Like the ancient serpent ouroboros, Australian football has a seemingly infinite capacity for auto-cannibalism. With a grassroots participation base that is the envy of any other Australian code, average attendances that place the A-League in the top 20 domestic competitions across the globe, and a level of corporate investment that increasingly underwrites financial stability, the game, from certain vantage points, has never looked more robust.
And yet, under the constant clouds of an ever more enervating three-year descent into civil war, season 13 of the A-League became the perfect example of this tendency.
Overshadowed by intensifying vitriol between the game’s administrators and its club chairmen, bad news rose to the fore, and opportunities for celebration were somehow squandered. A low-key season launch could have been a chance to celebrate a connection with the grassroots; instead it smacked of cheapness. The 11th hour spiriting away of Tony Popovic threw one of the league’s blue chip clubs into disarray. And false dawns emerged and then dissipated at strugglers Central Coast Mariners and Wellington Phoenix.
Even the feel-good Cinderella story of the resurgent Newcastle Jets descended into ash-in-mouth farce as the pantomime villain VAR reared its head for one last evil cackle during the grand final. The season could have been typified by Riley McGree’s scorpion kick. Instead it was Paul Okon’s furious primal scream to the heavens. “Who’s up there?” a thousand Australian football fans cried out at once, as their game careered from preventable incident to inevitable accident with the drivers of the game who had their eyes off the road.
The importance of the constitutional changes passed earlier this month cannot be overstated. The sheer animosity, the friction, the wasted energy invested in a fight that enriched nobody but beggared all can finally be consigned to the past. Steven Lowy departs the Australian game unfairly maligned, but that was an outcome pre-ordained the day his father hubristically decided his status as saviour of the modern game allowed him to reinstate a monarchy instead of a democracy.
Not that it will be plain sailing from here. Massive questions remain for the game’s administrators: who will constitute the new expanded FFA congress, what will the share of A-League revenues between owners and FFA be, what happens to the timeline for expansion, and what might an independent A-League even look like. And that’s before you get to wider questions of grassroots infrastructure and costs, ideological debates about player development pathways, and the myriad of challenges facing the women’s game.
But without constant friction consuming the energy of the best minds of both FFA and A-League head office staff, attention can increasingly return to on-field matters.
In Keisuke Honda the A-League has captured a genuine marquee. As big as Dwight Yorke or Alessandro Del Piero in global reputation, Honda also signifies an important recalibration towards Asia and its ever-growing football market. On top of that, at 32 he’s still close to his best.
While the Usain Bolt experiment has divided fans, with some wringing their hands and bemoaning “reputational damage” as if the A-League was a respected elder of world football and not a spotty teenager, what’s beyond dispute is that the unorthodox trial arrangement has fundamentally shifted the narrative surrounding the club.
Central Coast Mariners could be entering a season with the talking points being either a) how they’ve finished below apparent basket case the Wellington Phoenix for three consecutive seasons, or b) how chairman Mike Charlesworth has consistently under-invested in his playing group.
And yet optimism is flowing once again in the land of palms and inflatable sauce bottles. Having told Mike Mulvey he would not be handed anything near a full wage budget, the austerity goggles have come off for the majority owner, and suddenly the arrivals of Ross McCormack and Tommy Oar have lent actual substance to the hot air promise of a 32-year-old A-League would-be debutant.
And while Bolt-watch continues to dominate the column inches, away from the Jamaican and the Japanese there is a decent roster of overseas stars or returning Socceroos that mean in playing standards, the 2018-19 season appears set to continue to improve.
In addition to three-quarters of Ange Postecoglou’s 2014 World Cup Socceroos backline, Tony Popovic’s Perth Glory renovation has lured home the tremendously gifted Chris Ikonomidis. Another 2014 World Cup Socceroo, Ben Halloran’s return has gone almost entirely under the radar, but the former Gold Coast and Brisbane flyer could be a revelation at Adelaide this season, with five seasons of German second division experience under his belt and still just 26.
Siem De Jong, Ola Toivonen, Alexander Baumjohann – these are not 36-year-old journeymen arriving with their last decent club five years in their past. It may not have garnered the headlines it deserves but the Swede Toivonen has gone from helping condemn reigning world champions Germany to an ignominious group stage exit in Russia, to signing for an A-League club.
The nervous self-reflection and anxious sideways glances at rival codes and their heavily invested media organisations will continue. A leopard doesn’t just change its spots. But with a cessation of bloodshed in the corridors of power and the arrival of genuine quality on the pitch Australian football has the opportunity to leap from the well-worn record groove of constant hand-wringing.
