It’s often said that a salary cap punishes success, but on Friday afternoon, after Football Federation Australia sensationally kicked Perth Glory out of the coming A-League finals, we were reminded again that it also encourages creative accounting. Or cheating, to call it by another name.
Such is the allure of victory.
The timing of the FFA’s announcement wasn’t great, which isn’t to say there’s a good time for this sort of thing. The chief executive, David Gallop, no doubt endured an acute case of déjà vu as he disclosed the punishment mere hours before the co-competition leaders were due to host Sydney FC – he was at the helm of the NRL when the Melbourne Storm were stripped of two premierships for salary cap breaches.
The Glory knew a decision on the four-month investigation into their salary cap was pending but hope — blind hope, perhaps — was their prevailing emotion; hope that the FFA would not come down as hard as it did, hope that any punishments and sanctions would not scupper what has been an excellent campaign. Few pundits gave Kenny Lowe’s team a chance this season, yet in the 24 rounds to date they have remained at or near the top of the league, defying expectations every week that altitude sickness would be the death of them.
It doesn’t matter now. Their stellar season, the games, the goals, the drama, the joy, all the toil and effort that’s gone into it, has been rendered redundant. You can only feel for Perth’s players and staff, at the least the overwhelming majority of them who have had no involvement in, or inkling of, the club’s elastic approach to the salary cap. Perth’s fans have also had the rug pulled out from under them.
But sympathy doesn’t mean that the FFA’s punishment was excessive. That the sport’s governing body chose to effectively deal a blow to the integrity of its own competition in its 10th anniversary year shows how seriously it views Perth’s digression —one that has stretched over three years. Until now the A-League’s star —unlike that of rival football codes, which have been bashed and buffeted by “blackest days” and the endless crimes and misdemeanours of players — has barely strayed from its upward trajectory. This will knock it out of its orbit. For that reason only small-minded rival fans will take any pleasure from Perth’s pain.
The saga has fuelled debate on the merits and size of the salary cap, and how it can be kept in place without stymying Australian football’s efforts to attract foreign talent — whether they are second tier stars in the making or, as as been the case, big names making a grand farewell tour.
But that is not the issue at hand. Perth had a salary cap to operate within but tried to circumvent its restrictions in ways so creative they could hardly be written off as accidental. The breach for 2014-15 alone was $400,000. That may be the kind of money Cristiano Ronaldo loses down the back of the couch, but it’s a sizeable percentage of the $2.55m salary cap.
As unfortunate as Friday’s events were, there is surely more to come. Perth will respond, although it’s difficult to imagine anything they say or do will change the situation. More importantly, the architects of the salary cap rorting — and those who knew about it and chose to look the other way — will need to be identified and face investigation and sanctions of their own.
One worry in all this is that Perth’s salary cap breaches were discovered by journalists and not the A-League. Similarly, it was a whistleblower who alerted the NRL to the Melbourne Storm’s systematic cheating. It doesn’t exactly give you comfort that thorough checks of our sporting clubs’ books are being done as a matter of course, which raises the troubling thought that Perth may not be the only club which has tried to skirt the issue. They are just the only ones to get caught, in the A-League at least.
For now, however, we can only hope it’s an isolated incident. Even if that proves true, it’s an inglorious day not just for Perth, but for football in Australia.
