"It would be lovely to think that we'd be able to sell a player from Australia for US$23.5 million directly into a top-five league," says Buddy Farah, Herrington's agent. "I just can't see that happening."
That quote, blunt as it is, tells you everything about the deal that just made Lucas Herrington the most expensive Australian footballer in history — and about the structural trap A-League clubs cannot seem to escape.
The timeline is jarring. On January 3, Brisbane Roar sold Herrington to Colorado Rapids for $800,000. On August 2 — seven months later — Colorado sold him to newly promoted Hull City for $24 million, rising to $33 million with add-ons. He turns 19 next weekend. He hadn't become 41 times better at football. The league he was playing in just changed.
The level problem
Researchers at the CIES Football Observatory have crunched 8,389 transfers between 2014 and 2024 and identified the single most influential factor in transfer valuations: not goals, not starts, not international caps — the quality of competition a player has faced in the previous 12 months. Thirty strong performances in a strong league are worth more than 30 strong performances in a weaker one. It's that simple, and that damning for the A-League.
Top-five European clubs were watching Herrington while he was still at Brisbane Roar. They didn't act. They didn't trust the level. So Farah sent him to MLS — specifically to face better attackers, to be tested in ways the A-League structurally cannot provide. Barcelona flew to the United States to watch him defend against Son Heung-min, Tyler Boyd, and Denis Bouanga. "The best front three in the league," Farah said. When Herrington handled them, the valuation shifted.
That's not a knock on what Brisbane Roar did with him developmentally. The skills Hull City paid $24 million for were already there on the banks of the Brisbane River. The market just wouldn't pay for them there.
A-League clubs are developing the talent and losing the profit
Brisbane Roar did retain a sell-on clause from the Colorado deal — meaning they get a cut of the Hull fee. That's smart business. But the club's financial distress meant Colorado were able to buy low in the first place, and Brisbane cashed out of their sell-on earlier than planned. The full windfall goes elsewhere.
It reflects a deeper contradiction the A-League is bumping up against. Clubs, squeezed financially, have pivoted to youth development as their revenue model — find talent, develop it, sell it. And to some degree it's working. But the more experienced players get stripped out to cut costs, the weaker the competition becomes, and the less the market trusts what it's seeing. A young defender's performances mean less if the strikers he's dominating are also teenagers. Hull and Barcelona aren't flying to watch that.
- A-League regular season: 26 matches — short by global standards
- Competition ranking: well outside the top tier by CIES metrics
- Herrington's Brisbane sale: $800,000
- Colorado's Hull sale: $24m guaranteed, $33m with add-ons
- Gap created by league perception: roughly $23 million
The uncomfortable conclusion is this: to become a genuinely profitable selling league, A-League clubs still have to spend. Cutting costs and developing youth aren't the same strategy. Taken too far, one actively undermines the other. Right now, it's Colorado Rapids and Hull City who are banking the real return on Brisbane Roar's work.
