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News has seeped out over the last few days that A-League clubs are dizzying themselves, vibrating like children hopped up on lemonade at the prospect of signing Robbie Keane or Steven Gerrard from the MLS.
Reports like these crawl through the brain like embarrassing memories of childhood awkwardness; surely I wasn’t the only person somewhat relieved to see Michael Essien’s proposed move to the Melbourne Victory fall through.
The A-League had appeared at one stage to have outgrown its taste for the overpaid and over-the-hill.
The argument that players like Keane or Gerrard could contribute meaningfully to the on-pitch success of a team isn’t totally sieve-like.
Yes, I’m sure Keane would bang in a few goals for the Brisbane Roar – the club with which he is most heavily linked – for a season or two. But the idea topples when the cost of such a premise is weighed up.
What, if Keane were to arrive in Brisbane, would happen to 23-year-old, freshly capped Australian striker Jamie McClaren? It’s difficult to see how McClaren – last season’s second highest scorer – wouldn’t be displaced by the Irish striker, a man who scored 104 times in the US, and who has plundered more international goals than Lionel Messi and Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
A similar argument could be made for a player like James Troisi, or Oliver Bozanic, were Steven Gerrard to arrive at the Melbourne Victory. Making way for players deep into their thirties, whose arrivals are designed as much for the sake of name-brand publicity as they are running, passing and shooting, makes less and less sense as the A-League ages.
As to the effect these players would have on the commercial prospects of the clubs that sign them, and the league in general, forgive me if I’m hesitant to support a potential transfer based primarily on that.
The Sydney Derby hasn’t needed the presence of Alessandro del Piero to break all of the attendance records this season, and the slight bump in Roar shirts with ‘Keane’ hastily adhered to the back that might occur won’t solve the problems the ownership has plagued the Brisbane club with anyway.
The fetish with ex-superstar marquees was a vital part of the establishing years of the league, when loosely arranged and volatile clubs were propped up by these tent-pole marquees. For a moment, hark back to those years.
Remember the days of the common guest contract? When Romario or Benito Carbone could come and enjoy a working holiday, sauntering around for a few matchdays, insulated from the perspiration and grit of the local professionals around them, whose salaries paled in comparison to theirs? These are not memories that should be recalled with any fondness, let alone brought hurtling back into the present.
This is not an argument against foreign players, or even against aged marquees. Bruno Fornaroli is the best player in the A-League, and at 29, is still enjoying the latter stage of his prime years. His exploits last season, which have continued into this campaign, are quickly turning him into the genuine superstar of the league.
Thomas Broich has been a consistently – and, importantly, permanent – compelling foreign marquee, who most A-League fans probably hadn’t heard of in 2010. The same goes for Besart Berisha.
Tim Cahill, the most beloved and enduringly potent Socceroo we have, is the kind of late-career marquee acquisition that should be indulged in, with more name-brand recognition than Keane or even Gerrard.
Let’s look at the last few big name, former European-based marquees to have come and gone in the A-League. Since 2014, Emile Heskey, David Villa, Alessandro del Piero, William Gallas, and Luis Garcia have entered and exited the stage, with only del Piero considered a success.
Heskey scored just ten times in more than 40 appearances, Gallas’s time in Perth was far from glorious, and Garcia and Villa played six games between them, with the latter’s stint at Melbourne City serving to tear open and reveal the odd – and acutely cringe-worthy – PR-fuelled asset shuffling that exists between the City Group’s satellite clubs.
Gerrard’s future was, for a few weeks, thought to lie in management. He recently turned down the opportunity to manage MK Dons, and is now apparently weighing up continuing his playing career against taking a coaching position at Liverpool. This is not the stage in Gerrard’s career into which the A-League should be inserting itself, licking its lips, remembering the sound of the packed MCG signing You’ll Never Walk Alone in unison.
Even if Keane and Gerrard were to improve the net talent in the league, and drag up the mean level of quality, it still wouldn’t be worth it. They’ll be gone in a year anyway, and the stunted development of the players who stagnated behind them will take that long to repair.
Weaning ourselves off these types of signings has taken a decade, and just because two former stars have shuffled out of their American retirement home, doesn’t mean we should usher them obsequiously into an Australian one that closed years ago.