A new A-League season is upon us, but you’d barely know it. Football traditionally struggles to find space at this time of year, thanks to the finals series of the NRL and AFL, but the build up to season 11 has been even quieter than usual. No marquee signings, no milestones, no glitz and glamour.
Aside from the FFA Cup, which seems to have lost none of its novelty in its second season, football fans have had a bleak off-season. There has been ownership dramas at Newcastle Jets and an ongoing saga with the Indonesian owners of Brisbane Roar, who have left players, staff and creditors unpaid for months. The very public and very messy battle between FFA and the players association engulfed both the men’s and women’s games, while SBS has relegated the A-League from the main channel to SBS2. There are new revelations of the distrust between NSW Police and the Western Sydney Wanderers active supporter group, as well as rumblings about the FFA board elections in November.
Perhaps the best news in the run up to this season was the September release of A-League: The Inside Story of the Tumultuous First Decade. Co-authored by Fairfax journalist John Stensholt and Leopold Method publisher Shaun Mooney, the book is a timely reflection on football’s incredible growth over the past 10 years, but it is also instructive for the upcoming decade.
A-League shows that while the recent boom has given top-level football a much firmer footing in Australia, it has been built and paid for by an unsustainable confluence of generous government funding, the largesse of several wealthy individuals and the sale of A-League clubs to new owners. The government money included a start-up loan from the Howard Liberal Government, as well as the Gillard Labor Government’s pork-barreling in Western Sydney that led to the creation of the Wanderers in 2012. The losses of club owners alone have been staggering, in the vicinity of $150-200 million.
Perhaps this is why, rather than aggressively stimulate the league, the clubs appear to be opting for a period of consolidation.
Many believe the lack of true, high-profile marquee signings has hampered the league’s growth. In the biggest and most important markets, Sydney and Melbourne, there are relative unknowns in Filip Holosko (Sydney FC), Federico Piovaccari (Wanderers), Besart Berisha (Victory) and Robert Koren (City). Incredibly, the highest-profile player signed to an Australian club this season has been former Greece captain Kostas Katsouranis, who played for second-tier Heidelberg United in the FFA Cup quarter-final.
Those who advocate marquee players will point to Sydney FC’s investment in Alessandro Del Piero between 2012-2014. Del Piero, along with the introduction of the Wanderers, precipitated a huge growth in the club’s revenue and membership numbers, while boosting the rest of the competition. Overnight the A-League went from stale to sexy, and the TV executives loved it. There’s a reason there was a Fox Sports camera stationed solely on Del Piero, and there’s a reason there will never be a Holosko-Cam, no matter how many goals he scores this season. Holosko is a player whose wages cannot be squeezed into the salary cap, not a proper marquee.
Indeed the role of high-profile marquee players is inextricably linked to the next television rights deal. Marquee players bring commercial and mainstream interest in the A-League, in turn giving FFA greater leverage in their negotiations with TV networks.
As shown by Stensholt and Mooney in A-League, the last deal – worth $40 million – received no interest from the commercial networks. Instead it was thrashed out with Fox Sports, SBS and the Federal Government, with the latter pair providing $8 million.
It’s unlikely there will be similar generosity next time around, but still FFA are aiming for an increase of at least 50% on the last deal. At the moment this appears blindly optimistic.
SBS’s coverage, which was supposed to provide the free-to-air oxygen that FFA craves, has been peripheral. When SBS switched the A-League from SBS2 to the main channel last season, FFA chief executive David Gallop said it was a “sign of SBS’s commitment to the game and underlines the booming popularity of the A-League”.
But SBS directors Michael Ebeid and Helen Kellie both expressed their disappointment with the A-League viewing numbers, and this season have returned the coverage to SBS2. That is a vote of no confidence, no matter which way you look at it. Even the public service-oriented, self-proclaimed “home of football” want out.
Of course, there is a long way to go, and nothing will be officially finalised until 2017. But the success of this season will be important for Gallop to present an attractive product to the commercial networks. Much of the A-League’s next decade will hinge upon how lucrative this deal is – hot-topic issues such as the PFA-FFA dispute, the timing of expansion to 12 teams and the ongoing viability of several clubs all revolve around FFA’s lack of revenue.
There are some positive signs. Melbourne Victory continue to set the benchmark for A-League clubs, cracking 25,000 members this week, while Sydney FC have been solid, if not spectacular, since the Del Piero era. There is also an attractive new bunch of foreign players, not household names but promising signings nonetheless.
Nothing however, will change the fact that in 2014-15 half the clubs went backwards – Western Sydney Wanderers, Perth Glory, Central Coast Mariners, Brisbane Roar and Newcastle Jets all retrograded. Meanwhile Adelaide United have lost their popular, charismatic coach Josep Gombau, Melbourne City have delivered far less than expected since the takeover by the City Football Group and Wellington Phoenix offer very little to Australia in terms of growth.
The fundamental question is this: what has changed to make people interested in the A-League since last season? The rusted-on fans will be there, and that’s great, but it’s not enough. Why would the thousands of latent football fans who aren’t yet attending or tuning into A-League games suddenly do so this season?
In such a competitive sporting marketplace, there is a fine line between consolidation and stagnation. As the A-League book illustrated, at this stage of the competition’s growth, the sizzle can be more important than the steak. Right now there is no sizzle.
Friday Focus is a new weekly column from the Guardian’s pool of football writers that aims to highlight the current and pertinent issues affecting men’s and women’s football in Australia.
