When the A-League was created the newly formed Football Federation of Australia went away from many of the recommendations of the Crawford Report. Fifteen years on and with a great deal of hindsight it would appear that some of those decisions were misguided.
The FFA we were told opted to look to Japan’s successful J-League as an example of what could be achieved with a fledgling new league competition. Yet Japan is a very different nation geographically and traditionally from Australia.
The A-League opted to have a Franchise system of ownership. It was hoped that the clubs would be owned by rich fans of the game who saw the potential in the competition. Since then owners have come and gone, as a result the league as a whole and many clubs have been destabilised. Former Perth Glory co-owner John Spence aptly summing up the situation as being a “billionaires club for millionaires.”
The Covid-19 Pandemic exposed many of the clubs fragile status; not just in Australia but in far more established Leagues across the world. Clubs who were living beyond their means. Clubs where the owners were using the club as a tax right-off, or for other non-football related purposes.
In fifteen years few of the clubs in the A-League have managed to break even, let alone make a profit. As a result areas where investment is required to make the league a success have been ignored, or repeatedly put on hold. Costs and expenses have been reduced in order to limit the losses.
Now with key sponsors walking away from the game the A-League is sitting at a very important crossroads. Does it plough on trying to make the best of what exists or does it change direction, and with careful planning chose a new route that will in time promise greener pastures? (Is Expansion and Restructure The Way Forward?)
The word is that various scenarios are being looked at. Which is good news. One that is under consideration is a structure similar to the Major League Soccer in the United States.
Just as the A-League has a team from New Zealand competing the MLS has teams from Canada competing in its League. The first season saw ten teams competing in the MLS in 1996. The plan was to have 30 teams by 2022, but those plans may be pushed back now due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. However a tripling in size in 25 years is still a phenomenal growth.
The A-League had eight teams in the first season in 2005/06. The average attendance was 10,955. Those average attendance figures rose each of the first years to an all time high in season three of 14, 610. In the next eleven seasons with more teams and more games the closest the average attendance has come to season three was 13,041 in 2013/14. The league has since expanded and there are now 11 teams fifteen years later with a twelfth due to enter the competition next season. Unfortunately a further three teams have also entered and left the League in that time.
The MLS has more teams but in 2019 their average attendance was 21,035. It has been above the twenty thousand mark for the past five seasons. Their lowest average attendance came back in 2000 when it dipped to 13,756. By 2002, 17 years after the start of the competition, their competition had witness two teams fold.
The start of the MLS was in fact almost the complete opposite of the start of the A-League. In Australia crowds flocked to games in that first year, and they continued to grow over the next three years. In the USA they had a great first year, but the crowds fell away in the next four seasons before steadily climbing ever since. .
The MLS lost millions of dollars in those early years. One of the reasons was that teams played mainly in American football stadiums, which were usually empty.
One of the most important decisions made was that teams had to play in football-specific stadia. Once they did, the attendances went up. The MLS now has the third-highest average attendance of any sports league in the U.S. after the National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MLB). However there is a caveat on these figures. The sports with a large following such as Ice Hockey and Basketball are played indoors, and the capacity of the majority of those indoor arenas is less than the stadia built for the MLS.
One of the other key factors that has stabilised the MLS in the past twenty years is that clubs no longer operate as group of independently owned teams. The MLS is a single entity in which each team is owned by the league and individually operated by the league’s investors. It operates as an association. The benefits from such a structure is they know if a club is struggling in terms of crowds or performance and they can as one step in and protect the integrity of the competition by directing the necessary resources to that club.
We have seen in recent years a number of A-League clubs cause anguish to a number of young players with aspirations to play in Europe. The A-League clubs have been asking for development fees from the European clubs, which invariably leads to the offer made to the young player being withdrawn. The European clubs are taking a punt on a young player with talent. They will be investing in that young player as it is, so the last thing they want to do is pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to club when the player may never make it. Instead they will opt for a local player with no price tag.
If the League is centrally run and the clubs centrally owned this would cut out such situations. The player could be allowed to go and pursue their dream, and the powers that be would monitor their progress. If they are rewarded with a professional contract, which is when the develop[ment payments kick-in, they can claim that money and reinvest it into the game. One feels that this minefield would be better run than it is currently and more players would benefit from such opportunities. The long term benefit for the game is that a player leaves Australia and will receive top class training in Europe. Back home an opportunity opens up in Australia for another young player. Which means that the talent pool for the National teams is greater.
The investor-operator system in the USA does see the operators have control of their teams and the day to day running of the clubs, but crucially by being centrally run any Mavericks are kept under control.
As mentioned, those early years were not without their problems and the League did nearly collapse. In 1996 the players filed a lawsuit against the MLS, Fraser v. Major League Soccer, but In 2000, the league won the antitrust lawsuit. The court ruled that MLS’s policy of centrally contracting players and limiting the players’ salaries via a salary cap along with other restrictions was a legal method for the league to maintain solvency and the competition parity.
The league was built in those early years around local players. The marketing was based around “homegrown talent.” It was only after the league had stability and following the success of the national team making the quarter finals of the 2002 FIFA World Cup, that there was there a clear shift to move up a gear.
Unlike the A-League which tried to attract big name players to their competition, many sadly well past their prime, these players were in the main viewed as a short-term fix. In Australia each club that signed a big name player hoped that the merchandise would fly off the shelves and the turnstiles would keep clicking. Regrettably in many cases the financial windfall was short-lived, and the players ended up costing the clubs a great deal on and off the pitch, as well as in their bank balance.
