A year on, and it looks like this change to La Liga kick-off times will actually happen, following an offseason that has revealed just how parlous Spanish finances are, Barcelona’s debt and Mallorca’s financial troubles only the most obvious examples. It’s now apparent La Liga executives see a shift to suit Asian television audiences as critical not just for revenue growth at Real Madrid and Barcelona, but for the whole league — even if it’s at the expense of Spanish tradition.

I would argue that there are root problems in La Liga’s foundations behind these levels of debt that need to be addressed with as much urgency as reaching out to a new market, but at least La Liga is starting to realise that a two-club league is not the way forward, as World Football Insider reports.

“We are trying to change gear the way the Spanish league is promoted, not only the league but the players and also the sport of football,” Francisco Roca, La Liga’s chief executive, told Soccerex delegates today.

“I say changing gears because so far most of the promotion of the Spanish league has been driven by the individual efforts of FC Barcelona and Real Madrid.

“This has been extremely successful for us because those are the two elite teams of the Spanish league, but it’s not enough.

“They will obviously continue to do their individual efforts to do their tours every pre-season but we think that as a competition we are mature enough to be able to promote not only our two elite teams but also the other teams of the Spanish league, especially the first division.”

Famously, unlike the Premier League, television rights in Spain are sold individually by clubs, with the income for Barcelona and Real Madrid dwarfing all other clubs: Real Madrid and Barcelona have deals worth about €150 million  a season, while the likes of Valencia and Sevilla earn around €30 million a year, at best. Ultimately, as great as that is for Barcelona and Real Madrid in the short term, in the long run it makes for a weaker league and a less appealing global “product” (ugh). The Premier League and Manchester United have demonstrated the ancillary benefit of being seen as the biggest and best club in the biggest and best league, at least as collective marketing power has driven that perception.

If any informed Spanish observer knows, I’d be curious to learn if overseas television revenue is also sold individually by clubs in La Liga, or whether it’s sold collectively and shared equally: if it is the latter as I suspect it is, it would appear this drive to the Asian market may be one way to financially compensate for that huge domestic imbalance in revenue, that only hurts smaller clubs and drives madcap spending by the big two. Because while there has been discussion of selling La Liga rights collectively in the domestic Spanish market too, such is Barcelona’s debt and reliance on their individual television deal that seems very unlikely to change right now.

Elsewhere, in discussion of that imbalance and the drive to the Asian market, La Liga CEO Francisco Roca said, according to SportBusiness, that “this is not about short-term. The real benefits are in the medium and long-term. As a league we have to promote our clubs and we have to recognise that promoting the league is not just about Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.”

In the Hyundai A-League, Australia’s national football competition, neither of last year’s grand finalists have reached this year’s finals series. The Melbourne Victory and Adelaide United finished fifth and sixth respectively — putting them out of contention for the finals, which only features the top four teams.

And yet, Melbourne and Adelaide will both be competing in Asia’s premier international club competition, the Asian Champions League, when it kicks off in March.

And they’re going to the ACL as — supposedly — Australia’s best two clubs.

The problem lies in the scheduling. The A-League season wraps up in February, two months after the AFC (Asian Football Confederation, who organise the Champions League) announces its draw. As a result, the AFC have opted to use last season’s champions for this year’s Champions League.

But consider this:

Melbourne qualified for the Champions League on December 17, 2006 – close to 15 months before it would play its first game in the competition. Adelaide also qualified over a year earlier, in February 2007.

Strike anyone else as a bit of a problem?

Last year, Adelaide had the advantage of being able to play in the Champions League soon after the A-League wrapped up, by virtue of having finished first in the 2005-06 A-League season.

But this year, neither Adelaide nor Melbourne are playing anywhere near their best. Both teams have lost much of the good form which helped them to qualify for the Champions League in the first place.

The AFC needs to have a long, hard look at the qualification process for the Asian Champions League.

In December, it announced that Indonesia would have no representatives at the ACL this year, because the Indonesian competition doesn’t finish until January — a month after the ACL draw.

Only six months ago, Indonesia was one of the four countries hosting the Asian Cup. Now it can’t get a team into Asia’s biggest international club competition.

If the AFC wants the Champions League to be truly representative of the best clubs in Asia, it needs to change how the qualification process works.