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The Western Sydney Wanderers Asian Champions League success is made all the more remarkable for the incredible gulf between the payrolls of themselves and their opponents.
Recent commentary has advocated for Australia to abandon the salary cap to bring the A-League into line with most professional football leagues around the world.
Usually articulate and well-argued, you sometimes get drawn in and start wondering whether they might really be onto something.
The central tenet of these arguments is that salary-capped Australian clubs would never gain success in Asian club football due to the superior resources of the super clubs of Asia. Australia would need its own super clubs.
This is all great in theory. The success of the Wanderers however has shown that the theory does not stand up in practice and that a salary capped competition is well and truly capable of producing a champion club. The proof is in the pudding.
It is worth trying to figure out how a salary capped team from Rooty Hill could take out the Asian Champions League and set up a potential World club championship meeting with Real Madrid. What combination of x-factors (no, not you Marlissa) could have negated the financial clout of the Asian super clubs.
Coaching is one. Australian club coaches, operating under a salary cap, are very good.
Popovic out-coached his overseas rivals on a number of occasions. The sight of Marcello Lippi doing his block at Parramatta stadium was a clear indication that this upstart Aussie had arrived on the scene. I believe Graham Arnold, Mike Mulvey and Kevin Muscat also are coaches who can cut the mustard. Arnold’s efforts with the Mariners even led to a coaching stint, albeit short-lived, in the J-League.
The physical prowess and competitiveness of Australian players is another. There are many on this forum including myself who would concede that the technique and skill levels of local players is somewhat behind the heavyweight nations of Asia. The competitiveness and fitness levels of Australian players however are a different story.
What brings about this extra competitiveness? It is the evenness of the league of course, owed in no small measure to the salary cap.
Week in week out, our A-League teams go at it toe to toe. There are very few ‘easy’ matches compared to some of the big leagues in Europe.
Away teams don’t routinely park the bus and generally always give it a red hot go. Adelaide upset the reigning champions Brisbane 2-1 in the first week of the A-League away from home.
Melbourne Victory toasted the Wanderers in the season opener, although this was a home win it was against the Asian champions-in-waiting. This league is extremely competitive, one of the most competitive in the world. The fact that last year’s champions are wallowing at the foot of the ladder illustrates this point perfectly.
Extrapolating from the Wanderers success it could be argued that the A-League is now the best football league in Asia.
Since locally produced players make up the majority of the playing staff of every A-League club then it could be further argued that ability wise, the stock standard Australian footballer is as good as, if not better than, any player in Asia.
The combination of a tough league, the salary cap and great coaching have been the cornerstone of the rise of the Australian game. If the levels of technical skills could be improved through better coaching at the youth level, Australia will be a perennial front runner in Asia.
The Bundesliga is one of the great football leagues in the world. Watched by huge attendances with fantastic flowing football, it has one fundamental flaw.
That is, that Bayern Munich are so far ahead of the rest of the league that the best any other club fan can ever hope for is to finish second.
For most clubs it could be described as the Red Cadeaux league. Watching the ESPN coverage of the UCL match between Bayern Munich and Roma this morning, the commentators made a very pertinent point.
They explained that Bayern were concerned about the lack of competitiveness in the Bundesliga and felt they were losing their sharpness. One of the things our little league does really well is keep all the teams very sharp.
One of the major benefits of the salary cap to football in this country is that by keeping the competition relatively even it ensures that interest is maintained by the general sporting public.
This is vital to gain a foot hold in what is a very crowded sporting market. Other benefits have been described ad-nauseum in various forums – I won’t repeat them here. My main point is that thanks to the Wanderers, the theory that only an unrestricted league can produce a continental champion has been well and truly debunked.
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