Silver Lake windfall only underlines need for home-and-away ALW season
Welcome the A-Leagues, the new land of milk and honey. Or, perhaps more accurately, the land of $130m in funding from an American-based global technology investment firm.
The Australian Professional Leagues, capitalising on its newfound independence and operational and commercial control of the domestic top flight, announced on Tuesday it had sold off a 33.3% equity share in itself to Silver Lake. The deal, which valued the APL’s properties at approximately $425m, brings the organisation into a Silver Lake investment folio also featuring the likes of The Madison Square Garden Company and City Football Group.
Given football has for so long been the reject of the Australian sports sponsorship scene this bounty has, unsurprisingly, been greeted with all manner of excitement across the footballing landscape. According to reports the APL has adopted an eight-pronged strategy to direct the funds towards marquee names, the resuscitation of youth football and greater investment in digital marketing and content – which assumedly has something to do with TikTok. Football Australia, which retains a “good of the game” non-financial minority equity interest in the leagues, is expected to use their sliver of the sale to push forward with plans to introduce a men’s national second division and a women’s FFA Cup.
The APL is already set to expand the A-League Women competition next season to 12 teams through the addition of Western United and Central Coast Mariners and has also flagged further investment in the women’s game. Increasingly, though, matters of expansion or new cup competitions across the space only serve to increase focus on the absence of what is the single most pressing need for women’s football in Australia: a full home-and-away season for the ALW and year-round opportunities for female footballers in elite environments.
“First of all, we need to extend the season,” City coach Rado Vidošić said mid-week. “I think you need to make this ALW competition full time. We need to extend the season, they need to train professionally all year. I think that is step one.”
“For me, this is not working, sending 18-, 19-year-old girls overseas, and they don’t play and just sit on the bench. There’s a lot of girls who are playing overseas who would love to come back home and play for their hometown.”
Though it must be acknowledged that fully professional set-ups do not grow on trees and that football has never had an AFL-style war chest to underwrite its competitions, the void that a lack of 52-week women’s programs in Australia – in both a local and international context – is readily apparent.
A women’s FFA Cup, for instance, faces the issue that, due to the lack of year-round football at ALW level, the majority of its players spend their off-seasons playing with the very clubs which would ostensibly be facing professional teams in the national stages and providing the competition with its biggest selling point. Illustrating this, on Sunday afternoon NPLW Victoria sides Calder United and South Melbourne locked horns in the final of the Nike FC Cup – a state knockout competition of which the decider had been delayed by Covid – but did so without the service of regulars Melina Ayres, Catherine Zimmerman and Melissa Barbieri because of their ALW duties.
Further, as another wave of Covid grips Australia and throws sporting leagues into chaos, the lone ALW player to have tested positive thus far is believed to have done so “in connection with her non-football place of work”. Though it feels like only a matter of time until an ALW player picks up a case at a cafe, supermarket or petrol station, hers is a case that would have been completely avoided had she been part of a fulltime professional environment and not forced to juggle her football with an external career.
On Wednesday, it was announced Dylan Holmes was set to return to Adelaide United after a hit-and-miss spell with BK Häcken in the Swedish Damallsvenskan, during which the 24year-old played a combined 261 minutes across 10 appearances. Though a significant boost to the Reds’ 2021-22 campaign, she is the latest player to depart Australia’s part-time professionalism and head over to Europe, only to discover that the grass isn’t always greener.
In 2020, Jenna McCormick, following a campaign with Melbourne Victory that earned her a maiden Matildas cap, signed with Primera División side Real Betis only to experience a horror stint in which she “didn’t get the respect that I deserved as a footballer – or as a human first and then as a footballer second”. Emma Checker also returned in 2020, citing in part City’s higher-quality medical standards after sustaining an injury in France which later became a stress fracture in her fibula.
“I think Australia is going to find it hard to build a strong cohort of players leading into 2023 because we can’t have them playing in high-quality environments,” Victory director of football John Didulica said. “We need to meet [players] halfway, and that’s having pathways within A-Leagues clubs and within state structures that girls can stay within their club and improve week on week, year on year. There’s simply not enough quality environments in Europe to give the women the structure and pathways they need to be successful.”
Will it be easy? No. Will it be cheap? No. But developments across Australian football in the past week once again demonstrate the urgency surrounding the introduction of a full home-and-away season for A-League Women.