The AFC Champions League Elite Finals draw was held yesterday, confirming the quarter final match ups to take place in Jeddah next month.
What is noticeable about the make up of the teams to make the final eight (or final 12 as it is until the West Zone completes their postponed Round of 16) is the inclusion of JDT from Malaysia and Buriram United from Thailand.
This isn’t the first time the two Southeast Asian giants have made the knockout rounds of the continental competition, but it is the first time they’ve made it this far since the advent of the AFC Champions League Elite format last season, and they did so at the expense of clubs from Japan and Australia, not to mention the Korean clubs eliminated in the group stage.
It represents a seismic shift in the landscape of Asian club football, but how it came about has people questioning whether this is actually for the betterment of Asian football.
On this week’s The Asian Game Podcast, we discuss the AFC’s decision to scrap foreign player limits that have allowed JDT and Buriram to field almost exclusively foreign starting XIs and the impact it might have going forward.
We’re at a tipping point – Scott McIntyre
I think we’re maybe at the beginning now of what could be some kind of a seismic change in Asian Football. Because I think it’s clear that we’re not going to turn back from what’s happening at a Champions League level, that we’re not going to go back to the three-plus-one or whatever we had before.
There’s some skepticism about why this was originally done with the influence of the Saudi clubs who had opened up visa spots and could field 11 players. We’ve seen it now with JDT and Buriram. We’ve seen clubs trying to do it, with Lion City sailors, and other clubs.
So my great concern, as someone who’s been here in Japan for a long time, and obviously from Australia, where I think both of our countries have strong traditions of producing young players coming through and helping the national team, I think the bigger impact that we’re going to see is that the more nations get left behind, is that they’ll simply fall in step with the continental regulations, and go with what we’ve seen in Europe, the problems that we’ve seen where these clubs are fielding all foreigners and no national team players, and then you, you’re struggling to produce players.
My fear is that we’ll be here in three, four or five years’ time, and we’re talking about the J. League running with eight foreign players. We’re talking about the A-League running with 10 foreign players, and then we’re talking huge impacts with national teams and development because, again, we see the regulations have shifted so often in terms of which nations and which clubs are allowed to participate, right?
So at the moment, we have it kind of with this closed shop as it is. But just say, for example, Vietnam, just plucking an example out of here, if they come up, then with the one super club model as well.
And the next time we see entry requirements for the Champions League reordered, then we have the Vietnamese super clubs coming in, then we end up with a Chinese super club, or a Laotian super club, where investment is coming in, and you’ve got all these foreigners, or all the national team players coming.
Then you can almost see a situation where even nations such as Japan, that consistently produce so many good young players, will struggle to compete with them.
We’ve seen the Korean clubs struggle to compete as it is again, the domestic leagues are operating under what looks like an increasingly outdated model of limited foreign players being able to play in the domestic competition.
I know the J. League technically now has this thing where you can sign as many as you want, but you can only play a certain amount on match days, and I can see that as being the first step towards the J. League in two or three seasons going, you know what we’ll go to five, you know what we’ll go to seven, you know what we’ll go to nine, you know what we’ll have no regulations.
And then once we see that, for me, we’re standing on the tipping point now of this being the reality with domestic leagues across Asia, where everyone will just fall in line, and then your domestic leagues are in a world of hurt.
It would be an absolute tragedy, I think, if someone like the J. League, which has been a flag bearer for development, because you’ll have a couple of clubs that hold out and want to play Japanese, but you’ll end up with three-quarters of the clubs in the first two divisions playing Brazilians, and that will be the reality and that impacts absolutely everything.
And, in my opinion, the Champions League changes are to blame for the point that we are going to get to. And I think we I think now we’re almost rolling too far down the hill to turn it back
We’re seeing it already now – Michael Church
Last year’s Champions League final, in some respects, was the perfect example of those two systems clashing against each other.
You had Kawasaki Frontale, with the vast majority of their players domestically produced, coming through with the Frontale academy or other academies in the J. League, and then coming through, maybe going overseas and then coming back to play in Japan against an Al Ahli team that was almost exclusively foreign born, produced and then bought in.
So we’ve already got that to a degree. It’ll be interesting to see if we end up with the Champions League actually playing to its conclusion this year, whether we see that replicated or not again this season.
(But) in the countries where you don’t have the relaxation of those rules, the direction of travel with the naturalisation for national teams is almost bringing that in through the back door as well. You look at Thailand, you look at Indonesia, Malaysia is maybe not the best example to use, given what’s been happening there over the last sort of few months.
But there is a direction of travel on that, even with the national teams, that you’re naturalising players, or you’re desperately scrambling around to try and find players who have germs of ancestry somewhere in their backstory, and then bringing those players in.
But generally speaking, they’re not players who have been developed locally through the local system. So the national team is no longer a reflection of the local system that produces players.
And then those players that get that eligibility at some point or another, and we’ve seen, especially with the likes of the Philippines, end up then moving away from the European countries that have produced them, and they end up playing, say, in Southeast Asian countries or in the Philippines.
And so it kind of, it’s almost reverse engineering the whole thing.
Is it actually good for local football? – Paul Williams
“We’ve got the situation now where we’ve got JDT and Buriram that have both progressed through to the knockout rounds at the expense of some of the bigger clubs, or from some of the bigger countries in East Asia, clubs that play almost predominantly foreign teams.
I think there’s one local player, generally speaking, there’s usually one local player in each of their elevens, which is far removed from what we’ve known the Champions League to be in the past, that’s had the three-plus-one rule. Now we’ve just got open slather that you can do what you want.
Have we gone too far in the other direction? And what could be the implications further down the line, if we just allow this to happen, for teams to field entirely foreign teams? Is it actually good for Malaysian football? I mean, these clubs dominate their domestic scene anyway. On paper, it’s great for Malaysian football, they’ve got a team through, but is it actually great for Malaysian football?
Listen to Episode 268 of The Asian Game Podcast
