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Bear with me, football fans. While it may seem a little mean to reject the oft-treasured ideal of equality, their really is no place for it in competitive sport.
The A-League has grown out of a conflicted sporting culture in Australia. While on the one hand we want to beat all comers and punch above our weight, football here is being held back by the idea that equalisation is good.
Well, it’s not. For a whole variety of reasons.
Both philosophically and practically speaking its a dead weight around the ankles of what could be a much more accessible league structure for Australia.
1. Meritocracy and ambition
The assumption I grew up with as a young rugby league-infected kitten from the mean streets of Penrith, was that success breeds failure. Necessary failure of course, because the last thing an equalised sport wants is for a sporting club to build a culture of year in, year out success.
Having branched out from the nest and discovered international football – once the initial jarring sensation subsided – its easy to see the advantages of unequal European football leagues. A culture can develop at top clubs like the Barcelonas, the Manchester Uniteds, the Bayern Munichs, which breeds an expectation of success which in itself produces and attracts the type of players that will make this self-fulfilling.
So being about more than simply money, its about condensing the talent and uber-competitive mental cases that want nothing more than to grind their opponent into the dirt. Ahem…
At the other end of the scale, up and coming clubs need to lure of promotion to make them feel they are playing for something. And clubs at the foot of the table need the trapdoor of relegation to keep them on their toes. A wooden spoon hasn’t been enough for me since I was getting about in grey Stubbies.
2. The joys of inclusiveness
In football, most league structures around the world enable clubs of all shapes and sizes to be engaged in a pyramid-style system.
This is in contrast to walled off sports like rugby league, Australian rules and many American sports that exist only for those current top level clubs. It’s what us Austrian school economics-obsessed loons like to call a “corporatist” approach or more colloquially “crapitalism”.
Much like the way our current “boom/bust” modern economies run more broadly, this is counter to free market capitalist principles. Which is a bad thing, just to clarify.
So while the inner leftist in some of you may preach that “equality is good”, in fact within a sporting context it excludes those clubs that aren’t already at a predetermined, largely arbitrary base level.
These minimum standards are enforced in the A-League not just via the obvious salary cap, or more importantly the floor in the cap system. Its also done via other operating standards enforced through things such as participation franchise lease agreements and the collective bargaining deal.
Clubs that cannot meet these minimum standards are excluded before they can even prove themselves on the field of play.
3. Being globally competitive
Now this is a moot point for small world sports such as those that have historically dominated the Australian sporting landscape.
But for football, we exist in a world of external benchmarks. Now the obvious advantage here is to allow our (potential) super clubs to compete to sign better quality players, but the more important effect is about talent condensing.
The top quality players that we do have in the domestic scene need to gravitate to less clubs not more. And play around others with a similar level of skill, commitment and ambition. One feeds into the other within a club, raising all boats in a sense.
Not wanting to exclude those “on the rise” it also means that at smaller and mid ranking clubs, there is room for those players still making their way. As well as for players formerly of the bigger clubs, returning from overseas or maybe later in their careers who want to pass some of this on to the “lesser lights”. And maybe even segue into coaching.
4. Room for development
This leads to another important role of an unequal football league structure.
Small to medium size clubs can be hot beds of experimentation, innovation and development by creating spaces where players and coaches are not burdened with expectations of immediate success.
Sure these clubs can grow above their current station, but up and coming clubs or fallen clubs in transition are perfect nurseries for young players and coaches to make their mark.
This is where inequality is at its best.
5. Engaging the whole of country
There are no doubt challenges in a country like Australia in having a “whole of country” approach to league football.
Yes the travel can not only be somewhat expensive but also draining and time consuming. All the same, the advantages outweigh the negatives.
Regional Australia is largely neglected by sports that set an arbitrary base above which an area needs to sit to be able to sustain a place in their competition.
In football, this has been famously expressed by FFA chief executive David Gallop as a “fish where the fish are” approach. It sounds fine (if somewhat simplistic or even a tad banal) on the surface, but it leaves one asking “by whose size chart?”
Which “fish” are the keepers and which are the throw backs?
In the A-League, it’s set by the regions or cities that can be assumed to be able to afford all those minimum wage and operating benchmarks mentioned earlier. But what if those levels were optional or even better deregulated out of existence?
It’s all well and good to have standards as aspirational but not as a hard floor that keeps out those currently not able to meet them.
The best way to expand the reach of a competition like the A-League is to remove that barrier on the ambition of clubs currently below it. There are many clubs at the PS4 National Premier League level that – were the parameters accessible enough – would love the opportunity to play their way into the top flight.
As we are seeing with the revolutionary FFA Cup, the potential is enormous. And the excitement among the true believer football fan quite palpable. Strike now while the gilt-edged opportunity presents.
Why wait until some mythical future when football is king down under and better able to sustain it? Or so the assumption goes.
Because in fact its better to lay the correct foundation now and grow on to it. Having an open, hyper competitive league structure may actually be the thing to mark the game out as a something different, more dynamic and superior to other sporting leagues here.
The current set-up of the A-League has been fine for the first decade. To build on this, it needs something else for the coming decades.
Be the “disruptor”, football.
The time is now.
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