A revolution has quietly taken place in the A-League. It helped propel the Young Socceroos to success at the recent U-20 Asian Cup, and is being noticed by the rest of the footballing world.
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The A-League has found its purpose. And it’s worth $20 million a year
Most of Australia might be oblivious to what is happening in the A-League Men these days, but the rest of the world is watching closely – and they like what they see.
Last month,
Marca, the biggest sports newspaper in Spain,
put the spotlight on what it described as Australia’s “peculiar transfer market”, how committed clubs are here towards developing young talent, and suggested that this, together with the salary cap, was a “sustainable model” Europe would do well to copy.
The A-League’s many recent errors and foibles do not need further ventilation, but this was due recognition – and, from
Marca, a relatively high and somewhat unexpected source – for its recent successes.
The article, however, barely scratches the surface of what can be described as, without hyperbole, a revolution that has quietly taken place in the A-League – one that is already having a profound impact both on and off the field,
helped propel the Young Socceroos to success at the Under-20 Asian Cup, and will hopefully pay enormous dividends one day for the Socceroos.
The trigger for the article may have been a graph released by the CIES (International Centre for Sports Studies) Football Observatory. It ranked 50 of the world’s top divisions for the percentage of match minutes played by under-20 players (born in or after 2004). Remarkably, the A-League was second, behind only the Serbian Super Liga – pointing to a drastic identity shift for a competition that, not so long ago, was lambasted for the over-recycling of senior players and a reluctance by coaches to provide opportunities to youth.
Indeed, this season, the average age of starting players in the A-League has dropped to 26.3, the lowest since it began in 2005. Almost half of all match minutes have been played by players aged 24 or under.
Clubs across Europe are sitting up and taking notice of the talented young players coming through the ranks: the past two years have brought the biggest transfer income in Australia’s history, according to FIFA’s records. And that’s probably the tip of the iceberg, now that the Young Socceroos are Asian champions and bound for the FIFA U-20 World Cup later this year in Chile, where scouts and football directors from all the big clubs will be in attendance.
How and why has this happened? Why have A-League clubs suddenly decided to play the kids?
‘A football development factory’
Sam Krslovic, the chief executive of Macarthur FC – the most active club in the A-League in the most recent transfer window – says the domestic league is gaining a deserved reputation for talent production.
Krlsovic is also closely linked to Sydney United 58, the former NSL club which produced the likes of Tony Popovic, Mile Jedinak and Jason Culina.
“We have re-established a football development factory that we lost for about a 15, 20-year period,” he told this masthead. “Clubs overseas have seen that.”
Australia, he believes, is now producing a much better quality of player than it was during the early seasons of the A-League, and is producing more skilled footballers, and fewer running machines.
There are a couple of reasons for this.
Firstly, it is 16 years since the release of the first edition of Football Australia’s oft-criticised national curriculum, which, for the first time, provided a set of technical and tactical principles that would guide grassroots coaches. The players who are now emerging have spent their entire junior careers with these principles in place.
Most good judges agree with Krslovic’s assessment that the latest generations are better than what came before; new Western Sydney Wanderers recruit Alex Gersbach, speaking on the
Football Friends with Ben & Stef podcast, said there was a “dramatic” difference between the quality of young players compared to when he left the A-League almost a decade ago as one of Australia’s most promising prospects.
“There’s some really good young players … technically unbelievable, 10 times better than I am,” Gersbach said.
Secondly, many A-League academies have now been running for roughly a decade, and have refined their processes over that time, maturing into dependable operations which can take talented juniors and turn them into pro-ready players. Sydney FC launched their academy for boys in 2015 under Kelly Cross, one of Australia’s most highly respected development experts. Han Berger, the author of the national curriculum, is also on the club’s board. Their alumni list includes more than 60 players who have gone on to play at the professional level, including three Socceroos World Cup representatives and some of the most exciting players in the Australian game right now, like Adrian Segecic and Tiago Quintal.
Thirdly, the A-League has expanded in size, from eight teams in 2005 to 13 this season. That means more opportunities for Australian players. This is further incentivised by squad rules such as scholarship contracts; each club can sign up to 16 players on scholarships, which count outside the salary cap.
All of these factors underpinned the Young Socceroos’ stunning Asian Cup campaign, in which they played a proactive, bold style of football rarely exhibited by Australian teams – at least over the past 10 years. Coach Trevor Morgan’s tactics had plenty to do with it, but they were enabled by players with the innate ability to carry them out and a level of confidence gained from regular first-team football.
“From a development point of view, obviously any changes that you make take a long time to come through,” Morgan said on
Total A-Leagues.
“What we’ve tried to do is embrace the individual qualities of the players so that there is a style of play, there is planned things to do, but there’s not a paint-by-numbers approach. It’s very much about getting into good areas and then providing some options, but also encouraging the boys to take responsibility and take action and make decisions.”
While a pivot towards youth was always going to happen once A-League academies had reached maturation, there’s no denying that it has also been triggered by financial imperatives. It’s not entirely altruistic.
The graphs in this story say that clearly enough: they show that the moment when things really changed was in the pandemic-disrupted 2019-20 season. The A-League’s broadcast deal with Fox Sports ended after that campaign and the one that replaced it, with Network 10 and Paramount, didn’t bring in as much money, which put financial pressure on the Australian Premier Leagues and, in turn, the clubs.
This season,
annual distributions from the APL to clubs dropped to just $530,000, down from a historical high of $3 million. Clubs are spending less on high-quality imports or experienced professionals and are giving greater opportunities to academy products.
The Young Socceroos’ success at the U-20 Asian Cup followed the explosion in match minutes for young players in the A-League.Credit:Stephen Kiprillis
