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Take a deep breath, pour yourself a glass of red, and relax. The A-League isn’t about to turn into some Asian super-competition, as was apparently the wish of seven out of ten club owners.
David Gallop yesterday broke FFA’s silence on a matter which has riled the Twitterati, knocking the proposal to include teams from Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia into Australia’s league smack bang on the head.
Central Coast Mariners owner Mike Charlesworth was allegedly the driving force behind the idea, and even went to the trouble of engaging an English player agent to work out whether such a daring expansion remit could reap benefits for a competition in dire need of greater investment.
Gallop didn’t immediately say no – taking a leaf out of Paul Keating’s book, he wanted to do this one slowly, and allow Charlesworth and his followers to figure out for themselves just why it wasn’t actually such a smart move after all.
“When I first spoke to these guys, I said you need to cross the Grand Canyon in a rocket and when it explodes on the other side it needs to explode into cash,” said Gallop, indulging in his own Keating-esque flourish.
Of course, this is exactly the kind of thing that would trigger internal cha-ching sounds in the heads of those in A-League clubland, but Gallop kindly pointed out it would compete with the AFC Champions League and a proposed pan-ASEAN competition. Besides, Fox Sports ratings prove locals aren’t really that enamoured with watching Australian sides locking horns with Asian teams anyway.
And that’s before you even consider that Charlesworth should be using that brainpower to find a way to make the Mariners viable without upsetting the entire Central Coast.
As we near the end of the A-League’s 10th season, most clubs need to take a good, hard look in the mirror, forget about hair-brained schemes like this and re-evaluate the way they do things, because whatever it was that made it compulsive viewing two years ago is now gone.
But the craziest part? It’s really not that crazy to imagine Asian teams in the A-League one day.
Aside from the fact we already have Wellington Phoenix, there’s something about the way modern football is evolving that it feels terrifyingly inevitable that countries would merge their interests in such a way.
The 1998 cult comedy classic BASEketball presents a satirical vision for the future of American sport were it to move in the direction that, 17 years later, we can say that it did.
The main characters invent the eponymous sport – which is amazingly fun to play, by the way – as a way of showing their distaste for a system that allowed players to change teams like babies change nappies, and for teams to switch cities to such a degree that the Utah Jazz play in Salt Lake City where, the movie famously tells us, they don’t allow music.
We aren’t that far away from Preparation H Arena and Maxi Tampon Stadium, either.
Think about how much football has changed. No longer is it the pursuit of the everyman. Clubs aren’t owned by local benefactors but by resource tycoons. A bloke can’t identify with the average footballer anymore. FIFA is basically SPECTRE come to life.
To paraphrase the Wu-Tang Clan, cash rules everything around football.
You’ll never see David beat Goliath in the transfer market, much less the UEFA Champions League. Even in the A-League there is clearly a discrepancy between the rich clubs and the poor, even if the salary cap means it’s not so blindingly obvious.
The world, meanwhile, is getting smaller every day. Technology is seeing to that. And broadcasters, who really hold the whip hand in this new world order, can put the best leagues in the world on TV everywhere. And it’s great, sure, but interest levels in domestic competitions fade as a result, people start buying Chelsea shirts instead of their local team’s, and that’s depressing.
Gallop already pointed to the fact an ASEAN Super League is in the pipeline. If the A-League ever did follow through with it, they’d only be following a trend.
Super Rugby will include teams from five different countries in four different continents next year. You don’t have to think too hard to believe that a European Super League will probably happen at some point. When that happens, game over.
The point is that this sport is going down a certain path, and that as soon as Charlesworth’s idea makes financial sense it will pop up again and FFA will in their wisdom say yes, and another part of what makes football so special will be lost.
That’s not to say we should stop going to the football, or all begin taking ‘Against Modern Football’ banners to games, or – God forbid – start forming A-League club versions of FC United of Manchester in local indoor competitions. Nobody wants that.
But there’s every chance the horse may have already bolted. If it has, and football drifts further and further away from its working class roots, we should at least be fully aware of it. Maybe pour yourself another glass of red for now.
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