It was a football fairytale. A local kid rising through the ranks at his hometown club, scoring a first senior goal 75 seconds into his debut.
As his team flagged badly, Sydney FC’s Steve Corica knew they needed a spark. In the 88th minute he turned to Marco Tilio. Seven touches into his professional career the 18-year-old found the net, controlling a cross from Harry Van der Saag before firing past Mark Birighitti.
His Sydney FC teammates mobbed him – not just the young ones, senior figures like Alex Wilkinson – exhausted after playing nearly 90 minutes in energy-sapping conditions and the exertions of an arduous return journey to Japan midweek – sprinted 50 metres to congratulate the academy graduate.
Milos Ninkovic got in Tilio’s ear at the restart. His head was spinning, his heart beating out of his chest, but calming words from a seasoned pro helped him quickly refocus. Less than 90 seconds later the teen turned provider – this time it was fellow homegrown hope Van der Saag who lashed home a third goal to secure the points.
The stuff of fables, but one that would never have been written had Australian football’s warring factions not learned to cooperate.
The Youth Development Conundrum
The A-League clubs had a problem. Some, like Western Sydney Wanderers, Melbourne City or Sydney FC, had invested millions into their youth facilities. But how to prevent rival clubs poaching players they had poured untold time, money and energy into developing?
The players’ union had a problem. At the end of the past two A-League seasons nearly two-thirds of players came off contract – the vast majority of whom were younger players, struggling to make the leap from academy to first team.
The governing body had a problem. At the international level, Australia was falling behind its rivals – Australian men’s teams were not qualifying for major tournaments at youth level, and young players were not getting the minutes they needed.
For Football Federation Australia there was a desperate need to incentivise clubs to invest in the nation’s youth; but from the clubs’ perspective protections first needed to be in place. And so, with the two-year power struggle over the leadership of the game resolved, behind the scenes key parties started important conversations.
Crucially, as the chief executive of Professional Footballers Australia, John Didulica, told Guardian Australia, the “tripartite discussions” proceeded without rancour. “It was a really good discussion, we all landed in the right place - there was no, what you’d consider to be orthodox ‘negotiation’ – the parties sat side-by-side in signing off on it.”
The outcome of these particular discussions was a series of regulatory reforms signed off ahead of the 2019/20 A-League season. The first, a rule extending bench sizes for local under-23 players, the second, adjustments to the salary cap allowing up to nine under-20 players on scholarship deals as well as up to four under-23 academy graduates as “homegrown players” – all on contracts counted outside the cap. For clubs in a closed system battling both salary and squad-size restrictions the competitive advantages of investing in youth became significant.
Across the league, the success of the rule changes is already in the numbers – 35 scholarship players and 23 homegrown players contributed to a record number of young Australian (and New Zealand) talent signing professional contracts this season – the A-League now boasts 89 players under-21.
For PFA, bridging the abyss between the semi-professional and professional level has been a huge success of the expanded scholarship provisions.
“A big deficiency historically has been that when young players leave the A-League, the other young players behind them haven’t been ready to step up,” said Didulica.
“The gap between the young kids who are basically part-timers earning $60 a week, trying to juggle football and other demands, that gap was way too great. Now, with the scholarship players being able to train alongside pros you’ll see those players over time be able to be integrated into first-team squads a lot more effectively.”
Tilio and Van der Saag were two such scholarship recipients – and without the regulatory changes the story above may never have unfolded.
The elixir of youth – marketing the A-League
Another fairytale from the 2019-20 A-League season has been Adelaide United’s Mohamed Toure. Like his brother Al Hassan, whose heroics lit up the FFA Cup final, the younger Toure might never have enjoyed an A-League debut but for a run of injuries. But having earned his break during round 18, the following week the 15-year-old became the competition’s youngest ever goalscorer – another headline-grabbing story – after an action-packed 13-minute cameo.
For FFA’s head of leagues, Greg O’Rourke, such headlines and resulting global attention have untold commercial value for the competition as a whole. The fascination with, and love for, young players is a major driver for engagement with the domestic game – not just for local fans. “We measure now really well our digital engagements”, he told Guardian Australia, “we have dashboards that measure this: last month, 5.2 million videos across the leagues were viewed – 500,000 of those involved Mohamed Toure”.
Thanks to the expanded scholarship provision, following his debut and stunning first goal for the Reds, Adelaide United were able to quickly commit the 15-year-old to a three-year contract – outside the cap, and with the possibility to progress to homegrown status down the track. A pathway – reaching forward potentially seven years. It’s a far cry from the days when an emerging player like Isaka Cernak might bounce back and forth along the periphery of the professional game, collecting six different A-League clubs between the age of 18-25.
For Adelaide fans there’s the added bonus of knowing that this kid – a talent their club developed – remains theirs. As O’Rourke explained: “our code suffers from an inability to hero homegrown stars”. In simple language – there’s nothing worse than putting an emerging star front and centre in your marketing campaigns if, by the time the billboards hit the streets, he’s playing at a different club.
