TWO FINANCIALLY struggling Victorian football clubs celebrated their futures this week. A third celebrated its past.

North Melbourne set the ball rolling six days ago when it unveiled a still vague but promising vision for Arden Street based around the surrounding multicultural community it has largely ignored until now.

The Kangaroos are working to reinvent themselves and the task that lies ahead is daunting as they search for a new local identity.

Only last weekend, Foxtel's coverage of their clash with the Brisbane Lions featured a Kangaroo logo that has been shelved and still a significant proportion of the club's recalcitrant shareholders are hedging their bets and holding on to a Gold Coast future that pretty much everyone else, including the AFL, has abandoned.

The club has taken money to play games in Sydney, Canberra and southern Queensland and abandoned all three. Now it has little choice but to win the support of its own backyard and an ethnic community that Essendon and the Western Bulldogs have been wooing for some years and North has ignored.

The planned multicultural centre at Arden Street has won funding from state and local government, the AFL and the Peter Scanlon Foundation. Andrew Demetriou, who last year privately told key Kangaroos that even he could not fix the club should it choose to remain in Melbourne, now has thrown his support behind the club and the Arden Street redevelopment which, of course, is a creative attempt to build better training facilities and win young supporters, recognising that to take, the club must also give.

Even the plan to ditch the Kangaroo from the club's clash jumper and replace it with a soccer-style design seems aimed at the migrant community. For North Melbourne to continue to remain afloat, it needs money from the AFL's special assistance fund — Telstra Dome will not cut the club a better deal — and to keep getting the money, the club needs to adopt a new business plan and stick to it.

And North needs to find a way to replace the $1.2 million it would have made had it played on the Gold Coast next year. If the AFL grants the Kangaroos a historic Good Friday game then the competition's support for the club will not be questioned.

On the strength of the Geelong game two nights ago, a few more Friday night fixtures should surely go the club's way as well.

Two days after the North Melbourne launch, the Western Bulldogs unveiled the Whitten Oval's elite learning centre, a football, sports medicine and training facility which had to be seen to be believed when you consider the club's previous working and training conditions. For the second time in three days, the Victorian Sports Minister, James Mileno, trumpeted his Government's generosity, making it clear that public money will go to football clubs that use their imagination and embrace their communities.

The Bulldogs are still struggling to build their membership and face a thicket of bureaucratic tape if they are to achieve their final vision in the west of Melbourne, but what they have achieved at their once certifiable training facility off the back of an $8 million Federal Government grant is staggering.

The club's vision is years ahead of the Kangaroos, whose dithering over the Gold Coast wasted the AFL's time as well as their own.

Campbell Rose, the Bulldogs' unconventional CEO, now meets Rodney Eade and his football staff every week. Onfield, the Bulldogs are thriving this season. Eade has worked wonders with his group and remarkably — when you consider what he inherited and what he has achieved — Rose is never mentioned among the leading club chief executives when positions at other clubs become vacant.

It has only been in very recent AFL history that the Melbourne Football Club has been thrown in with the Bulldogs and the Kangaroos when clubs at risk are discussed. A decade ago the Demons still had an establishment cachet about them. Now the AFL states they are most endangered of the lot.

Last night, the club finally honoured its 150th birthday in the midst of a horror season with a moving celebration of the heroes of the past. Now the rebuilding for the future must begin.

The Paul Gardner regime, it must be said, has not achieved much. The club cannot be blamed for the delays and design changes of its potential new training facility in the Olympic Park precinct, but that is the price you pay for not controlling your own destiny.

The Casey relocation is bold but risky and the Melbourne Cricket Club is treating its one-time headline act like a poor relation. Jim Stynes, Paul McNamee and the melded new board have a frightening amount of work to do.

Melbourne the football club still has no home and is bottoming out as the AFL is due to hand the best young footballers in the country to two new teams.

The Demons' timing could scarcely have been worse.