A-League transfer showdown: Football Australia ready to implement DTS without APL buy-in

Football Australia CEO James Johnson has signalled that his organisation is willing to introduce a domestic transfer system (DTS) into the Australian football ecosystem without the full buy-in of the game's various stakeholders.

Increasingly advocating for the concept in recent months, poor results from the Socceroos in World Cup qualifying have recently seen Johnson kick his push for a DTS into overdrive, positioning it as an answer to Australia's woes in developing talent.

"It's a major change in the way that we operate as a sport," Johnson told ESPN's Beyond the Lead.

"It's a major change in the way that clubs need to think about the recruitment and the contracting of players. So it's a system that is really going to require the whole ecosystem to really buy into it. We've gone through a long consultation process. So we've spoken to the elite clubs."

Yet despite the executive's efforts, his ability to deliver the system remains the realm of the hypothetical more than two years into his tenure.

A former head of professional football at FIFA, Johnson quickly made the introduction of a domestic market for player sales one of his signature policies after taking over the national federation in January 2020; numerous references to it included in the organisation's new "XI Principles" document and a white paper on the concept handed down in January 2021.

While they are free to sell the registration of players on the international market, as Sydney FC recently did with Joel King's transfer to Odense Boldklub, salary-capped A-League clubs are presently banned from bartering with one another for talent.

This has led to transfer windows dominated by players reaching an agreement to "mutually terminate" their deal with their parent club before moving and, as explored by ESPN's Ante Jukic, squad construction becoming inherently dominated by a short-term pursuit of results and salary cap considerations as opposed to financial sustainability and the nurturing of players as assets.

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National Premier League (NPL) transfers, though allowed, are capped at 50% of the remaining value of the official value of a player's contract and the training compensation system, which Johnson says fails to properly incentivize clubs to develop players, has not been reformed for a decade.

However, just a month on from telling the Sydney Morning Herald that Football Australia "can't really impose" a DTS without the buy-in of stakeholders, Johnson told ESPN that his organisation's appetite for dialogue wasn't inexhaustible.

"We've done a long consultation, but I think we're coming to a point now where we need to start making decisions and stakeholders need to be ready that we may take some quite aggressive decisions to start implementing the transfer system," he said.

"That's something that we're considering at the moment ... it might be a case of beginning the transfer system in a certain part of the football pyramid. Whereas it might take longer to establish it in other parts of the system. So we're looking at mechanisms in different stages that we can implement a transfer system.

"But we absolutely want one and we want our stakeholders to really buy into it. And I can't say that we have full support across the stakeholder groups to implement a transfer system at this point in time.

"We do have requirements through different agreements with different stakeholders to go through meaningful consultation. But following that process, we do have the authority to implement [a DTS]. Ideally, we convince people on merit, that this is good for the clubs, it's good for the players, and most importantly, it's good for the whole of the game. And we do believe it is.

"So we'll continue the consultation with the stakeholders but there's going to come a time where we're going to have to take decisions around what we think is in the overall interest of the sport."

When pressed on exactly what a lack of "full support across the stakeholder groups" entailed, Johnson said that though there had been buy-in from member federations and NPL clubs -- who are simultaneously advocating for inclusion in FA's mooted National Second Division -- there was still disagreement from the higher levels of the game.

"You've got a lot of people in the industry that want to have the discussion. And you've got others who might at this stage think that it's not a top priority for them because they're focused on other strategies," he remarked.

"So we what we would like to see is we would like to see the same level of support that we're seeing from the NPL clubs from the member federation's reflected in the top tier of the game, who at the moment naturally, are having some challenges because of the world we live in today with COVID around finishing competitions.

"But if we don't do this now, we're going to lose years around player development, and the quicker we can put player development at the forefront of our thinking throughout the system. The quicker we're going to be having better national teams and better top tier competitions."

The PFA, though, remains unconvinced. Having published numerous reports surrounding youth development, the union says that it doesn't believe that a DTS provides a panacea for Australia's problem with talent production. The PFA says that early 2021, after it wrote to FA requesting a meeting over the DTS, they have received no response.

"We all have a shared commitment to producing talent and establishing the most effective economic model to support that. There are a wide variety of measures and reforms that can help achieve this and no singular action in isolation will," PFA co-chief executive Beau Busch told ESPN.

"It is important that this discussion is aligned to the professional game's strategy, a comprehensive talent development framework and backed up by research and evidence otherwise it becomes one driven by ideology.

"Based on available research, it is clear that the redistributive impact of a transfer system is negligible outside a select few clubs such as Benfica, Ajax and Dinamo Zagreb. In addition, the system often results in significant barriers in the way of players progressing to higher levels of the sport, something Australian football can ill-afford.

"Importantly we are yet to see any modelling on the financial impact of reintroducing a DTS and any detail on the current costs being incurred by clubs in producing players and whether it is parents of young players or the clubs themselves who are incurring these development costs.

"A salary cap and transfer system are incompatible. From a player's perspective, the transfer system acts as a barrier to their freedom of movement by imposing a tax on their employment, whilst their earning potential remains capped at the same time.

"Equally the players would be concerned by plans to make their employment more expensive at a time when the game is struggling to rebuild its revenues, especially when the business and player development case is yet to be convincingly made."