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Does Australia’s top division football league want to continue on the collectivist path, or can it embrace a future where each can live to its individual means?
The A-League so far has been built as a compromise between the market economy of world football and the domestic model of having a level playing field.
Salary caps and floors, collective bargaining agreements, labour regulation, the lack of a competitive path for entry, prohibition on local transfer fees – this has been the strategy for the early years of the league.
But these measures are all holding football in Australia back from embracing its necessary path.
Individualism.
For the first decade of the league, you can understand the decision to genetically engineer a relatively even competition. As a way of protecting that early seed and of appealing to locals more accustomed to competitions such as the NRL and AFL. And to adopt a similar, semi-collectivist model.
For the next nine decades of the league’s first century, should that still be the case?
Or should the league now set the foundation that will carry the league forward for the next century? And what would be the ideal structure for Australian football?
For me it would be one that enables any team at any level of the Australian club football pyramid to work their way up to the top tier. That’s as close as you can get to a ‘human right’ for clubs in football competitions around the world.
Every league in the world would be worse off without it. Australia is as well.
The trade off for this open playing field is to lose the level playing field.
Equalisation is the mark of the semi-collectivist model of this league, which brings us back to individualism.
An individualist A-League would allow teams like the Melbourne Victory and Western Sydney Wanderers to grow to whatever level they can sustain. And hopefully challenge the world powers in club football over the longer term.
It would enable year on year growth for potentially quite large clubs. A cumulative approach builds year on year, rather than taking turns at winning and losing under the level playing field model.
The whole of the football family would also benefit from an individualist A-League. Any team wishing to play their way into the top flight would have the path to do so.
Who knows what stories and new local football powers will emerge with a more entrepreneurial, grassroots approach?
The big fish, small fish and all in between.
The FFA Cup is just the teaser to what could be ahead for not just the A-League but the whole football pyramid.
It’s hard to think of a more positive football story in the past few years than the FFA Cup. Maybe the universe is trying to tell us something?
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