The Transfer Market

How much is Alex Brosque worth? If an EPL club offered Perth Glory $200,000 for Naum Sekulovski, should they sell him? Or how about $2 million for Archie Thompson? Who will be the first player sold from one A-League club to another? What will happen if good players under free transfer are snapped up by European clubs, leaving local teams with nought for their investment? Will the team with the best reputation slowly dominate by cherry-picking the league?

Details about the future of the A-League remain unclear. The format for choosing the two qualifiers for the Asian Champions League, for instance, still hasn't been decided. Everyone agrees squad sizes are unsustainably small, and most teams have trailists or trainees in place, but no official changes to team structures have yet been sanctioned. Even ticket prices aren't firm. Worried about low attendances, Victory has slashed almost one-third of the cost of its general admission tickets for its opening home game on Father's Day.

Call me premature, but another under-analysed detail concerning the future of the league is the transfer market. There is a multitude of open-ended questions about the comparative market value of A-League players, the capacity of clubs to buy new players and the very real issue of losing talent to bigger clubs.

I imagine the FFA is strongly opposed to selling high profile players like Archie, and has or would emplace measures to deter the clubs from doing so. The salary cap, of course, is one such deterent. Nevertheless, we can't forget that every team in the league is subject to wider market forces. As such, it would be stupid of them not to position themselves in that market through the acquisition, trade and sale of players. To my knowledge, not a single player has actually been purchased by one of the A-League clubs, who have either acquired free transfers or paid token sums (e.g. $3,000) to state league clubs for their poachings. That's rather interesting, isn't it? How will the league change, I wonder, once maneuvers in the transfer market become more apparent?

So, from a purely economic standpoint who are the league's most valuable players? What kind of price would be too tempting to refuse? Which youth players are the most likely to be targeted by major European clubs?