You need to look at it from the A-League's angle. MLS is in a position where it has a tradition of signing big name stars and is now coming to the point of realising that they often don't live up to billing and may not be the optimal use of DP money. The A-League is a step behind that - they simply can't attract the big-name players in the first place, and most marquee slots go on either mediocre nobodies from Europe or players with a history of playing in Australia, who are only marquees to persuade them to hang around (which I guess is what will happen to Fornaroli next year).
From our position yes, the clever money is on signing a rising star as DP and building the team around them, but the A-League can't get either rising stars or big-name players so it's doing what MLS did when Beckham first came over - desperately trying to throw ever larger amounts of money at players in the hope of persuading just one or two real celebrity players to join for even just a single season.
They don't even need it to raise the standard of the league, at this stage it's more about the fact that most clubs get less than 15,000 fans at a game and some clubs barely get half of that, so they really need the stars in the first place just to attract the fans to the games and raise the profile of the league nationally. Once they've got to the stage where the crowds are bigger and the league is more attractive, then they can worry about learning the lessons of MLS by altering their focus.
