Over its first decade marquee signings were trumpeted as critical to the commercial success of the A-League – generating excitement among fans, and garnering media attention within an increasingly sport-saturated and code-competitive marketplace. TV broadcasters loved a signing like Alessandro Del Piero, and fans flocked to watch the Italian wherever he went – great for the competition-wide bottom line, just not his Sydney FC team that finished seventh that season.
With the arrival of the independent A-League, competition boss Greg O’Rourke indicated a shift away from big-money signings and towards home-grown talent ahead of the 15th season. Whether a genuine policy pivot or a handy smokescreen for a perceived under-investment by the clubs in foreign firepower, the number of Australian teenagers seeing game-time during the 2019-20 campaign has been hugely welcome.
As previously noted, during round one Australian teenagers played a combined 546 minutes; by round 12 this had grown to 922 as injuries, fixture congestion or under-performance saw young talents like Mirza Muratovic or Dylan Pierias break through for first-team starts.
And yet it was the divergent fortunes of two of the competition’s big-money marquees that has animated the past week’s action as Robbie Kruse’s virtuoso showing dismantled Newcastle and Alexander Meier’s dispirited lumbering headlined a New Year’s Day home capitulation for the Wanderers.
In the absence of Victory’s frontman and skipper Ola Toivonen, Kruse blew open a relatively even-keeled contest, with a goal and two assists breaking the spirit of a willing Jets side. A genuine battle for over an hour – an utter rout by full-time. Precisely the impact you’d expect from a marquee signing.
It was a different story in western Sydney. While in any team sport you can’t place culpability for a loss at the feet of just one player, if there was anyone fans were hoping could elevate their team’s performance it was the man who arrived with nearly 100 Bundesliga goals under his belt and the moniker Der Fussballgott.
When marquee signings come off it benefits the entire league, it inspires teammates. But when they go wrong – and spectacularly so – it opens Pandora’s box. Fans question what percentage of their season ticket has flooded offshore as ill-spent wages, teammates glower sidewise at a player earning potentially 10 times their contract, and club administrators rush frantically to re-design upcoming promotional material.
In a competition that has been home to over 100 marquees, for every Dwight Yorke or Alessandro Diamanti there have been more than a few Mário Jardels, Brian Deanes or Federico Piovaccaris. Tellingly though, the major flops are significantly weighted towards the competition’s early years when infant clubs chased commercial cut-through, and the historical on-field return of marquee signings was slight.
Only 16 marquees have delivered their club a premiership – but 11 of these were from the most recent eight seasons. Ange Postecoglou’s Brisbane Roar lost just one game of 30 en route to the 2010-11 premiership without a marquee signing; Graham Arnold’s Central Coast repeated the feat the next season. Of that 16, only a handful did so as their team’s most influential performer, and again that is weighted more recently – Bobô’s 27 goals in 2017-18 for example, or Besart Berisha’s 15 after Melbourne Victory lured him from Brisbane with the marquee spot.
And while initially designed to capture the public’s imagination, to bring impetus to a relatively-new competition, more recently marquee spots have become a means of circumventing an increasingly redundant salary cap.
The introduction of a second marquee allocation in 2012-13 – designated initially for one international player and one Australian star before adjusting to two simple spots in 2015-16 – has seen clubs increasingly hand them to known quantities or proven A-League performers. That, to a great extent, undermines the off-field commercial wow-factor of enticing big-name foreign stars down under.
Of the 2019-20 cohort, seven of the 13 nominated marquees have previous A-League experience, and four of these feature already in the league’s top eight goalscorers list, spearheaded by the utterly ruthless duo of Adam Le Fondre and Jamie Maclaren.
New to the competition are Diamanti and Panagiotis Kone – to a new club, Western United. Of the other four foreign untested marquees, serious injury has robbed the league of Wes Hoolahan and Radoslaw Majewski, and until recently curtailed the involvement of Gary Hooper. Which leaves just Meier.
In this context, the return to Australia of proven talent Kruse seems significantly less of a gamble than the heavily credentialed but ultimately ill-fitting Meier who, like a throwback to an early-A-League “name” signing hulking about on their reputation alone, neither sells the jerseys of Yorke, nor terrifies defences like Kruse.
While Piovaccari never featured for the Wanderers past January, in an era where home-grown is the new selling point and big money increasingly needs to guarantee success, Wanderers fans will be hoping their big German improves rapidly to avoid the same fate.
