‘What has gone wrong with the A-League?’ This was a question posed at a dinner table on the weekend.
The person who posed the question had recently read the article “A-League Audience Figures Fall To Alarming New Lows on Channel 10.”
It is not a simple question to answer, and as always in sport there will be plenty with opinions of their own.
It is a question that deserves much thought, as when the A-League was announced in 2004 there was hope and expectation that football was finally going to be recognised as a major sport in Australia, and would at last sit alongside AFL, Cricket and Rugby League.
The first game was played on 26th August 2005.
The National Soccer League had come to an end in 2003/04 and so the country had been without a national football competition for over a year. When the A-League launched there was a captive audience hungry for a competition.
The new A-League was made up of just eight teams. Now there are 12 teams in the league. The initial league competition would see each team play each other three times. Which of course meant that some would end up with more home games in a season than others. This was not a format that the fans liked.
The final season of the National Soccer League had seen 13 teams competing in a home and away league.
Only two teams that had participated in the last season of the NSL would compete under the same name in the first season of the A-League, Champions Perth Glory and Adelaide United. Newcastle United were rebranded as the Newcastle Jets and the Football Kingz from Auckland, New Zealand were rebranded as the New Zealand Knights.
The new competition would be franchise based. There were 20 submissions received which was whittled down to 12 that sent in a final bid to be a part of the new league. Three bids were received from Melbourne, two each from Sydney and Brisbane, one from each of the preferred cities of Perth, Adelaide, Auckland and Newcastle, as well as a bid from the New South Wales Central Coast city of Gosford.
Prior to the restructure of football in Australia there had been the Crawford Report, a Government funded review into the way the game was structured, David Crawford and his four committee members including the late Johnny Warren were asked to focus on four areas:
They were to critically assess the existing governance, management and structure of soccer in Australia;
They were to make solution-based recommendations to deliver a comprehensive governance framework and management structure for the sport that addressed the needs of affiliate organisations and stakeholders.
They were to identify potential impediments to reform and strategies to overcome those impediments
They were to come up with a plan to implement their recommendations.
The Governance of the game did change and was supposed to witness all sectors of the game having a voice, but unfortunately that has not been the case. (Standing Up For The Game). Case in point in Western Australia, the National Premier Leagues which was created in 2014 and is supposed to be the highest level of the game below the A-League, has a Standing Committee but constitutionally has no voting rights on football in the State.
When it came to the structure of the A-League the powers that be at the newly formed Football Federation of Australia opted to ignore the recommendations made by the Task Force that had been put in place. Could this ultimately be the reason the game has not reached the heights everyone expected?
The Task Force called for a ten team league and a competition that ran from October until May. They stated that all bids must be considered equally, and recommended three clubs from Sydney, two from Melbourne and one each from Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. There were to be two other clubs from the regions, including New Zealand. All places were to be awarded on merit.
The minimum annual budget for a team granted a five year licence was $3.5 million to $4.5 million. Each club would require $2million in start up costs and average player salaries were to be $60-75,000 per year rising to $100,000 by year three.
The CEO John O’Neill and his Head of Operations Matt Carroll who had come across from Rugby Union, opted to ignore the recommendations and changed the structure of the League. There would be eight teams, and the season would run from August to February. The CEO also alienated many who had kept the game afloat for decades when he said that ‘old soccer’ would become ‘new football.’ The failure to acknowledge the past was a grave mistake. The NSL and the clubs who played in it were to all intents and purposes wiped from the history books. It was as if there had never been a National Soccer League and all the championships had never been contested and won.
There can be no doubt that this move, which the FA has since tried to right, caused a great deal of push-back from traditional fans.
Then there was another issue which everyone seemed to let slide. The Chairman of the FFA as it was then, Frank Lowy, had a share in one of the A-League franchises, Sydney FC. He also had his own company sponsoring key areas of the game. Many have said that this was generous, others state it was a gross conflict of interest. As the terms or value of these sponsorship deals have never been revealed by the FFA, despite good corporate governance stating that they should, and numerous requests having been made, one has to question whether this was generosity? Did Mr Lowy’s company purchase those sponsorship rights at well below the market value? We may never know.
Sydney FC won the A-League grand final that first season and became the inaugural A-League Champions. Soon after it was discovered that the team that was part owned by the FFA Chairman had breached the salary cap rules. The club was not stripped of its title, instead it was fined. Another factor that soured the taste in many fans mouths. So much for “new football,” it seemed as if the old ways were still very much in force. More fans were lost.
This would sadly not be a one-off case. In 2011 the Sydney Morning Herald revealed that the A-League’s senior operations manager, Matt Phelan, discovered in an audit after the 2009-10 season that Sydney FC had potentially breached its salary cap by more than $100,000. The paper reported “It is understood Phelan had a meeting with the federation’s chief executive, Ben Buckley, and another senior executive, in which he said a review by his staff had uncovered what appeared to be a significant breach.”
The paper continued, “It is understood Phelan recommended the federation should consider sanctioning the club. Such action, if approved by the FFA board, might have included fines and the deduction of points.”
