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Opinion
While citing restraint of trade and holding back potential excellence remain the cornerstones used by the critics of salary-capped sporting competitions, A-League fans should be celebrating the equalising measure.
The 2022-23 season has entered its back half and after yet another weekend of often impossible-to-predict results, each and every club will still believe they are destined to play finals football.
Just two wins separate last-placed Melbourne Victory and sixth-placed Sydney FC, with ten points spanning every club outside of runaway leaders Melbourne City.
Central Coast’s loss to Sydney FC on Saturday allowed City to skip clear, yet they are the numerical outlier, as the remaining teams now prepare to scrap and fight across the final 11 rounds of the competition.
No league in the world with which I am familiar is able to claim such parity and competitiveness at a comparative stage of the season.
Most brilliant is the fact that every fan still has strong motivation to be attending games, remaining hopeful of finals qualification.
In both 2020-21 and 2021-22, the magic number required to advance to the knock-out phase of the competition proved to be 39. Hypothetically, that leaves Melbourne Victory 25 points short at this stage of the season and potentially requiring seven or eight wins to navigate a path to the finals.
Tony Popovic (Photo by Daniel Pockett/Getty Images)
That might sound like a tricky road to hoe, consider two things. Firstly, the team in last position at this stage of the season in any major European league would be littered with players eyeing their contractual exit clauses, about to be triggered by inevitable relegation. Secondly, it is likely that less than 39 points will be required to qualify for the final month of A-League play.
Without teams battling in the cellar and being lapped by the quality above, the pinching of points and unpredictability of results is likely to lower the threshold for top-six qualification, with 35 or 36 points a probable marker.
That would leave teams like Western United, Brisbane Roar, Macarthur FC and Newcastle Jets just a possible six wins and the odd draw or two away from a finals appearance. In fact, things are so tight in the mid-table that Macarthur, Newcastle and Perth now exist on a week-to-week basis, knowing that three points potentially moves them into the qualification zone with a loss placing them on the outside looking in.
Essentially, two or three wins will likely move every club in the bottom six into the top six, or at worst, right on the cusp of it.
Above them, Sydney FC, Wellington, Adelaide, Central Coast and Western Sydney, inside the qualification zone yet precariously so, know that a similar run of wins will consolidate them immediately and potentially kill off the runs of the teams below.
With 33 points still on offer and the pattern of the season suggesting that no result is certain, it is perhaps time for the salary-cap mechanism to rise and take a bow.
While true financial fair play and equalisation is something of a farcical concept throughout most global leagues and far from black and white in the A-League, the initial intention to consolidate the competition by attempting to increase the likelihood of survival for its clubs was necessary.
(Photo by Daniel Pockett/Getty Images)
The cap is also the tool that allows the current complexity and unpredictability in the ladder to exist.
While many people are keen to see promotion and relegation introduced in Australia, those people who often cite a competitive nothingness existing for teams struggling at the foot of the table, one could actually mount a counter-argument.
Perhaps the flux in clubs’ fortunes over time and the lack of perennial cellar-dwellers actually creates a unique situation, where interest for a majority of teams’ fans is potentially held for far longer than in most international leagues.
We want to see the A-Leagues grow and expand to a point beyond the salary-cap era. However, we are far from that point right now, and perhaps a celebration of the ultra-competitive men’s league should take place in recognition of the current season and ladder situation.
After all, you don’t really know what ya got ’til it’s gone!