An a-league team has won it once, and made the final in another year. 

Need a second division and the funding to run it. Who props up WP if they get relegated so they can continue in the 2nd div? Unless you have a fully funded 2nd div relegation means death for most clubs, surely.

Maybe the next 4 seasons should be promotion only to get to 14 clubs. Then introduce relegation sometime after that. FFA prob won’t like the randomness of that though as far as expansion planning goes.

While I like the idea of no cap,I cant see how it can go entirely, without promotion and relegation.That's why it works overseas.
The same clubs will finish up the top and the same teams will finish near the bottom ,year in year out.
If there is a fear of relegation fans will watch games.If not those teams will end up like a walmsley teams.No one will watch them,no one will want them.They wont spend to improve,because there is no reason too.They will never compete with top teams.They can just put out development teams and cash in on any youth that excell.
This year we already have a taste of what a capless world will look like.But can you imagine the thrashings?Teams getting belted 10-0 and still turning up each week.
The funny thing is we have already had the fans turn on WP and CCM for being too rubbish and therefore being not worthy.So why not introduce relegation ,so they can be banished,without being expelled?
If FFA or anyone is contemplating getting rid of WP,then why not introduce p/r to get rid of them and introduce a new team to replace them?It's common sense.All we need is a second division.
Then you can get rid of the cap.

Agree with all of that, the last part is interesting because we have seen a drop off of players playing in the top 5 leagues since say 2006, on top of that Japan seems to have improved on that, South Korea have steadied but have some promising young players and Iran have got some more players in Europe now. 

Agree we have to be careful we don't let it slip, what worries is the FFA and the general state of the game don't recognise it in the congress stuff otherwise we could get a big surprise in the future.

Let's see how we will go in the World Cup but it appears to me the standards of the NT and clubs have dropped in recent times since the Asian Cup and Champions League success. 

Agree he's a very smart cookie!

The key in all of this is culture, not the coaching, the FFA NC, SAP which i dont deny they help the kids development but whats set in stone is the culture and how the game is played at the beginning of the childs development.

In Brazil they love to dribble in favelas fields, in Japan they love perfection and repetition, in Europe they have passion, knowledge plus dedication but in Australia we dont have that culture in what defines our football. 

Football is a technical sport and its all about having fun with the ball, until we see it like that and not about physique, speed and winning at all costs like the rugby codes, we will continue to struggle to develop top class players at the top end. 

Apart from the fact Chinese clubs are performing at an all time high in the competition, so your point about them not improving is false. They are currently ranked 1st in Asia.

Not working out so well for them with more than half the foreigners having a terrible attitude and basically treating the league like a retirement fund. 

I rekn Muscat is done.

I'm sure the players are well over his verbal sprays by now. 

Agree!

Tom Byer is extremely well credentialed, and what he says makes utter sense. Football really does start at home. It's about learning technique from an extremely young age, much before organised training is introduced. That's the problem here in Australia. We have so many kids playing the game but parents didn't necessarily grow up with the game, and thus kids are really only touching the ball properly the first time at the age of 5 or 6 which is actually too late if you really want to make it. By the age of 6 you should really already have mastered the bassics of ball control, stopping, moving etc. Not shooting, but literally just movement with the ball. If you kids start at the age of 2,3 they will be much much better off for it. And in order to do that you need parents that are there providing the ball to their kids at such a young age, and most aussie parents are not that clued in.

There will be no point improving our youth development if we keep the cap. It's that simple. The above average players and better will still move overseas at the first opportunity.

If we want our clubs to improve, the cap needs to go so our big clubs can keep more quality Aussies in our league for longer and most importantly playing with and against each other. Spending big bucks on flashy foreign marquees will be totally useless if they're surrounded by Aussie dross. Just like in the past.

But no,  let's stop the millionaires and billionaires who own our big clubs from using their own money to develop and recruit Aussies so that the small clubs aren't forced to improve. Absolute stupidity. 

Our only saving grace is that our best players get noticed and play in Europe which is still the pinnacle of football competition worldwide. Japan and Worst Korea also do this, China does not as yet have this luxury. If they wish to improve their national team, then their best players need to move away from roflstomping pub teams in the CSL and test themselves at the elite level in Europe.

Yes, we are falling behind in club competitions, but I think the national side will continue to do well simply because of the established development route to Europe that we have traditionally enjoyed. Football is a great game where one or two players can influence the outcome of a game dramatically - as long as we can build a spine of players at elite European levels (Mooy and Ryan in EPL, Leckie in Bundesliga etc) then we should be ok - this of course doesn't mean we should be resting on our laurels when it comes to reforming the game domestically.

Salary cap needs to go and we need more teams/avenues for players. With China with the amount of teams they have, yes the quality of the league at the moment is diluted but playing with and against good players in time will improve the overall standard of the league and allow more opportunity for good players to actually be found.

