Cacace, McCowatt, Waine, Piscopo - even if just one sells every few years it will be a source of money that we haven't really had before, with a handful of exceptions. We got good money for Singh, we have a young, talented crop of players for the next few years, and one of the best academies in the league. Barring a takeover we'll never compete financially with clubs like the Vuck or Smurfs, but I can't see a better way forward for us than aiming for this.
People mention that this is the Mariners plan and look how shark they're going, but they haven't really produced any talent to sell for a while, whereas we have. They used to - during their most successful period in the league, between 2008 and 2013 CCM sold six players (Jedinak, Amini, Wilkinson, Griffiths, Rogic, and Ibini) for a combined $4.3M, with Griffiths the highest fee at $1.3M and Amini the lowest at $400k. Through those years they had a number of smaller transfers too, like Matty Ryan and Matt Simon selling for under $200k. They then sold Sainsbury and Duke in 2014 and 2015 for $200k each but since then there's been nothing. Four years of terrible A-League campaigns and no star players, because they have stopped producing good young talent - They themselves aren't even "doing a central coast" anymore. Our academy is miles better than theirs - if we keep up the stream of talent that our academy system is starting to pump out, steal the cream of the rest of New Zealand's youth football talent like McCowatt and keep an eye on (hopefully) savvy pick-ups like Piscopo, I can't see why it would be a bad route to go down, nor how we could end up like the mariners.
