Since touching down in London earlier this week and joining her first training sessions with Chelsea, Sam Kerr has been all over her new club’s social media channels. She’s expected to make her debut this weekend, as the Champions League-chasing Blues play Reading, in a moment to be monitored closely by Australia’s football communities and the rest of the world.
There’s no denying that the W-League misses Kerr, and is probably viewing her new adventures with a tinge of both pride in what she’s achieving and a degree of Fomo because she’s not here anymore. But none miss her more than her hometown club, Perth Glory.
How have they fared since her departure? Not great, is the answer in short.
The answer in detail is somewhat bleaker: to date the Glory have scored a paltry four goals in six games, and sit second to bottom of the W-League with a single point. Last season Perth acquired their first point in their first game, and it took them just under two game to net their first four goals. By the beginning of round eight last season they’d scored 17 goals, had ten points, and were unbeaten. After round eight last season Perth were top, and remained in the top four for the rest of the season. And, of course, they went on to make the grand final, losing to Sydney FC.
It’s not unexpected for teams to experience a dip when their star player moves on, especially when that player was to the team what Kerr was for Perth: the fulcrum of their attack whether she’s the goalscorer or creator, or otherwise enabling her teammates to perform at their best as she led by example as captain. But Perth’s slide this season has been something else. Most striking with the departure of Kerr, as well as 2018-19 teammates Nikki Stanton and Rachel Hill, all architects of Perth Glory’s success last season, has been the relinquishing of their swashbuckling on-pitch panache. If you’re going to draw a game, after all, why 1-1 when it could be 4-4?
The situation, then, leaves much to be desired on the part of the decision makers at the club, who clearly weren’t prepared for the post-Kerr era. Given her departure was signalled long before the 2019-20 season kicked off, there should have been sufficient impetus for recruitment plans to be put in place that befit the club’s status of league finalists.
But Perth were slow to announce player signings in the pre-season, and even allowing for the fact that only Sam Kerr is Sam Kerr, there was no big name to replace her. As other W-League clubs were quick to snap up her Matildas teammates returning down under, Perth did not follow suit. And the FFA marquee player fund, which can be used by any club for the appropriate player, has been unused this season.
Keeping Kerr in the W-League last season, when Chelsea were already reported to be inquiring about the possibility of her services, through the marquee player mechanism was a no-brainer. It reiterated the esteem in which she’s already held in Australian football, while the rest of the world cottoned on to her brilliance. And what better way to instigate the concept to the league than via a player who is well on the way to becoming an all-time great of the game.
Then FFA chief executive David Gallop made it clear when Kerr was announced as the league’s first marquee player that part of the importance lay in the scope for raising the league’s profile. “We truly hope that historic days like today will ensure we create an important legacy for professional female players in the future,” he said at the time.
Such rhetoric is appropriate for the W-League which, in global women’s football’s increasingly crowded marketplace, needs to assert its points of difference and what it can offer players. The prestige and pay associated with a marquee player contract is one of these.
Geared towards building audiences for the last W-League season before the World Cup, the marquee player concept at the time hoped to represent a new watershed moment for the Matildas and Australian football, and possibly attract other new international players in the future. Which for the W-League arguably has worked - the standard continues to rise, and think of the calibre of the NC Courage cohort at Western Sydney Wanderers is a testament to the league’s international appeal. But bound in this is the fact the W-League has found a way to go on in the post-Kerr era in a way that, right now, seems to have passed Perth Glory by. As the first W-League club to boast a marquee player, they haven’t used this to their advantage as they could have.
Legacy is a nice word, after all, and is often thrown around in football. But a legacy, as it can be viewed at this particular point in time, in which a team is left to crumble after the marquee player moves on, surely isn’t what anyone had in mind.
After all, what real benefit can come from pitching a marquee on foundations which might prove to be made of sand? When the eventual winds of change banish not just the tent but its anchors, too? As Perth Glory are finding this season, not a lot when you’re kissing the prospect of finals football goodbye.
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