Youth Marquee Farce

When the FFA introduced the Youth Marquee allowance before the start of last season I thought it was a great initiative to help keep some of our youngest stars here in Australia for a year or two longer but now it has just turned into a farce and is effectively just a defacto $150,000 increase to the Salary cap.

The fact that the $150k allowance can be split across three players within the squad just means that clubs are going to use the allowance to pay for their three youngest squad members (which by the FFA regulations they must have) and effectively add the $150K saved to the rest of the cap.

This defeats the whole purpose of the Youth Marquee allowance. Originally when introduced, it was intended that the $150K could be used to encourage clubs to offer a bit more to those players who were on the verge of leaving overseas due to overseas league being willing to pay a lot more for their services than what a A-League club could afford under our cap. It was hoped that by providing an allowance outside the cap, it would allow clubs to offer higher than normal wages to a few select players that would normally have left. The idea was this could also be used to encourage younger players back from Europe when their careers may be stagnating a bit and the extra cash on offer might be enough to see them home. The classic example of this was Melbourne Victory enticing back Nick Ward. It is doubtful that Melbourne would have been able to afford him without the benefit of salary being excluded from the cap.

The fact that some clubs didn’t have players that were worthy of a $150K contract has seen a push from the clubs and PFA to spread this allowance across multiple players. This is stupid as now clubs have no motivation to chase the better youth players. So instead of clubs targeting the likes of Oliver Bozanic, Ryan McGowan, James Wesolowski & David Williams for a return to Australia they will just assign the money to their three under 21 players and free up the $150K to be spent on obtaining a slightly better foreign player. Don’t believe me, lets take Melbourne Victory for example again. With Nick Ward no longer eligible for the concession they sought and have been granted permission to assign their youth marquee allowance to Elasi, Theodore and Langerak, thus freeing up the $150K needed to sign Hernandez/Sukha. Now I am in no way complaining about these signings (as a Victory supporter I am rapt to have both) but it makes a joke out of the Youth Marquee salary exclusion.

Why didn’t the FFA dump the allowance and just bump the salary cap up by $150K, after all the result is exactly the same. I would much rather see an extra player slot allocated outside the salary cap than maintain this charade. This would allow the more adventurous clubs to add to the quality of talent coming into the league. It would also assist Australian clubs in the Champions League.

34 Days to Season V

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