Source :- THE AGE NEWS
If someone offered you an investment opportunity with a guaranteed return of 4025 per cent in just seven months, you’d probably do some thorough due diligence before committing to anything. If the offer came via email, it’d go straight into your spam folder.
It sounds far too good to be true – but in the case of Lucas Herrington, it’s all too real.
Herrington’s recent move to newly promoted Premier League side Hull City has been hailed as a landmark moment for Australian soccer, and a shining example of the quality of young players being developed. It also provides a sobering reminder about where A-League clubs sit in the global pecking order.
On January 3, Herrington played his last match for Brisbane Roar before being sold to Colorado Rapids for $800,000. On August 2, he played his last match for Colorado Rapids before being sold to Hull City for $24 million, with the potential for that figure to rise to $33 million with performance-related add-ons – a record for an Australian player should the full extent of the agreement be triggered. Already, after two appearances for Hull, he is being hailed in England as a shrewd signing with a huge future. He turns 19 next weekend.
Herrington did not become 41 times better at football in seven months, yet he became as much as 41 times more valuable. It’s not like Colorado taught him anything special; the skills and attributes which caught Hull’s eye were there when he was at Brisbane Roar.
All that changed is the environment in which he demonstrated them, and therefore how the market evaluated him. Part of that is because he also debuted for the Socceroos and played at a World Cup during those seven months, but a bigger part is because of how Major League Soccer is perceived.
So … what happened? Is this definitive proof that Australian clubs are being ripped off, as fans have long believed? Why did it require another club from another country to realise Herrington’s value? Couldn’t Brisbane Roar have just cut out the middleman and sold him to Hull directly?
The answers go to the very heart of the A-League’s increasingly enthusiastic embrace of player sales as a solution to its financial problems, and the limitations of that strategy.
Take it from the agent who did these deals.
“It would be lovely to think that we’d be able to sell a player from Australia for US$23.5 million directly into a top-five league,” Buddy Farah, Herrington’s agent, told this masthead. “I just can’t see that happening.”
Player transfer valuations are an inexact science, but there is a way of removing the guesswork out of it. Researchers at the CIES Football Observatory have quantified the many variables that decide how much a player – any player – is sold for. Their latest statistical model, built from an analysis of 8389 transfers around the world between 2014 and 2024, can account for almost 85 per cent of the variation in transfer fees.
Of all the performance-related factors they measured – goals, minutes, results, starts, international experience – the most influential was the sporting level of the matches a player had played over the previous 12 months, or the quality of the competition those matches were played in. Put differently, 30 good games in a strong league are worth more on the transfer market than 30 good games in a weaker one, and the more recent those games were, the more they matter.
By global standards, the A-League offers neither a particularly long season (26 games) nor a particularly high level of competition. Therein lies the problem for clubs, which do all the heavy lifting when it comes to player development, and are capable of producing players of high ability, but are not positioned to capture the value their work generates.
Forced into reduced spending on more experienced, battle-hardened players due to competition-wide financial dynamics, A-League clubs have pivoted to youth. Academy players are not only cheap, but they can be sold on the transfer market, and that money can help replace some of the revenue streams that have disintegrated.
To an extent, it’s been working: A-League clubs are producing better young players and becoming increasingly sophisticated about the deals they reach to send them abroad. But the current strategy may be running out of runway. The more quality that is stripped out of the A-League to make room for developing young players, the less meaningful those performances in the A-League become to prospective buyers, and the less they will therefore be prepared to pay to account for the assumed risk they would be taking on.
There were clubs from the top five European leagues who were interested in Herrington when he was still at Brisbane Roar, Farah said, but such was their assessment of the A-League’s standard, they did not think he was ready to play first-team football for them. They didn’t trust the level.
Farah recommended Herrington make a move to MLS because of the quality he would face as a defender, knowing that if he could handle it, those clubs would begin to trust his level. When Barcelona was tracking him, Farah said they chose to fly to the United States to watch Colorado play against Los Angeles FC, specifically to see him against who they fielded in attack: Korean legend Son Heung-min, American international Tyler Boyd and former Ligue 1 ace Denis Bouanga.
“They were the best front three in the league,” Farah said. “They felt like, ‘If this kid [Herrington] can handle those three, he’s able to move into an environment where he’ll be consistently distressed during training sessions and during match day.’
“When you look at our teams, how are players being challenged when they’re playing up against younger kids at the same age? How’s a young defender going to be challenged when he’s playing up against a 17 or 18-year-old, for instance? One of the coaches said to me, it’s like he’s almost turning up to a childcare centre, babysitting kids.”
Faced with such structural obstacles, the best way for an A-League club to maximise its return on a talented young player is to retain a sell-on clause, entitling it to a portion of the player’s next transfer fee, knowing that that’s when the numbers rise substantially. And that’s exactly what Brisbane Roar did with Herrington – but because of the club’s ongoing financial distress, which clubs like Colorado are eager to take advantage of, they infamously cashed out early.
It’s a paradox the A-League must confront. Reduced spending is not the same thing as youth development; in fact, taken too far, it risks undermining the very pathway to prosperity that they have committed to. Giving young players more opportunities is undeniably a good thing, but those opportunities are less valuable if the standard of play around them is allowed to drop. There’s nothing wrong with being a selling league, but to become a profitable selling league – for A-League clubs to unlock the big, game-changing money they’re after – they still have to spend.
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