The international dimension – competing in the global marketplace
The revenue challenges facing the A-League have been well-documented. A lucrative broadcast deal is approaching its end amid a disrupted media landscape, and major sponsors – including the naming rights partner Hyundai – are reportedly considering their options.
Within this context, new FFA chief executive James Johnson has identified a key area for future revenues. “If you look at the international transfer market, which is upwards of $10bn [Australia is] generating less than $2m of that”, he told Fox Sports.
It’s an area in which A-League clubs have regressed badly since the days when Central Coast Mariners nurtured players like Mat Ryan, Trent Sainsbury and Mustafa Amini before recouping significant sums for their young stars.
Relative to Asian rivals – where clubs in the K-League can boast a revenue flow of $50m-plus through player transfer sales over the past five years – it’s an area that O’Rourke concedes A-League clubs are losing ground.
“More sales will fuel the entire financial ecosystem, and that’s somewhere where we’ve fallen behind.”
Rather than putting more rules in place – such as the K-League’s imposition of one mandatory under-22 player in the starting XI and on the bench before clubs can make three substitutes – the issue from FFA’s perspective is one of education and incentives and, at the end of the day, basic competitive instinct.
“The primary driver is the owners’ peripheral vision to their peers. They can see clubs like Melbourne City talking about selling player A for X, and look to their own management teams and say – why aren’t we doing that?”
The extended benches, scholarship and homegrown player provision are all a starting point to getting more minutes for Australia’s best young talents. That some clubs are slow to embrace the incentives could be, as Didiluca suggests, an issue of “regulatory lag” – with the full effect of the changes better judged ahead of the next A-League season.
But if Australian clubs are to look to player sales as a means of attracting significant new revenue sources in the future, as indeed Melbourne City have built their business model upon, they have to keep a firm eye on what’s happening overseas, and not just what’s happening around Australia.
“It’s not about whether our young players are getting better year on year,” said Didiluca, “it’s about whether we’re getting better relative to the rest of the world. And we can’t get better if we’re not playing matches.”
“It’s no good having players sitting up in suits in the stands after a good week of training – they need to be testing themselves on matchday”.
The missing ‘lilypad’ – an extended Y-League
Regulatory adjustments in and of themselves do not create instant successes. In the case of a player like Tilio there are years of effort and sacrifice away from the spotlight to consider – from the player, from their families, and from numerous backroom staff within club environments.
For Sydney FC’s assistant coach, Rob Stanton, it’s a journey that started several years ago. “Technically, Marco is tremendously talented – we’ve known that for years inside the Sydney environment,” Stanton told Guardian Australia. “But it’s taken him a few years to adjust physically – to make that leap from academy to first team”.
For Stanton, the former academy under-20s head coach, no one person “discovered” or “made” Tilio. From academy director to head of high performance and head of sport science there had been considerable investment, preparing the player mentally and physically for a first-team appearance, as well as a continuity of vision and stable staffing that saw Stanton graduating alongside the young players within the club – just as Corica himself went from academy, to assistant, to head coach.
Behind the scenes the integration of A-League academy sides into the NPL structures has been critical for offering young players the minutes they need to challenge senior players. The Y-League might only run 8-10 games, but competing in the NSW NPL 1 and trial games, across a season a scholarship player like Tilio might get 30-40 games under his belt.
The challenge of providing sufficient match minutes for young talent – at the highest possible standard – is one O’Rourke, PFA and the clubs are keenly engaged with. “When we speak to PFA and the clubs about what is the next area of investment, it actually is an expanded Y-League,” said O’Rourke, “everyone believes that it has to be much bigger, longer, more competitive than it is, because the funnel has become so wide with all the academy investment that there needs to be an expansion of the Y-League to put more players in that, so that those that are leaping from one lilypad to the next – from the academy to the Y-League, to the A-League – those opportunities don’t get too narrow too quickly.”
Where an expanded Y-League will sit in the wider football environment remains unclear with clubs outside of the A-League system adamant that any mooted national second division should emerge out of existing NPL clubs.
As always, funding for an expanded Y-League remains a significant obstacle. But after years of operating at cross-purposes, for key operators like O’Rourke processes such as the collegiate preseason regulatory reform provide optimism for the challenges ahead.
“What the various parties have come to realise very quickly is that working together as the whole of the game and approaching stakeholders as “football” rather than as “FFA” or “[the A-League clubs]” is the only way to be successful. Now, we’re actually executing strategy – not just trying to fix holes.”
“It’s been years in the making and we’re finally bearing fruit. We’ve probably got another one to two years to get the Y-League fixed, and then we’re looking to invest in the female academy space and we can start to see the benefits of that to the women’s game as well.”
It’s a long road ahead, and one that will require untold patience, collaboration, and negotiation.
For players like Tilio though, the fruits are already being realised.
