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Opinion
There’s a useful saying in public policy circles: “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.” It’s a well-liked aphorism because it gets to the heart of why people do what we do.
We’re all consciously or unconsciously pursuing benefits and avoiding detriments in our work, play and personal lives. Economists love studying incentives because it gives them predictive insight into how people, businesses, and even nations will behave.
And the football landscape is filled to the brim with incentives. The roar of the crowd when the ball hits the back of the net. The glory of lifting silverware. Clubs earning prize money. Qualification for continental competition. Avoiding relegation on the final day of the season. Selling gun young players to bigger clubs for handsome profits. These are all incentives that drive football clubs, managers and players to greater and higher efforts.
The flipside to the positivity of incentives is that misguided, or misaligned incentives, almost always have harmful consequences.
Unfortunately in Australia, compared to the world’s best practice we have a plethora of misaligned incentives in our national league. For starters, compared to the overseas leagues, the A-League lacks some of the most important incentives that excites fans. In particular, the A-League lacks drama.
Sporting officials frequently mention that their sport or league is “in the entertainment business.” It’s stated so often that it’s basically a mantra at this point. A good long look at what global football fans gravitate towards reveals something more specific: football is drama. Unscripted drama, with all the emotional highs and lows of the best HBO premium productions.
The most interesting football leagues are filled to the brim with high-stakes drama. The title race, the qualification for continental football, and multi-team relegation battles. Just observe the passion and drama of Wrexham and Notts County fighting for promotion out of England’s fifth tier (yes fifth!) to see how the slowly unfolding drama of a title race can grip even neutral fans across the world.
Unfortunately, the APL’s board and executives have different objectives than their audience. The clubs do not want drama – years of mounting losses have made them crave stability. And yet it is precisely the kind of profitable drama brought about jeopardy and glory that they choose to avoid.
A competition with a finals system that transfers the title race out of the month-to-month league games and concentrates it during the final month can work and has done for us to an extent in the past. But many would argue that the former prestige of the finals system has been neutered by the APL’s decision to move the grand final to a neutral venue with a neutral crowd. We now have neither a title race nor a true showpiece final.
A competition without relegation battles is also inherently less interesting than those that have them. The incentive to avoid relegation also raises the standard of football from the bottom up. Instead, we have more lame-duck teams than those trying to win the league.
The race to qualify for continental competitions has also been neutered. Western Sydney Wanderers and Adelaide have done us all proud with their past cup runs, but those competitive campaigns have been few and far between from A-League clubs, with most failing to get out of their groups. Worse still, the Asian Football Confederation has chosen to move the ACL knock-out stages to a neutral venue from now on.
We may never see an Australian club host a leg of an ACL final ever again.
Unfortunately, I cannot point to a compelling storyline to entice my friends to follow this season. Between them, the APL and AFC have effectively stripped away incentives for fans to follow the league.
(Photo by Steve Christo/Corbis via Getty Images)
There are other examples of where the APL’s objectives misalign with good football outcomes. By playing in summer to avoid competing against the NRL and AFL the A League’s brand of football is a slow tempo, and possession heavy. It’s pretty boring for part-time fans who are used to the overseas leagues.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, particularly when we remember how much better the football was in the Autumnal Covid-affected seasons.
Similarly, the desire to avoid competing with the big boys has led to the A-League having a very short season and very long off-season by global standards. Both of those factors lead to talent atrophying, with so little game time for up-and-coming players to keep improving in line with their international peers. A full-length season shouldn’t be scary; it is a necessary precursor for playing good football.
At the macro level, all of these shortcomings stem from the same source. The APL and club owners are not incentivised to play high-quality football. What is the benefit to them in being really good? Nothing. And are there punishments for being bad? Also no. This is a recipe for mediocrity, and fan apathy. The APL must act to break itself out of a vicious cycle of its own making.
I love that The Roar is one of the last bastions of optimistic thinking around the A-League’s future, and that is wonderful. But it’s important for us to understand why so many of our peers have become apathetic about it. The A-League has steadily morphed into a mediocre competition that has disincentivised local fans from caring about our own top tier. It’s a real shame.
Fortunately, the principal antidote to mediocrity is competition. And the A-League and its clubs are going to get more than enough competition from the NSD. We’ve already seen the APL jolt out of its complacency and jump to action by looking to expand to Canberra and Auckland.
I’m confident that the competition for fans, players, managers and administrative talent between the A-League clubs and the NSD will drive the kind of innovation and excellence local fans have been deprived of.
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