It was announced yesterday Football South, which runs the club, will apply to Football New Zealand to renew its national league licence.
The club’s previous licence expired at the end of last season.
Chief executive Chris Wright said it was positive news and he was excited to be moving forward.
The club had gone through a review process, seeking feedback as to whether it would reapply.
Wright was glad to have done that.
The key feedback which confirmed the decision was the desire to build on its progress, as well as continuing to utilise the coaching the club brought into the region.
If successful, the licence would grant the club two more years in the national league.It would find out the result in mid-late June, but indications so far were positive.
"The messages we’ve been getting are there’s no reason why it wouldn’t be successful," Wright said.
"We’d have the opportunity to fix anything if it wasn’t right.
"The indications we’ve been having is that Southern United are an important part of all the national leagues.
"If we can prove that we meet the criteria, as we have in previous years, I’m sure it will all go smoothly."
The biggest question mark had always been around the financial sustainability of the club.
It had been taken over by Football South two years ago after running into difficulties on that front.
That has resulted in it running national men’s and women’s league teams, as well as a men’s youth team and a futsal side over the past two seasons.
All up that cost about $200,000, which was less than some clubs ran two teams on.
Wright said the club was doing what it could to investigate where it could save money, as well as continuing to raise funds.
"We’ve got to work with our strengths and one of them is that being a federation national league team, Southern United [and Football South] are quite ingrained with each other.
"We’ve got quite good scales of economy and we can share staff, that works really well.
"That means we can also do things like align the pathway and instead of duplicating activity across a club and federation we can just do what works best across the whole ecosystem really.
"So the gap, we’re pretty confident we can fill it."
The club performed exceptionally well last season.
Its futsal side won the national title, its women’s side made the playoffs for the first time and the men improved from 10th to fifth place.
