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It’s becoming almost ridiculous now. Refresh your page on any football news site on the net and another Australian player is heading off to north Asia. Sasho Petrovski, Mark Bridge and even that great flop John Aloisi are all rumoured to be mulling over offers to go to the Chinese Super League.
Before you know it, there’ll be no players left.
But Football Federation Australia even today (and I know, just having done a radio interview with one of its bods as a guest) is still sticking to its guns, talking of financial responsibility and persisting with this delusional idea that lifestyle considerations are going to bring in good foreign players to make up for the good local ones we’re losing hand over fist.
It can’t go on unchecked. There has to be a correction. A circuit-breaker.
I wrote about the importance of something being done a couple of weeks ago on The Roar and in that short time the urgency of the situation has only ratcheted up to critical.
While the intention of the cap remains noble it is completely out of kilter with what is required to take on these avaricious Asian clubs.
The FFA wants a “sustainable model” in place for all the clubs but what is the point of sustaining a competition that has no decent talent left? What use to anyone is a “level playing field” if all the players on it are ordinary?
The fans aren’t stupid. They want to see the best players in the country and if not given them will turn away from the game. They want to see their clubs fight tooth and nail to keep the best players, not keel over like shot horses the moment an Asian club opens its chequebook.
To that end, FFA, please allow clubs to pay wage bills as a fixed percentage of their total income from all sources of revenue.
It was suggested by a reader on my World Game blog and I think it’s a great idea. If it means the A-League has a new superclub, likely Melbourne, then so be it. It’s a way to reward success and keep good players in the country while also encouraging clubs to explore new revenue streams so they too can spend more on quality players.
There’s also the obvious (to me, anyway) contradiction of bidding for a World Cup and positioning ourselves as the most capable nation in the region to host such an event yet being demonstrably incapable of thwarting these concerted player raids by showing some backbone of our own.
What’s the plan, FFA?
The more players that go, the weaker our competition becomes, the less likely we are to win an Asian Champions League, the less likely we are to gain those extra Asian Champions League places, the less money goes into the game, the less chance we having of winning the right to host the World Cup.
Everything is interconnected.
A few years ago the people running the game in Australia said the key to the future of Australian football was a healthy and viable domestic league. The hope was to make our A-League as much a popular success as the Socceroos.
The Socceroos are gaining in popularity but the A-League, in many ways, has gone backwards. The imbalance can be arrested but it’s going to take some concerted effort and some fresh thinking.
The question is: Is the FFA really on the ball?
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