Bruce Djite, now a pundit for Network Ten and Paramount+, was Adelaide United’s director of football when Riley McGree was sold to Charlotte FC.
“It’s not recognised as a league that produces elite footballers regularly. So when you talk about the A-League, it’s ‘Oh yeah, he scored 15 goals, 20 goals. He scored a hat-trick against the Mariners.’ [Foreign clubs are] like, ‘So what? Bruce, there’s palm trees in the background, come on. He can do it against those defenders, but you’re talking about Championship defenders here. If he can do it against them, different discussion.’”
When Adelaide sold McGree, the A-League was in the throes of a pandemic-induced existential crisis, and the club needed the money. And it was decent money – rarely do outbound transfers from Australia generate much more. Zejlko Kalac’s sale from Sydney United to Leicester City, for $1.7m in 1995, still stands as the all-time record, and a constant reminder that Australia is not getting nearly enough out of world football’s booming transfer market.
FIFA last week released its global transfer report, which reveals there were 18,068 international transfers in the men’s game last year with a total of $6.75 billion spent on transfer fees. But Australian clubs only received $1.53m in transfer revenue – a tiny sliver of an enormous pie.
The problem, Djite said, was that most overseas clubs simply aren’t looking to Australia for players and won’t trust them enough to spend big until they’ve seen them perform in better leagues.
For instance, Birmingham never contacted Adelaide about McGree and were brought in on Charlotte’s end of the deal. The Americans deserve credit for spotting a diamond in the rough and finding a way to maximise its worth.
The lack of interest from European clubs surprised Djite given how well McGree had been playing, and speaks to the fact that Australian players have long been under-appreciated. It’s why he believes A-League clubs are better off focusing on maximising sell-on clauses rather than outright transfers, at least for the time being, although Djite argues Adelaide ticked both boxes on this occasion.
“People have got to understand that when you’re overseas and you’re talking about Australian footballers, no one’s really getting excited. That’s just a fact,” he said.
“It’s not that they’re not good enough, but the league isn’t looked upon as a league that produces multi-million dollar players. There’s a lot of players who’ve come out of the league and not done as well as anticipated. Its place in the global football economy isn’t the same as Europe. It’s a reputational thing because our reputation globally, to be frank, isn’t the greatest.
“You’ve got to take that into account and say, ‘this kid’s so good, I’m going to let you borrow him for a year and he’s going to show you how good he is – and by the way, when he does, you’re paying premium.’ That’s a better approach, you’ve got more chance of success financially.”
The only way to change the situation is to improve Australia’s global standing in men’s football, and that’s a hard, long slog. It’ll take more players such as McGree proving themselves in foreign leagues, more strategic investment and decision-making from clubs towards youth development, and more buzz around what the Socceroos are doing.
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Football Australia is trying to encourage clubs in Australia to focus more on development by introducing a proposed domestic transfer system, which – in theory – should provide an incentive to clubs at all levels to produce better players who more clubs, both at home and abroad, would be prepared to pay more money for.
Unfortunately, the dial has barely shifted in recent years. If anything, it may have gone backwards: Djite himself transferred from Adelaide United to Turkish club Gençlerbirliği for about $800,000 in 2008. Transfer fees have exploded around the world during that time, and yet more than a decade later, McGree has gone for only a fraction more than the man who helped get him to Boro.
“MLS is starting to get these sort of deals. They’ve matured to a level well beyond the A-League, if we’re honest,” Djite said.
“The A-League still has a lot of work to do on its reputation, and that comes down to the whole ecosystem, which is very immature here: how easy are the Socceroos qualifying for World Cups, are they dominating Asia, where are those players playing? It’s all that.”
McGree transfer highlights Australia’s lowly place in football’s pecking order
Source: Philippines Alive