A statement came soon after from the FFA which claimed “Sydney FC’s player payments for the 2009-10 Hyundai A-League were under the salary cap limit and were verified in a compliance audit.” In the 2009-10 season Sydney FC were crowned both Premiers and Champions.
In terms of the salaries and the expansion of the competition one feels that the A-League tried to run before it could walk. In the fifth season in 2009 -10 two teams were added. Within two years both of these clubs had gone. This was far from good news as after season two the Auckland franchise had folded and been replaced by Wellington Phoenix. Also Nick Tana had walked away from Perth Glory. At one stage the FFA were controlling three A-League licences and searching for new owners.
The franchise model would see owners come and go and clubs change their names. Queensland Roar became Brisbane Roar when more teams were admitted to the league in Queensland; who approved that name in year one, failed to have any vision! Then Melbourne Heart became Melbourne City when taken over by the City Group, owners of Manchester City.
None of these changes were good for the game, or the league, and left many wondering if the franchise model really was the right option.
Football or any sporting club is about connecting with your community. Having values and an image that reflects that community, and gives it a voice. This is possibly the biggest area in which the franchise model has fallen over. What do the clubs in the A-League stand for? Are they indeed part of the community or are they just businesses trying to make money from that community? In many cases there is a huge disconnect between the footballing public and the A-League clubs. Why is that?
One aspect that has hurt the A-League clubs by comparison to the old NSL is that the NSL clubs often developed their own players, so the players had an immediate connection with the fans and knew what the club stood for and meant to the fans.
Somehow the A-League clubs have been allowed to field teams under the same name as their A-League name in a seperate competition, and even A-League contracted players have graced these competitions even though this is in breach of FIFA Regulations. (Is The Integrity Of The Competition At Risk?) Yet many of these players have been poached from local clubs, with no financial reward for the time and effort that they have invested in that player. So once again this has led to resentment.
Some would also argue that these clubs having teams in this competition has hindered the overall development of talented players. By taking these young talented players out of a traditional club environment they miss out on a great deal. They lose the chance to understand what it feels like to be a part of a club, and work your way up into the first team. Many will miss out on playing alongside seasoned experienced players from which they will learn a great deal, as in the A-League NPL sides they are usually playing with players their own age.
One trend that is disappointing and shows that possibly these players have been exposed to too much football at a young age is that once they are released from the A-League NPL side and they know that they are unlikely to ever make it to the A-League let alone a higher league, they walk away from the game completely. Clearly expectations have not been managed, as reality would tell you that very few are honestly going to make that step up. It also reveals that in today’s game the focus is far more on self than on the team.
Which leads us into another possible reason why the A-League is struggling. The powers that be have made a complete mess of the development of players in Australia.
The AIS program was altered and then scrapped. Here was a program that saw players with talent polished and developed so that when they graduated they were ready to play in the NSL. With “New Football” that rarely happened. (Player Development The Elephant In The Room). The FA will claim that this was why the program was discontinued, but maybe it was in fact because we had the wrong people running the program.
There is no doubt that it was a masterstroke to appoint Guus Hiddink to lead the Socceroos into their World Cup Qualifier in 2005 against Uruguay. Australia qualified for its first World Cup Finals for 32 years. However it came at a huge price. The FFA did what the administrators before them had done and gambled on Hiddink, luckily for them it paid off. Although the bonuses paid to Hiddink were costly to the game as a whole
Clearly the non-football people running the game underestimated the Australian squad in 2006. A squad made up of the most Australian players playing in top leagues around the world in the game’s history. They had not banked on them progressing out of their group. Little was done to capitalise on the success of that World Cup campaign and an opportunity was missed.
However the biggest problem was that they were blinded by the belief that Dutch football was the answer to Australia climbing the world rankings and becoming a force in World football. We had Dutch Technical directors and Dutch national men’s coaches, and even the Matildas had to endure a disastrous appointment that was questionable from the get go. (No Waltzing With The Matildas) Was the Dutch system really the best system to develop the next generation of Australian footballers?
Australia is made up of a pot pourri of migrants. Each of these young men and women bring with them different attributes which can be an asset to a team. The Socceroos in the past reflected this, and the coaches nurtured the attributes that each individual brought for the good of the team. The one thing that never was missing was the Australian ‘never say die’ attitude. Now most players look like programmed automatons. The flair, the skill, the ability to take on an opponent, the room for individual thought has been taken away. All so that each player will play in a similar style.
Player development has been mismanaged since the creation of the A-League. Creating mythical “pathways” has been detrimental to the game as a whole. They have fuelled the dreams of both young boys and girls and their parents that they will become professional players, when the reality is that very few will. They have built up expectations and when those dreams are broken the family is left shattered. One thing that is abundantly clear is many of these youngsters are missing out on the sheer joy of playing. No longer is it about enjoying the game, but about achieving an outcome and progressing on “the pathway.” Talent alone is not enough, you have to have a passion for the game to reach the top, and you have to enjoy what you do. Like any job if it becomes a chore it saps the life out of you, and regrettably watching many youngsters play there is no joy, there is no life in the way they play.
