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According to a report from News Limited football journalist Ray Gatt, Football Federation Australia, in conjunction with the NSW Government, are looking to bring out Manchester United to play an A-League All Stars XI.
Pre-season exhibition matches are hardly new in the A-League. In 2010, Sydney FC hosted the ‘Festival of Football’, attracting Blackburn Rovers, Glasgow Rangers and AEK Athens to the Harbour City.
In 2009, Gold Coast United played their inaugural game at Skilled Park against English Premier League side Fulham, while Melbourne Victory hosted Greek giant Olympiakos earlier this year.
These events attract decent crowds and provide A-League sides with an opportunity to increase the intensity of their pre-season training schedule.
However, the decisive factor in organising these types of tours should be to encourage interest in local football.
The last time Manchester United toured Australia in 1999, domestic league clubs were overlooked altogether, with the Red Devils instead facing the Socceroos.
A-League veteran Simon Colosimo will remember the Rene Rivkin-backed tour for all the wrong reasons.
The tour was, in the end, one of several futile events designed to encourage Australia’s latent football public to support the game. Dwight Yorke, then at Manchester United, commented the trip was “made extra special by meeting the most extraordinarily beautiful girl it has ever been my pleasure to know”.
Football, clearly, was the sideshow.
Similarly, in 1979, the Socceroos played exhibition matches against the New York Cosmos, with the view that the gala event would attract fans to the National Soccer League.
The Age football writer Lawrie Schwab claimed that the Cosmos’ arrival in Australia “dispelled some of the gloom hanging over the local game”; while Socceroos coach Rudi Gutendorf predicted the “beginning of a new era in Australian soccer…many people will come again to see us”.
In this context, it is worth asking whether exhibition matches like these increase or diminish the credibility of the A-League. Should we appease those who suffer the cultural cringe?
There is nothing wrong with A-League club sides organising pre-season fixtures with overseas clubs.
However, to pit an A-League All Stars XI against an established club side smacks of desperation, and cheapens the image of the competition.
Do we really want to see players from rival clubs lining up in a Harlem Globetrotters style arrangement?
Football fans will welcome the return of Manchester United to Australia. But, for the sake of the A-League, let them play against Sydney FC or Western Sydney Wanderers.
Gimmicks and exhibition matches are below Australian football and should remain a thing of the past.
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