Who would have guessed: Play the kids and people get excited

There’s been a bit of commentary around about the exciting and fresh start to the A-League and W-League seasons, but it doesn’t come as a surprise to those of us who have been advocating for youngsters to be given more of an opportunity to shine in the top tier.

Only a few days and games in, the football has been easy on the eye, the goals have been great, and the trigger has largely been a fresh batch of young players being promoted to go forward by a fresh batch of coaches. 

Things are ever evolving in the world of football, but it has taken the A-League a long time to wake up to the trends of world. Undoubtedly those that have run it and driven its discourse over the past five to 10 years have led it astray.

Rather than leveraging off the movement of the global game in neighbouring East and West Asian nations and other parts, we have been stuck trying to compete with local sports that, let’s face it, aren’t the competition.

Understandably you want to compete and capture the imagination of the local public, convert players into fans and all that jazz, driving the code locally.

Nothing does this better than uplifting the standard of the football, or the product as some of the suits and marketers will call it. When you drive the standard, you start to compete on a world stage, and the football world takes notice.

Nothing gives you more credibility around the globe than being a producer of talent. If you could afford to throw money away, you can have a show-biz league full of near-retired global superstars seeking a last payday, maybe capture the imagination for a second or two, but this is not as good for the soul of the game as being a nation known as a developer, and seller of talent. 

Invest the money not in washed up overseas ‘talent’ but in producing youngsters, giving them game-time, and the potential reward is that you reap return from sales overseas, which you can the re-invest into your club in either building football infrastructure or re-investing in further player development. 

It happened in the 1990s in Australia. Famously, when Sydney United sold Zeljko Kalac, they were able to build a grandstand.

Australian football has struggled between these two dynamics, and probably still will, but in the past few years, the economics have driven a shift to the current state of play, which sees clubs more willing to give youngsters a chance.

A couple of clubs, in particular, the Western Sydney Wanderers and Adelaide United, have started the trend in the past couple of seasons, and now just about everyone is following. Not before time.

The system which for the best part of 15 years has driven a recycle culture of average journeyman from one club to another is now making way for a system that is starting to see the bigger picture.

Despite some infamous comments about the A-League not being a development league, it couldn’t be further from the truth, Australia’s place in the world game is as a developer and seller of talent, and the better we do it, the better and richer we get as a football nation.

This is when people notice, both here and overseas. 

Then comes the next challenge of taking this formative framework to the next level.

Imagine, for example, we had 30 clubs across two divisions providing a platform for kids and fresh coaches, to showcase their talent. Suddenly you have a broader football ecosystem, working to a same goal, to develop talent not only for their own success, but also for the national teams and the international market.

Punish those struggling to achieve it with relegation, encourage those doing a great job with promotion.

We’ve had a lot of head-scratching over the past decade or so as the narrative drivers have led the game astray, but the shift toward youth, in part forced by economics, but also driven by a common sense approach to the way football is conducted around the world, is a positive step that the game here has long needed.