Last season CF provided $685,000 in financial relief - it achieved this by reducing the cost of player and referee registration fees by 50 percent last year - after the competition was delayed and forced to condense into eight rounds for the NPLW and seven, plus three championship games, in the NPL.

This season 17 rounds have been played in Canberra's NPL and NPLW, before the decision was made this month to cancel the remainder of it. Capital Football's CEO Phil Brown said the organisation had made no decisions on offering fee relief just yet, but it would be completely different to last year.

"It's a completely different scenario. It's also different in that if you look at NPL1, NPLW, NPL Youth as examples, between 76 and 86 per cent of the season has been played, which is completely different to last year," he said.

"We've delivered far more of the season, people have participated in far more of the season. We haven't yet decided what we are going to do but whatever we do do, it's going to be a completely different approach to what we had last year because the scenarios are completely different."

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The organisation's NSW counterpart, Football NSW, is providing $1.5 million in fee relief for the 2021 season. Their season was cancelled earlier this year, due to the Sydney lockdown, after 12 rounds had been played in the NPLW and 17 in the NPL.

In addition to the differing lengths of the two seasons, Mr Brown explained further why it was a different scenario compared to 2020, in terms of the work done by CF staff and there being no JobKeeper support.

"The [2020] season was paused before it started and there was a significant amount of support that was provided to business at the time, so there was JobKeeper. And then we took a position, because we knew what was coming in advance, where we could look at some cost savings across the business, staff went back down to reduced hours and we were able to obtain some financial support from the federal government around JobKeeper and there was also some support provided by the ACT Government in waiving hire fees.

"That together enabled us to consider that we were delivering 50 per cent of the season so we could provide a refund or set a lower fee," he said.

"This year round it's a bit different in that all of the work that we would normally deliver for a winter season has been delivered. We've prepared from October the previous year, we've done the scheduling, the registrations, the only thing that we haven't delivered is the finals series in terms of workforce within the office."