A Four Corners investigation has exposed the shocking truth behind foreign ownership in the A-League, with one club’s owners still unidentifiable.
The A-League, Australia’s premier football competition, can be truly sublime when it is at its brilliant best.
But when it’s at its lowest ebb, it’s a stark reminder of how far the game still has to go in order to catch up with the rest of the world.
Watch the world’s best footballers every week with beIN SPORTS on Kayo. LIVE coverage from LaLiga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Serie A, Carabao Cup, EFL & SPFL. New to Kayo? Start Your Free Trial
There’s no more worrying sign of needed progress than the state of foreign ownership of clubs in the A-League.
An investigation by the ABC’s Four Corners has revealed the backstories behind the owners of two A-League clubs, as well as the peculiar situation of one club whose owners refuse to identify themselves.
One club the investigation centred on was Melbourne City, who were crowned A-League champions for the 2020/21 season when they beat Sydney FC, another foreign-owned club, in the grand final.
The Victorian side are a sister club of European powerhouses Manchester City, and also fall under the umbrella of the City Football Group, all of whom are owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the royal family presiding over Abu Dhabi.
Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a nation with a questionable human rights record.
Amnesty International Australia chief executive Sam Klintworth told the program Sheikh Mansour’s ownership of Melbourne City was a classic example of “sportswashing” – using sport as a means of distracting from other issues.
“People associate sport with positivity, with achievement, with prowess and athleticism, with achievement, and this can be used in what we call sportswashing,” Mr Klintworth said.
“And sportswashing, essentially, is taking that positive attribute that’s associated with sport and using it to improve your reputation.
“So essentially that can be leveraging off the glamour, the access, the universal appeal of sport to improve your brand, to disguise or divert away from human rights violations.”
Four Corners also highlighted concerns about the Bakrie Group, the owners of three-time A-League champions Brisbane Roar.
The Bakrie Group is involved in mining and media, and owns the Roar via an Indonesian holding company called Pelita Jaya Cronus.
A director of the holding company, Joko Driyano, has previously been imprisoned for 18 months for his involvement in an Indonesian football match-fixing scandal, Four Corners reported.
Driyano was convicted of telling his personal driver to remove a computer and documents relating to the investigation from his office, however he remains listed as the “president director” of Pelita Jaya Cornus.
The strange ownership among A-League clubs doesn’t end there.
In 2018, Adelaide United was sold by local businessmen to a consortium of Dutch investors.
The strange part? The investors refuse to identify themselves.
Adelaide-based lawyer Greg Griffin, who was a part of the selling group in 2018, admitted he didn’t even learn the identities of the Dutch investors.
“The only person I knew in the consortium, or the front person, was Piet van der Pol, who had been a player agent for one of our players,” Griffin said.
“He said he represented a consortium out of Holland. And that’s as much information as we were ever given.
“It’s clearly not ideal, and I think it’s probably unheard of in most European leagues, where ownerships are very transparent.”
For former FFA corporate affairs executive Bonita Mersiades, Adelaide United’s murky ownership is part of a larger problem in Australian football as it looks to catch up with the rest of the world.
“They’re private entities operating in a sport, and sport has a level of transparency and accountability,” Ms Mersiades said.
“We demand a level of transparency and accountability from sport because it is something we all engage with and it is something that we should be aware of who are the owners, how they’re financed, how they’re structured and why they’re here and what they’re getting out of it.”
As sport fans take more of an interest in the backgrounds of the people running the teams they love, the calls for greater transparency will only grow louder.
But as has often proven in the past, calls may fall on deaf ears yet again.
For all the latest Sports News Click Here
