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As the sun sets on another international week, attention around the globe has begun to turn back to domestic matters.
For Australian football fans it’s already been a vibrant start to season seven of the A-League with Brisbane Roar’s continued dominance even outstripping the Harry Kewell show in Melbourne.
Yet, while we’re all pleased with the renewed interest in Australia’s fledgling domestic football competition, developments beneath the surface point to the continuation of some worrying trends.
Let me cut to the chase – as one club after another burns through its original ownership structure (and in some cases its second), A-League management and Football Federation Australia now have to look abroad for fresh investment.
Hot on the heals of controversial Indonesian business family the Bakrie group taking over Brisbane Roar, the Central Coast Mariners have now become the latest club to look abroad.
While this latest development out of Gosford raises the question of whether A-League clubs should be locally owned (or at least by someone from within Australia), what really interest me is the reasons why this is happening, and most importantly, what it means.
Basically the game is running out of people with a kangaroo and emu on their passport willing to sink large amounts of money into the local game for no return.
All of which harks back to the structural issues within the A-League that have been prevalent since day one – over-sized stadia, a restrictive long-term TV deal that is only now beginning to approach its end and the systematic bungling of where clubs have been set-up.
Yes, the arrivals of high profile Socceroos Harry Kewell and Brett Emerton have garnered a raft of fresh excitement into the league, but as I’ve argued on this site before, much of it has been by fortune and not design.
FFA may have laid the ground work for Kewell and Emerton’s arrivals with their Australian marquee agreement with the PFA, but they didn’t make either of these deals happen (comparisons with how the new domestic Twenty20 league is using the signing of Shane Warne are informative).
The changes that have been made to the A-League this season have been mostly cosmetic and so massive flaws remain in the competition’s setup.
Though now it is no longer just Australians who are paying for them.
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