The Roar
The Roar

Mister Football

Roar Guru

Joined December 2009

98.2k

Views

49

Published

11.8k

Comments

Published

Comments

Can it work?

I will say this: it can be no worse than what we’ve witnessed the last few years.

Will an independent A-League actually work?

At the start of the calendar year, I had high hopes of the Matildas lifting Australian soccer out of its present doldrums.

It might still happen, but I expect it to take a little longer than I had expected.

Finally, football is becoming everyone's game

As the author notes: “potential promotion and relegation was not mentioned…”

Of course it wasn’t!

When are people going to understand, the clubs don’t want it, and they now control the league.

Chairman Nikou has already stated publicly that it will be at least 15 years before promotion and relegation is introduced (and be assured, if it ever comes in, it will come with a long list of provisos).

When first elected to Chair, one of the priorities publicly stated by Nikou was to safeguard the investments in clubs which have been made over the history of the league, including the opportunity for owners to offset the $300 million in losses they have made.

Well, you aren’t going to safeguard anyone’s investment by dropping them into B-League obscurity are you?

The best way for club owners to offset their losses is to sell more licenses.

Selling licenses at a premium is completely at odds with allowing Struggletown FC to gain access to the top flight, at no cost, merely because it won the B-League.

Professional league independence brings excitement and challenges

You need not be concerned Buddy, in reality, it’s not on the agenda, and if it is, it’s way, way down the bottom.

The club owners aren’t about to lobby to push it up the agenda either.

Promotion and regulation: Timing is the issue

Not on the basis of actual attendances at the SCG.

Sydney AFL Ground? SCG considering moving to drop-in pitches

It may or may not make sense to the club, but will players and player managers continue to seek that out?

At the end of the day, 90% of them want to go overseas, even for lower wages, so they will want the easy exit, and even domestically, it’s such a merry go round, there’s very little downside to the player to continue signing one year contracts.

FFA reaches in-principle agreement for independent A-League

This is probably one reason why P&R is, and will remain, on the backburner for many years to come.

Open P&R means you get what you get. It might mean a national footprint, or it might mean 80% of the top tier clubs coming from the one city.

Every now and then, it might mean the likes of a Morwell or Cooma gets promoted at the expense of a Sydney or Melbourne.

You get what you get.

An independent A-League: Who will the casualties be?

Written like a true supporter of the club most likely to get relegated if P&R was introduced tomorrow.

Sleep easy all Mariners fans, when Chairman Nikou said it’s 15 years away (2034), you can view that as representing the earliest possible time it will be introduced (and even then, with so many provisos than the big city clubs would never fear being dropped into B-League oblivion).

Promotion and regulation: Timing is the issue

I think one could mount an argument going the other way.
The goalkeeper is actually the final remnant of something all the players were allowed to do in the earliest codification of Association Football.
I think a big step for the game of soccer would be to get rid of this final, archaic remnant, and make soccer the purest form of football.
It needs to happen now.
At a minimum, I see an immediate benefit for all those losers who get stuck having to be the keeper.

Football may be the world game, but we deserve better

It would be very easy for cricket to replicate what England has, they would just have to move to tiny little cricket grounds.

Sydney AFL Ground? SCG considering moving to drop-in pitches

If it was actually getting built in Hoppers Crossing, you’d be more accepting of it.

The key point is that it’s getting built outside of the outer outskirts of Tarneit, where there are currently only sheep paddocks, and the surrounding land is so cheap, it’s where they built a Mosque, a Hindu Temple and even an Apostilic Church of Nazarene.

An independent A-League: Who will the casualties be?

Let us hope they are not signing players on one year deals then.

An independent A-League: Who will the casualties be?

The road ahead is fairly predictable, especially if you know something about how the MLS run things, which will clearly be the model for the A-League clubs now that they have control.

1. Drip feed as many licenses as is humanly possible into the marketplace over the coming decade(s). Note: I’m talking about licenses to play in the top tier, a license to play in the B-League is worth next to nothing.

2. It follows from point 1 that you must push out the prospect of P&R far,far into the future (clearly you can only sell licenses to play in the top tier at a premium price if, ahem, the new club paying the license fee is actually playing in the top tier!)

3. Slowly loosen the equalisation policies, which inevitably will lead to the financial collapse of a club like the Mariners. Bad news for the A-League? Well, not for the owners, it means selling another license for millions of dollars, of which the clubs keep 90%. Too good to pass up, what’s bad news for the Mariners supporters is wonderful news for the club owners.

4. Keep selling licenses for as long as is humanly possible, push out P&R way, way, way out into the future.

An independent A-League: Who will the casualties be?

As LH intimated above, the majority of A-League players are on one year contracts.

There’s a long line of young players who have joined overseas clubs at zero cost.