The MLS introduced the designated player rule. The rule was adopted ahead of the 2007 MLS season, and enables teams to compete for star players in the international market.They can also align players with clubs where they are likely to receive the best return. Once again these players are funded by the individual clubs and also the MLS; the A-League has a similar set up with Marquee players. Yet because of the corporate clout that the MLS has by owning all clubs, it means that the funds to pay the high wages to attract the big name players can be garnered by attracting companies that wish to be aligned with that player. The risk is therefore greatly diminished. No one club is carrying that burden.
Unlike in Australia where fans sit in bars and wrack their brains as to which superstar that played in the A-League performed as expected and was worth the investment, MLS fans have conversations on the impact these players had, and the legacy they left behind.
Let’s not kid ourselves that all was rosy from day one in the MLS, far from it. In the first ten years they had multiple clubs operated by a single investor. Which didn’t look good to the outside world. Only in 2002 did the league adopt changes to the operating agreement between the league and its teams. The aim of this was to improve team revenues and increase the incentives for people to become involved with the goal of moving towards an individual club operator. These changes saw the operators being given the rights to a certain number of players that they developed through their club’s academy system. An incentive to make sure that they delivered in the academies, rather than simply poaching players. They were also able to sell individual club jersey sponsorships, which before had been controlled by the League. They also now receive a share of the profits each year from Soccer United Marketing.
Soccer United Marketing is the for-profit marketing arm of Major League Soccer. It is also the exclusive marketing partner of the United States Soccer Federation. Its role is to primarily to promote and sanction professional football in the United States. It has been said that the MLS and Soccer united Marketing are “joined at the hip.”
In part thanks to this relationship the MLS only started to move into the black around 2006. That is twenty years after it first started. The A League is now 15 years old and its target should be that all clubs and the league is profitable in the next 5- 7 years. The key is finding the way of achieving that outcome.
It was around 2004 that those running the MLS could see they were on the right track. They key contributors they have revealed were the single-entity ownership structure, the salary cap, and the media and marketing driven by Soccer United Marketing. The biggest deciding factor though was the building of stadia just for football. Not only does it allow the club to make money from the venue, but as their management revealed ownership expanded, and television coverage increased because the product looked good in front of big crowds in purpose built venues. These stadia resulted in the MLS seeing revenues increase, while at the same time controlling their costs.
So should the Football Federation be looking more to the USA as the foundation for the A-League’s future? Certainly they should be exploring all options. The USA though is another vast country, although it has the benefit of a larger population, yet there are still many similarities that Australia could learn from.
Certainly many involved in the game would prefer to see a system in which the money comes into the top and is filtered down, rather than what exists at the present time. Whatever the powers that be decide the next five years are possibly the most important for the game as a whole and whether it will ever realise its true potential and win over the media.
While many question the wisdom of following the United States at the moment due to the actions and tweets of their President, it is hard to deny when it comes to sport they tend to get things right. So would this be a model that could be adapted in Australia? Would it save the A-League and the game?
Thanks F as always for your comment.
I am not a believer that you ever copy anything holus bolus, but I do believe you can copy some of the principles and adapt them to suit your needs. In this case I was trying to say that I believe a centralised model would be more beneficial and easier to run than the current model.
I do agree that in my lifetime football will not be the number one sport in Australia. I also agree that people have to stop trying to “copy and paste” to try and find solutions.
You mention the powers that be listening as to why people who love theme don’t go and watch it, but sadly they do not want to hear what they have to say. They simply brand them as being negative. Sadly football is made up of sycophants in Australia, and that is another reason why I believe it will never move forward. As a result too many bad decisions are made time and time again, like the State Football Centre!
Great article Ashley and very well researched.
I’ve always asked myself as to why exactly do we feel compelled to model our football leagues and structures to that of another country’s ?
We have been down this path a number of times with our code from trying to emulate the J League to introducing the Dutch style of football or dissolving Institutes of Sport for Academies so on and so forth. Has it worked ? Hmm, fair to say no, no it really hasn’t.
Football in this country is a unique animal. It likes to believe it is far bigger than it really is by virtue of trying to reflect the games overall status as the world’s most popular sport and that is just wrong. It has for decades, almost arrogantly, professed it’s potential to be the biggest sport in Australia which totally ignores the cultural and social significance of the long-standing traditional Australian sports such as Aussie Rules, Cricket and Rugby and that again, is wrong.
Football will never, ever be this country’s No.1 sport. The sooner they accept that, the easier it will be to move on and redirect their efforts and energy on fixing the codes well established issues by introducing measures that attract Aussies to Australian Football. These measures have to be tailored to suit the game and its stakeholders HERE not simply transferred from somewhere else and crossing your fingers hoping they work here.
The current population of Australia is 25 million of which we can comfortably state there are literally millions of thoe that claim football as their preferred sport and either actively play the game, follow it as a supporter, participate via their children, via their work with clubs or simply sit in their lounge watching it. Again, MILLIONS.
If the so called experts of the game in this country can finally establish why the overwhelming majority of this substantial sum of people have almost no interest in SENIOR football (A League and NPL) in this country then they will be very well positioned on finally making the correct decisions on how the game is structured and administered.
Until then, stop with the copying, please