Comments on: FFA, it’s time to slow the player-drain now!

By: Footbal Person

Footbal Person — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:33:18 +0000

This is an old article now isn’t it. No matter, the player drain has already been cloged, now it seems they want to stay wich is delightful.

By: Alan Carr

Alan Carr — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:06:17 +0000

Dear Adrian,

As a regular reader of your articles, this one really piqued my interest. I am a passionate supporter of the A-League and the budgets these teams have – relative to overseas teams – completely limits them when it comes to generating enough pulling power to bring overseas players home.

That’s not to say the league lacks talent. Infact I think in many ways it is a lot more interesting than it’s overseas counterparts purely because the commitment is to the game, not to the pay cheque. But there is a fundamental problem with how the governing body of A-League soccer is running the game, and I think it can potentially have greater effects than it is now as soccer becomes more and more mainstream, and the overseas club seek to extract more talent from us.

Keep up the good work.

Allan.

By: josh

josh — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:55:33 +0000

agreed

By: jaymz

jaymz — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 07:50:06 +0000

One thing the FFA can do is implement the asian berth rule, i would even go one further and have an asian marquee (non aussie obviously) to force clubs to look at some high quality asian imports

By: Midfielder

Midfielder — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 06:11:09 +0000

This will solve the problem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXQg7Oir1Bg

By: Whiskeymac

Whiskeymac — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 04:18:08 +0000

All clubs and leagues lose players eventually. Hardly any player stays at one club for life – there are exceptions (Maldini, Giggs) but generally the players have a right to go wherever they want and to earn what they can – maybe the clubs should tie them down to better contracts and capitalise on transfers more. The money this generates will benefit the game here… and, in agreement with Pippinu, the FFA seem to be doing a good responsible job. they seem to have a solid business plan to work off and aren’t knee jerk reacting to stories that players like Griffiths or North are being lured overseas (and who knows if they will last or end up like Elrich did?). Surely the hope is that the FFA is concerntating more on the issue that for every North going there’s a Ryall, Minniecon or Gan being developed.

By: Lazza

Lazza — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 02:30:14 +0000

Hopefully the next TV contract will help. The league is under capitalised but we should be able to match the Asians and the 2nd tier Euro leagues in the future.

Currently the FFA get about 17m a year, the next contract is supposed to yield 100m per year? With the financial crisis it may not be as much but still an improvemnet on what we have now. We should only lose the very top talent.

The only positive is that a lot of youngsters are getting an opportunity to show their worth.

By: megatron

megatron — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:18:07 +0000

The smaller clubs won’t be able to survive that.

It’s a shame because the league can’t afford to lose these players.

Part of me wishes they wouldn’t be so greedy and would stick around to help the league.

By: Pippinu

Pippinu — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:56:23 +0000

This issue has been done to death lately.

Money is the root of all evil.

As others have said, Joel Griffiths was a marquee with the Jets, and yet he has been wooed to wherever he is going.

If you’re losing your marquees, that tells us that there ain’t enough money to fix the problem in the short term.

The FFA is probably correct in concluding that it has to rely on a slow upwards trend in raising overall club revenues – to be honest – what more could they possibly do?