The whole Caceres situation is weird, but it definitely wasn't farming. CFG knew he was looking at leaving his old club (also in the A-League) but the A-League's rules are in some ways even more restrictive than MLS - they have free agency, but clubs aren't allowed to buy players off each other like MLS and unlike MLS they can't trade players because the clubs own the player rights, not the league. Player swaps can only be done if both players agree to do so first. Additionally there's no GAM, no drafts and you can't sell international slots etc, so there's basically no incentive to trade players unless the two players are valued equally. For this reason, virtually the only way clubs trade players are by waiting for players to leave their clubs, or by attracting in players who have been playing abroad. It's no coincidence that in the A-League, players tend to sign contracts for between 6 months and 2 years only.
In light of this, CFG wanted Caceres for Melbourne City and he wanted to go to them, but literally the only way that they could do this was by arranging for Manchester City to buy him for a transfer fee and then loan him back to Melbourne. Of course, the rest of the league then protested that this was a bending of the rules, and to be honest they might be right. What was really surprising was that the Australian authorities did nothing to stop it - they have a similar reputation for spur-of-the-moment rule changes as Don Garber has. They did, after all, create the A-League's "Lampard rule", stating that a club can't have both a guest player and a loanee at the same time (to stop Lampard joining Melbourne City while Villa was also there) - if they hadn't made that rule then we would never have had Lampardgate.
So yeah, going back to the original point. Not really a farming at all. Not sure if that makes things better or not though.
