The future of Australian football is in the hands of FIFA after accusations that Football Federation Australia (FFA) chairman Steven Lowy twice derailed political consensus over an extraordinary 24 hours.
A joint FIFA/ Asian Football Confederation delegation will return to Zurich on Thursday to report back on what one A-League club chairman described as an "embarrassing" show of the game's governance.
FIFA spent two days in Sydney seeking to broker a compromise on its mandate that FFA broadens its congress to give more stakeholders a say in how the game is run.
Given the drawn-out and toxic nature of the impasse, such a task was always going to go down to the wire.
In the end, a capitulation from wavering state federations left furious A-League clubs calling for Lowy's head and resigned to the fact that FIFA may be forced to sack the board and appoint a normalisation committee to temporarily run the sport.
On Thursday afternoon, Lowy hauled the state federations into a private meeting lasting two hours, leaving FIFA representatives and some 15 stakeholders waiting as negotiation time ticked away.
Australian Associated Press reported that Lowy, deployed as a facilitator in this process, had already stymied the first breakthrough between the clubs, the players' union and states, intervening late on Wednesday by calling a snap meeting with the states to reassert his influence.
Hopes for an end to the situation appeared all but lost during Thursday's acrimonious all-in session, comprising about 40 representatives from the various parties.
The clubs and Professional Footballers Australia again reached resolution with the states, only for the states' subsequent behind-closed-doors conference with Lowy to untangle that work.
Previously, all state federations except the largest, Football NSW, supported FFA's proposal of a 13-seat congress featuring nine votes for the nine state federations, three for the clubs and one for PFA.
The A-League clubs, operating collectively under the Australian Professional Football Clubs Association, have long been united with PFA in fighting for a 9-6-2 model.