FFA reaches in-principle agreement for independent A-League

Well, you might be able to do it in some fantasy land, but back in the real world, any club that has paid a huge license fee for a seat at the big boys table is not about to be relegated into B-League oblivion in a hurry.

Conversely, semi-pro Struggletown FC is not about to get to join the big clubs at no cost merely because they won the B-League.

FFA reaches in-principle agreement for independent A-League

Well MLS has got away with, continues to get away with it, and their medium term planning is more of the same.

As Chairman Nikou said a month back, we’re unlikely to see P&R for 15 years, which strikes me as a pretty accurate assessment when you factor in the number of licenses the clubs will try to sell over the next decade.

As I’ve said many times, you can’t relegate a club which has just paid an $18 million license fee for a seat at the big boys table.

Or do you think otherwise?

FFA reaches in-principle agreement for independent A-League

So you reckon the State Feds will be able to block the clubs following the MLS pyramid scheme set-up?

Yeh, nah.

FFA reaches in-principle agreement for independent A-League

Ph
It’s wonderful they a CoE, but as RF suggests, that ain’t going to pay the bills and help you keep up with a club like the victory, which already has at least triple the revenue of CCM (at least triple).

And to be honest, if you’re a talented youngster living within 300km of Gosford, why on Earth would you want to end up on their books?

FFA reaches in-principle agreement for independent A-League

Lozza

The newest additions to the A-League have paid somewhere between $12 mill to $18 mill for a license.

The clubs now control the league and are entitled to keep 90% of all future license fees.

So they will want to sell at least two more license, maybe even four more licenses so they can all share another $50 mill in license fees.

Once that’s done, you reckon all the clubs are going to agree to voluntarily get relegated just because a semi-pro team has won the B-League? And let that semi-pro come up for absolutely nothing? while a team that may have paid $18 mill in license fees in the previous five years disappears into oblivion?

Not a chance in hell (unless you have a situation where there are two or three clubs struggling to keep up, and they become obvious candidates for relegation, acting as insurance for the bigger clubs). Even then, hard to imagine the existing clubs are going to let Struggletown United join the party for nothing.

As Brainstrust correctly points out, the MLS is the model. They survive on selling licence fees (very much like a pyramid scheme). They have plans to expand, i.e. selling more licenses to participate in the top tier. There is no plan for promotion and relegation.

FFA reaches in-principle agreement for independent A-League

Removal of the cap will certainly make the comp more uneven over time, but that of itself will assist in ushering in P&R.

There will be no P&R until the bigger clubs have next zero chance of relegation. We will see the fruits of this via scrapping the cap, where the bigger five or six clubs will separate from the rest in terms of financial muscle and having decent player rosters.

A club like the Mariners won’t be able to keep up, and will be a candidate for immediate relegation. If the nix haven’t disappeared by that stage, they will give the Mariners a bit of competition, as might the Jets.

Thereafter, it will be a bit of a merry-go-round of broke clubs going up and down, with the bigger clubs reasonably well insulated from relegation.

FFA reaches in-principle agreement for independent A-League

Apart from denying the obvious, not sure what point he is trying to make.

To suggest that ratings on Pay TV don’t matter is extraordinary.

At a minimum, it informs two vital pieces of information:
– what TV products consumers are interested in (pretty important bit of info for a broadcaster I would have thought); and
– even if you want to argue there is no correlation between ratings and subscription revenue (an extraordinary claim to make), you don’t reckon sponsors care? You reckon sponsors are going to ignore the 25k watching on Pay TV in favour of the 1k streaming?

Should the FFA Cup move to broadcasting on social media?

If you hate the Victory now, wait for when the cap is scrapped, and the Victory spend double the average salary on players (as a minimum).

Then we’ll know we have joined the ranks of the world’s soccer leagues!

By the way, today is independence day for the A-League.

I hate Melbourne Victory — and I love them for that

As the author correctly points out: “Ritson suggested that typically online streaming accounts for around four per cent of the total TV audience. ”

What many people don’t understand is that the TV audience is averaged across the full length of the show in question. The streaming numbers one often sees are an entirely different kettle of fish: anyone logging onto a particular site for at least 3 seconds.

So for a typical A-League game getting around 25k in ratings on Fox, if the streaming numbers are calculated on the same basis as TV ratings are calculated, it’s an additional 1,000 in ratings (which might equate to 15,000 watching for an average of 6 minutes).

Obviously this number will grow with each passing year, but as the great Billy Preston once sang: nothing from nothing is nothing.

Should the FFA Cup move to broadcasting on social media?

However, you can have a salary floor without a cap. I would have thought that is the key point.

Have a salary floor to appease the union. Let the Mariners stay afloat by signing a roster at minimum wages, then let a club like the Victory sign whoever they want.

What are your hopes for the A-League next season?

You have described a salary floor.

What are your hopes for the A-League next season?

close