It'll probably take them a 5-10 years to be a powerhouse in Asia, but we are very much starting to fall back into the pack and may very well be left behind by the big nations. In 2010 we cruised in qualifying, no one came close to us. In 2014 we just scraped into automatic qualification by not being stronger than we are now, but the fact the other Asian teams hadn't closed the gap. Now the 2018 world cup we've slipped to the playoffs which is a massive fall from the days where we were the number 1 ranked team in the continent.

To go along side this we are progressively getting worse in the ACL campaigns, from when the Wanderers won the competition we have actually only had 2 teams qualify for the knockout stages since then and both were in the same season and they got knocked out at the first time of asking. Then if this ACL campaign continues on the trend it is currently going at then 3 of the past 4 seasons would have seen us fail to have a team qualify out of the group. This isn't even including the Roar being embarrassed in the qualifiers. 

Things need to change as we are falling behind in Asia rapidly.

They probably get paid better for sure which helps there cause, the problem is the overall talent pool is the root of our problem.

Does that mean that we need to get rid of the salary cap? Or produce better local players so the average player can stake up against the very best in Asia? 

Its not an easy solution. 

Im talking the general level of talent between the teams, but ive noticed the chinese have improved quite a fair and surprisingly the japanese have fallen on the way side, however the koreans have continued to be very strong. 

Its interesting given the ACL is played very early in there seasons unlike us when its at the pointy end, fitness seems to be an underlying factor too. 

The difference though is the best Chinese players stay in their league, it allows them to perform stronger at the top and soon just throughout the league. While we can't keep our even just above average players for a year.

I looked a little deeper at our performances over the last few years. We may actually be improving compared to korea but china has improved out of sight in a short amount of time. Japan I think have only recently taken the comp seriously due to chinas improvement perhaps

I feel the general standard level between Japanese and Korean players is better than the average australian player.

But the general standard between a Chinese player to an Australian player it's quite even in most ways, perhaps we might have the slight edge in certain parts but i feel given the Chinese large investment in grassroots they might soon overtake us in the future.

Overall we have to raise the level of local players here if we want to compete on a consistent basis in the ACL, although having 3 quality foreigners will help you do need the other players in the squad to be a decent level.

We won’t compete in the Asian champs until we scrap the cap. It will attract all those aussies playing in Europe.

Credit to Shanghai, Hulk was fantastic in this game and Oscar who wasn't as great in this one but still scored 2 goals with the later a peach! 

Victory won't too out there they just lacked the class in the front third, although Leroy George continues to impress me more.

Give it a few years or a decade more and the investment in grassroots will start to come in effect too.

The Chinese govt. along with youth development expert, Tom Byer has now made it compulsory for kids from 5 years to play football and will be put a heavy emphasis on parent education in changing the culture in their country. 

Based on that China is going become a major player before our eyes.

It takes more than a few years for the local players to improve significantly in quality which are still the majority for each Chinese club since they are only allowed 3 foreigners. While in the mean time the foreign players help them do well in the ACL and allows the local players to learn off very successful players. Not to mention Chinese clubs are definitely improving and are getting multiple teams to the end of the competition.

I would like to see what happens if we go to 3 foreigners like the chinese

We have three plus one foreigner spots and so do Chinese and other countries.I just don't agree that the quality of three or four players makes us uncompetitive.Especially when we can get two visa players outside the cap.
The problem is the Australian players .Youngsters coming through not getting game time and presumably,according to coaches not up to standard,otherwise they would be getting game time.So whats going on there?
Then there is the aging golden generation players and original HAL players,each team still has.Those players are too slow now for ACL games.Wilkshere,Carney,Valerie,McKay,Brosque,etc..Fancy having players in the team that if they lose the ball can't chase their opponent,because they are so slow.
What a gift for ACL opponents.A glaring weakness
This is a case of Australian coaches getting away with mediocrity in the HAL.Choosing older players who are vulnerable to fast ,technical players and getting away with it in the HAL.Arnold came out and said as much.Why should he pick youth when the older players get the job done here.
They are living in a fools paradise.

the lesson for HAL players in Asia is keep your hands behind your back in the area because asian refs will likely award a penalty when the ball hits them whether you think your hands are in a "natural position so not deliberate" or not.

It's funny how much money the Chinese clubs waste on foreign players, its embarrassing for the league because its still pretty shit. 

oh yes but the foreigner players are part of CSL so wake up, this is club football.

Ask yourself this, Without shitting on them because it's funny to shit on Australian football after a loss. Do you actually believe an all HAL Socceroos wouldn't compete against China?

The only difference between us & the CSL is their teams all have 3 players on fuck off wages

what evidence beyond naked eye do you have that its not improving?

We only have 3 ways of gauging the quality of the league objectively
1. asian performances (going up every year until the last two where there has been a crash)
2. how well do a league graduates do relative to how dominant they are here (hard to gauge in a single year. Borello is doing well despite being not too strong here is promising. Jmac struggling is more a worry but strikers have often been weak)
3. non-competitive friendlies (also improving over time but there haven't been enough recent ones to tell)

So its actually really hard to objectively tell whether acl is harder or the a league is getting worse

If sydney holds up its end tonight we could be getting some bozza gold!