So this has clearly hampered the A-League. It is why the likes of Thomas Broich, Adrian Mierzejewski and Diego Castro were some of the players who breathed life into the league.
It was the great Danny Blanchflower who famously said “The game is about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.” He could well have been talking about the A-League.
Coaches will tell you that they are going out there with a tactical formation to win the game, but in truth most are going out to try and ensure that they do not lose. That is the issue. That is why Ange Postecoglou’s Brisbane Roar set the league on fire, and why he has succeeded wherever he has gone. He wants his teams to go out and win games. He wants his players to express themselves, and he gives them the confidence to do just that. Perth Glory in their first two seasons of the NSL were exactly the same, they went out to win games, not to come away with a draw. That was one reason the crowds flocked to watch, and also because they were predominantly local boys. Football is supposed to be entertaining.
Understandably the FFA and the Franchise owners, who this season have taken over the running of the A League want the media to promote the competition. They want them to promote it as this will save them money that they should be spending in marketing the league. This is not the job of the media.
The biggest problem with this approach is the lack of honesty there has been in the league. In today’s world you cannot con the fans. They have access to too many games of football globally to tolerate being told something is something when it is not.
The game does not need sycophants. Neither does it need sensationalism. As it approaches its 20th anniversary, now more so than ever it needs honesty. We don”t need asinine quotes from coaches and CEOs, we need honest opinion. Had there been this when it came to the Matildas then maybe they would not have bowed out of the Asian Cup in the quarter finals on the weekend? If a team plays well, praise them if they don’t, say so. However these opinions must be backed up, and then the person airing those opinions will in time earn the respect of coaches and players alike.
The line that it is great news for Australian football that a 26 year old player is returning to play in the A-League, is a complete lie, and one that no longer holds weight. Most fans know that at 26 a player should be heading into his golden years. If he has come back to the A-League it sadly indicates that he can no longer cut it in a bigger or a higher standard league. That is not good news for Australia, as it will ultimately hurt the national team. Of course now a player who does return can demand a wage in the A-League that previously players could only dream about, so it is easier to come home. Yet do they still have the drive to succeed and achieve?
There are and have been some very good people covering football since the A-League started, but there have been sadly many who have tried to sell the fans a line that it is on par with the English Championship. This is quite honestly laughable and does the game no good. The League will not survive on comparisons. It must find its own niche and become a stand alone league on its own merits.
Equally galling is trying to convince fans that some big name players, marquee players, are good for the league and actually still have something to offer when they are well past their prime. (A League Clubs Right To Bench Ronaldinho) Alessandro del Piero is one that is constantly used to defend this stance, yet according to insiders at Sydney FC with all the add-ons in his contract he very nearly sent the club broke! Is that good for football? Some players are becoming like boxers hanging around for one last club, when they clearly should have retired. The A-League has become their final stage. Once again something that has not helped the reputation of the competition.
One thing that few have taken into account is how the game has changed globally in terms of the way it is refereed. There is no doubt that in a league like the A-League VAR has probably done more harm than good. However it is the way the man in the middle is being told to officiate that has had the greatest impact. Tackles that would have been waved ‘play on’ in the NSL are now free kicks, and often result in a booking. Some of the physicality that was a key part of the game in Australia has been lost, as has the contest between players. The impact this has had on the game is that it is far less free-flowing. In addition the referee becomes more noticeable. The old adage is that the best games are when you do not notice the referee. In every A-League game, if you can find where it is airing and be bothered to watch, you now nearly always notice the referee. That is not their fault, but the fault of those who have told them how to officiate.
When one considers the sports that football is up against in terms of attracting fans and viewers, AFL and NRL, the sport needs to have that physicality. As it would appear that this is something Australian sports fans crave.
So just as there is no one person to blame for the A-League stuttering along at this stage in its history, there is not one contributing factor but many. The current CEO of the FA James Johnson has a very tough task ahead as he tries to align so many facets of the game which will ultimately benefit the A Leagues as they are now known as well as the national teams. There are so many factors that are contributing to the current problems faced by the A-League. Sadly, unless these are addressed the future is extremely bleak. One of the first that has to be addressed is the player development, and returning young players to a club environment.
The A-League owners face an extremely challenging time ahead. They are going to have to park their egos at the door if they want to see the league and their franchises succeed. They are also going to have to invest in someone who has experience running a similar competition, someone who is not going to tell them what they want to hear, but what they need to hear. As painful as it may be they are going to have to sit down and re-evaluate the broadcast deal with Paramount and Channel 10 and ask is it benefitting the game, is it really benefitting them? With a penalty clause in the contract should Paramount not achieve an agreed number of subscribers, – which was incidentally higher than A-League club memberships – it could end up costing them.
Too many decisions have been made in the past 20 years that have not been aligned. Many have been made to meet deadlines or satisfy external bodies. Now is the time to learn from those mistakes, use the benefit of hindsight and start righting those wrongs to ensure that the game is back on track within the next five years. The changes needed are not going to happen overnight, and neither will the impact of those changes be apparent immediately, so it it is vital that all pull together to ride out the storm.
