Villa's in town, but where have all the marquees gone?

It wasn’t a mirage. It was really him. At long last, David Villa has taken time out of his busy schedule of attending Enrique Iglesias concerts, watching baseball at Yankee Stadium, and chilling in Central Park to join his new teammates in Melbourne.

Cutting it fine, to say the least, but when you’re a Spanish World Cup winner you don’t need to spend months or even weeks trying to strike up combinations or acclimatise to unfamiliar surroundings. You just play, and the rest takes care of itself.

“David will be an important player for us this season and our priority was to get him training with the group as quickly as possible,” Melbourne City coach John van’t Schip said.

If five days before City’s season opener against Sydney FC is as quick as possible, whoever handles logistics in the City Football Group empire should probably start looking for other work.

Regardless of whatever training program Villa has been on or how many times per day van’t Schip talks with his colleagues in New York City, it’s not a good look to leave it this late – especially given his contract is only for 10 games, which means nobody can really afford for the Spaniard to take any time to find his feet.

To be brutally honest, it’s borderline unprofessional.

But all the Carmen Sandiego gags were quickly pushed to one side as soon as Melbourne’s press pack caught their first glimpse at a travel-weary Villa in the flesh, wearing the club’s new sky blue livery and apparently ready to go.

If he plays anything like he did the last time he took the field – for Spain in Curitiba, putting the Socceroos to the sword – then all the cynics will look a little silly.

This is, after all, a genuine superstar. The A-League has seen them before but none have been as close to the peak of their powers as Villa is right now at 32 years of age – although Dwight Yorke perhaps wasn’t too far off, since he went straight back to the Premier League after his season with Sydney FC.

Alessandro Del Piero was a bigger name, and comparing his arrival to Villa’s is a fun exercise.

ADP was pretty much given a civic reception at the airport when he touched down in Sydney for the first time. The very next morning he woke up to a La Gazetta-inspired pink Sydney Morning Herald with the entire back page, Roy Masters pointers and all, printed in Italian.

On the other hand, nobody even knew Villa was in the country until City told us so. He flew in anonymously Sunday evening, the club taking a much more low-key approach with their temporary talisman. It’s the kind of no-fuss, too-cool-for-school treatment you’d expect from an organisation that has new money coursing through its veins.

Just don’t expect the Herald Sun to do a Marca mock-up – they’re too busy asking James Hird if he’s still employed every six hours.

Villa’s first training session was similarly kept under wraps, with City choosing to send overlay footage of him in action to media outlets on Monday rather than inviting cameras down to their Latrobe University base. But he will undoubtably be the centre of attention at today’s season launch, so he’ll more than make up for any lack of attention very soon.

Villa comes at an interesting time in the A-League’s lifecycle. Every metric suggests the competition is poised to explode into its biggest season ever, yet the marquees are thin on the ground. Del Piero is in India, Shinji Ono is in the J.League 2 and Emile Heskey has been franking his reputation as a loveable loser back home in England.

Of course, Slovenian midfielder Robert Koren is at City with Villa while Marc Janko, the Austrian captain, will lead the line for the other Sky Blues, so it’s disingenuous to say there are no marquees. But none of them pass my patented ‘Dad Test’.

My father, who came to Australia from Italy when he was four, loves football dearly – but his preferred sports are Australian rules and cricket, so he doesn’t quite have an amazing depth of knowledge in the round-ball game. He won’t actively seek out an A-League game to watch, but if he happens upon one while flicking through Foxtel he’ll gladly settle for it. I often use him to embody the attitudes and biases of the regular Australian mainstream sports fan.

My ‘Dad Test’ theorises that if he hasn’t heard of a player, that player is not famous enough to be a marquee. It’s a foolproof system.

Suffice to say that while he knows Villa very well, he has no idea who Koren and Janko are.

Those two players will not pull thousands through the gate or glue eyeballs to televisions off the back of their reputations. Prediction: their respective Wikipedia pages will cop an absolute hammering in Australian traffic over the next few months. What will do it is the success of their teams, and the quality of their football. The idea is they will be more in the Thomas Broich or Besart Berisha vein than Del Piero, Ono or Heskey. Is that enough?

The jury is out. The A-League is getting there in mainstream terms, in no small part thanks to the prominence offered by the aforementioned holy trinity of million-dollar men. Del Piero’s Sydney taking on Heskey’s Newcastle in Round 1 of the 2012-2013 season, for instance, was genuine event TV. You couldn’t miss it. Big names and big games have been vital in pumping up all those key metrics that FFA are so willing to brag about now.

David Gallop said earlier this year that the marquee strategy is no longer essential to the growth of the A-League. “If you look at the youth coming through, you realise the game’s ready for the next phase,” he said.

Early in his reign as federation CEO, however, he also said, “The game is witnessing the execution of strategy – the marquee player rule – every weekend now. It has taken a few years, but who could doubt its pulling power now?”

Clearly, a lot changed between those quotes, but the last time the A-League thought it was big enough to cope without a high-profile injection or two, the competition stagnated.

There is a growing sense that football is ready to stand on its own two feet and do as it wishes to do, rather than try and fit in with or compete against the other sporting attractions around the country. FFA’s chest is puffed out, the organisation full of confidence.

The FFA Cup is a resounding success, the Asian Cup is coming, and Western Sydney Wanderers are in the AFC Champions League final. That all adds up to very real momentum. FFA is proud of where the game is currently placed and assured that it is heading into the right direction. Is that feeling justified enough to ignore the lure of the marquee?

Heading into a packed summer of sport, Gallop won’t want to be wrong. On top of all the football to come, there is the growing spectre of cricket to contend with. After Mitchell Johnson almost single-handedly restored the popularity of the sport last year, the Big Bash League will again be a behemoth, while the ICC Cricket World Cup will be jointly hosted by Australia and New Zealand in February.

Also during that month is the NRL Auckland Nines competition, which was warmly received after its inaugural run. All of these will steal the spotlight from the A-League, the FFA’s pride and joy, for at least a little while.

But not just yet. Villa will put paid to that, at least for 10 games. Australian sport thrives on star power and he has it in spades. Unless he has indulged more than we know in the months after the World Cup, he’s liable to tear the A-League apart.

The hope is someone, anyone can pick up his promotional slack once his southern hemisphere sojourn comes to an end.