The FFA's Punishment For Perth Glory Is Woefully Inadequate

Perth Glory's salary cap cheating punishment of a $269,000 fine & being banned from the A-League final series is completely inadequate, and should see Perth expunged from this season's records, Damien de Bohun should be sacked for his role in allowing the situation to turn out how it has, and the FFA need to rebuild the salary cap so players can be paid centrally, with more flexibility in squads & payments, while removing the rorts and additional payments that allowed Perth to breach the cap by so much.

When Perth "Glory" started this season, they played with a squad comprised of players on contracts that would have left them over the end of season $2.55 million salary cap. After signing high profile players such as Mitch Nichols, Youssouf Hersi, Andy Keogh, Richard Garcia and Ruben Zadkovich, questions were raised about their adherence to the salary cap that were only temporarily quietened by the shifting of Nebosja Marinkovic & Michael Thwaite to the so called "marquee" contracts. Damien de Bohun spoke out in defence of the Glory, talking about how it was a 'dynamic' situation and that he had 'no concerns'.

My first thought when this happened was that neither of these players should be considered 'marquee' players, and that the FFA should have stepped in immediately to investigate the Glory. Instead, Damien de Bohun rubber stamped the change, one that supposedly left Perth on a forecast of $50,000 under the cap, and he even gave a few choice quotes about how he had 'no concerns' about the club breaching the cap. Additional reports showed the club rorting the cap as long ago as the 2010/11 season by having the laughable situation of Robbie Fowler being listed as sharing a house with Steven McGarry... a house just happened to be owned by Tony Sage, the Perth Glory owner. Neither player was ever actually living there of course. Ryo Nagai was listed as living at the club office when he was actually living at a location owned by a person affiliated with the club, while getting paid over $20,000 in accommodation costs.

Perth declared after these initial reports they had not breached the cap. They now still deny they have despite the overwhelming evidence.

Several months after Damien de Bohun gave Perth the all clear, his boss David Gallop reported to the media today that Perth would be banned from the final series because of a salary cap breach of over $400,000. At least 6 players were involved and it was determined that Perth had deliberately cheated by hiding these payments. In addition to the breaches in this season, Perth also failed to disclose $69,000 of payments in the past two seasons. Their total fine is $269,000 for three seasons of breaches.

This should be the end of De Bohun. His substandard performance in his role, his destruction of the embryonic attempts at creating an active support culture for the Australian national team, has now been compounded by his bungling "nothing to see here" initial reaction to a situation that should have see De Bohun immediately launch a full investigation. Instead, he not only ignored the situation, he actively defended Perth until a whistle-blower stepped forward and tipped off the FFA to begin an actual investigation. He has no credibility left and must go.

The punishment for Perth is not enough. It is a weak punishment that isn't in keeping with the scope of their long term systemic cheating of the salary cap.

Perth should be expunged from the record of this season. They should not be dropped to 7th at the end of the season, they should be dropped off the ladder entirely. It should be as if we had a 9 team competition.

Tony Sage should be stripped of his license. Perth have become an even bigger joke year on year under his leadership, but at least previously their circus had never really impacted on more than just their position on the ladder.

The first action of the new FFA ownership should be to sack all the staff affiliated with the breaches, and to withdraw the contracts of the players who greedily accepted payments going to their family members. FFA should immediately begin work to create a community owned club, as yet another ultra-rich owner using his club as a plaything and either taking his hands off the wheel and letting it crash, or being complicit in a massive salary cap breach. The time of the rich magnate is at an end. All future clubs should start as FFA owned then transition to a community owned club with 51% control over the club.

I would seriously investigate winding down the club and putting an end to this tainted brand. The heads of Tony Sage, the players who took this money, and the management of the club involved should hang in shame, having bought both the club and the league into disrepute at a time when we are starting to look toward a longer term sustainable future along with a regeneration of our national team.

The PFA need to make a full disclosure about what they knew about the contracts, and if they at any point had any knowledge about payments that are clearly the kind that risked clubs going over the cap. Instead of doing anything to ensure their members get paid regardless of contractual obligations or the rules, they must now start a process where their own members can report such attempts at subversion of the cap, and to immediately bring them to the attention of the FFA. So far all the PFA have done is released a statement telling the players they can get off scot free, walk out on their clubs and go sign for another club.

To prevent this from ever happening again the FFA need to rework the salary cap rules. All contracts should be centrally paid by the FFA, and the range of rorts and perks that Perth have used and appear to believe were legitimate, and may in fact be legitimate for other clubs if used within the cap, should be simply put, outright banned. Attempts to subvert the cap must result in the club ownership, club management both football wise (vested in a technical director and/or club head coach) and in the office (CEO, financial officers and suchlike) being severely punished and being banned from involvement in football.

I believe that this change will require a raise in the cap to improve the contracts to a level that are roughly equivalent to the method that exists now. These reforms should also be taken as a chance to lower the salary cap floor, to remove minimum payment and remove squad caps to give clubs the ability to sign more players on cheaper contracts that better reflect their ability and situation, while still having the ability to sign high quality players.

The Western Sydney Wanderers went into this season knowing their A-League squad could only ever be comprised of their youth league players and the 26 men who made up the first team squad. The Wanderers could not start the season by having Kearyn Baccus in from the start to put pressure on Vitor Saba. We might have been able to sign Bulut earlier. We weren't able to offer a contract to Jerrad Tyson to provide 3 way competition in the goalkeeping position. We couldn't retain our captain Michael Beauchamp. Or Aaron Mooy. Or Rocky Visconte.

Instead we had to wait until our players was hurt. Any additional players outside injury replacements are only able to play in the Asian Champions League, waiting until another of our players got hurt or had to be released. We won the Asian Champions League despite these limitations, but our domestic season was badly hurt by fatigue, and without a wider squad that can cope with the higher demand, their performance on the pitch suffered.

Perth went into this season not only having no ACL commitments, but went on a spending spree, cheating their way to assembling a squad that went through to the FFA Cup final (which ironically featured Perth complaining that Adelaide getting the home final was not 'fair'), and was challenging for the Premiership.

Western Sydney faced Perth twice this season so far. On both occasions, dozens of Wanderers supporters spent hundreds of dollars to go to Perth, myself included. We watched our team lose both times, to a team who cheated. On both occasions, Perth played effectively full strength but illicitly acquired squad, comprising the likes of Andy Keogh (alleged to have been paid up to half of his $300,000 wages through his wife), Marinkovic, Thwaite, Vukovic, Sidnei, Dino Djulbic, Hersi, Daniel De Silva & Garcia.

We lost each game by a goal.

Our punishment is that we will finish below a team who cheated.

That is a disgraceful way to end the season.

I call on the Wanderers to tell Perth to get stuffed and to play a charity match as our final game of the season. What are the FFA going to do? Take points away? "Adjust" our position to 10th, assuming we don't end up there anyway?

I also call on the club to immediately release a statement confirming that the club either does not use these tricks and rorts, and if they are using them, that they are 100% certain that there is no chance that the club will breach the cap now or in the future.

Supporters deserve better than one of the clubs in the league destroying the credibility of the season in such a fashion.

I hope that our team is never ever put into this situation by the management.