A-League players should be paid the same as NRL, AFL

 
The Crowd Roar Guru

By NUFCMVFC, 6 Aug 2009 The Crowd is a Roar Guru

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There has been much debate about the place of the salary cap in the A-League and the composition it should take: in Jesse Fink’s Bundesliga A Model For The A League article, for example.

Clive Palmer has called for changes.

It is a complex issue with many dimensions at play, and with that, a large variety of perspectives.

Throwing my two cents into the equation, this author is fan of the base “cap” structure always being in place over the proposal that a cap based on turnover should be put in place, as has been mooted with a UEFA cap.

The fundamental operating costs of the league should always be kept low. The A League should always be a fairly lean operation, primarily to ensure that the local league can ably weather any ‘troughs’.

Also to ensure that regional teams can always viably field regionally based teams and so leave as best a national geographic footprint as possible (which cannot occur with other Australian sports).

And then, also, because even when football’s revenue does increase substantially from future media deals, rather than the wages merely going into paying players, as is the case with the EPL’s vast revenues, football’s money should go into facilitating football’s infrastructure – both physical but also administrative in terms of investment in refined scouting and football departments.

The money should go into better training facilities, coaching techniques, women’s and youth teams.

Not to mention diverting some into the lower tiers of the football economy to fill a gap all too often left by councils.

This may even be useful in filling a sponsorship void that will inevitably be present in any future A2 league, hence sustaining one.

Football would probably do well by developing its own media assets so as to reduce the inter-dependence on other media outlets which are ‘inconsistent,’ to say the least.

There are two competitive dimensions at play.

First, to ensure there is general competitiveness across the A League, to make sure that we don’t have a situation as is the case with Scotland or the EPL at present.

The Mariners, Fury’s and prospectively the Tasmania’s and Canberra’s need to be able to field loosely competitive teams to ensure community interest. Not to mention preventing the hoarding of decent players just to sit on the bench when they could be on the field for a different team.

The other side of the equation is competitiveness in Asia.

It is in the A-League’s interest to be able to field competitive teams in the ACL as well as moderate the player drain to richer Asian leagues such as the K League, CSL and even J League.

This serves a good purpose of facilitating acceptance, but this cannot be allowed to become endemic to the point where it seriously compromises the A-League’s talent pool.

Then there is the need to bring back returning Socceroos, keep promising Olyroos from going to Europe as quickly, as well as import good quality foreign players to subsidise players leaving for Europe as well as introduce a cultural flavouring and diversity.

With all of this in mind, this author would advocate a system whereby the cap ensures base wages on average would be generally in line with what AFL or NRL players earn to ensure a viable career path.

With smaller squads, we would need less money to achieve this.

In conjunction with this, the youth marquee spot as it is now, where the $150,000 can be spent on up to three players, is good as it encourages retention as well as youth development and the blooding of youth players by clubs.

This can be useful and encourage smaller clubs unable to spend millions on marquees every year to go down the route of developing Rukavytsa’s, Burns’s, Zullo’s and Minniecons, and keep them for a bit longer, so ensuring the viability of investing in substantial Academies, as the Mariners are.

There should be two Marquee spots – an Australian marquee, to ensnare returning Socceroos (rather than have them go elsewhere such as Popovic to Qatar,) like Sterjovski and Culina, and a “Foreign” marquee for the Milton Rodriguez’s, Dwight Yorke’s, Fred’s and Hernandez’s.

Team’s that can afford them or have ambitious owners can then choose to splash the cash on them, giving them something of a competitive advantage over teams electing or unable to do so, but not being so wanton to ensure the dynamic becomes too uncompetitive.

It is feasible that there will be increased capacity for transfer fees in future.

This is good in terms of keeping Hernandez’s in the league, but it also needs to be controlled as often the money spirals out of control and can often be better spent on infrastructure and football departments.

Therefore, a mechanism where transfer fees (instead of salary cap) are generally pegged to turnover is a good idea to keep fee expenditure under control, perhaps with some exceptions (teams can elect to take some money out of the cap to get deals over the line, or be innovative by electing to pay an open transfer fee but foregoing a marquee spot without adversely impacting operating costs).

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