on it."

Later, the new chairman announced to a meeting of 2500 members and supporters at Dallas Brooks Hall that not only would the club not be leaving its Arden Street base but would shed its Kangaroos name to revert back to the traditional name of North Melbourne Football Club, a statement of commitment, he said, to the club's Melbourne origins and intentions.

Brayshaw said he expected his new board to be drawn from "three or four" of the old board and three or four new directors who, he said, needed to create a unique place for the club in the competition.

"The sponsors I've said are there are there. The people who want to get involved in the capital raising are there. I've spoken to them today and they are still very keen to be involved. But let's not make any bones about it — this is going to be a massive task," he said.

"I think we've got to change fundamentally the way we go about running this footy club. We are a niche (club), a boutique club. We're not Collingwood or Essendon and the sooner we realise that and cut our cloth to that and make our business tailored to that the better off we'll be."