A-League clubs wasting cash on marquee signings says man who brokered Alessandro Del Piero deal

THE man who brought Alessandro Del Piero and Shinji Ono to the A-League says it’s clear A-League clubs have lost their way in recruiting star players.

Lou Sticca — the man who brought Alessandro Del Piero and Shinji Ono to the A-League — believes it’s clear A-League clubs have lost their way in recruiting star players, after it was revealed that almost $10m will be spent on marquee players this season but TV ratings have slumped.

Figures obtained by The Saturday Telegraph show the clubs’ combined marquee and guest spend will be $9.86m this season, but Sticca said it was obvious that few were getting value for money in terms of driving crowds and TV ratings.

Though the clubs do not share the detailed breakdown of their marquee wages with each other, Aaron Mooy at Melbourne City is believed to be the highest earner, at around $1.4m, while Filip Holosko at Sydney FC earns $1m.

It comes a day after The Daily Telegraph revealed the nearly $800,000 difference in spending within the salary cap and its allowances between Melbourne City, the league’s highest payers, and the Mariners — who also do not have a marquee player.

In some cases the marquee position has been used to reward a senior player whose salary would otherwise command a substantial proportion of the cap — such as Alex Brosque at Sydney FC on $450,000, or Eugene Galekovic at Adelaide on $320,000.

Sticca, a former administrator in the NSL and now a successful player and match agent, said clubs and FFA should both re-examine what a marquee player is for.

“The question of what is a marquee needs to be revisited because some of the choices are purely a way of bolstering a squad, almost an accounting exercise,” Sticca said.

“We need to understand exactly what a marquee is all about and what he is for. To spend almost $10m on marquees, well with the exception of Melbourne Victory and Western Sydney who both have naturally strong crowds anyway, are the other clubs getting value for money? Is the league? Clearly not.

“The marquee has to go beyond improving the team on the park. To me the KPIs for a marquee are that they drive crowds and drive TV ratings.

“If you exclude Victory, the crowds haven’t gone up and the ratings certainly haven’t, so in that sense the general choice of marquees is a failure.”

Sticca suggested that the choice of marquees had become the domain of powerful coaches, whose criteria was strictly limited to football rationale and not to wider questions of promotion and box-office appeal.

But he also cautioned against FFA being the arbiter of a marquee standard.

“We have a 23-man roster currently for each club, and no doubt 22 of those are and should be solely the coach’s choice, within the constraints of the cap,” he said.

“But the thing that will drive the growth of the league is bums on seats and eyeballs watching on TV; if we can’t improve those, it impacts directly on the club’s ability to earn and spend money, and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“That’s the thinking that should inform the choice of marquees.

“But at the end of the day it’s a very difficult question whether you’d want FFA signing off or effectively choosing the marquees. Maybe they need to police the criteria a bit more but really it needs the fans and the media to howl it down.

“Fans aren’t stupid — they know who is and isn’t a good player, and who they’re prepared to pay to watch.”

Originally published as A-League clubs wasting cash on marquee signings says man who brokered Alessandro Del Piero deal