Last week Australian soccer fans watched as the nation’s best players flew into Melbourne from around the globe to kick off the Socceroos’ 2010 World Cup campaign.

Marco Bresciano travelled from Italy. Lucas Neill and Mark Schwarzer arrived from the UK. Craig Moore left his Scottish club to pull on the gold jersey, and Josh Kennedy jetted in from Germany. These are professional players who travel to compete in the world’s best leagues and who shamelessly pledge loyalty to the highest bidder. Those are the facts of a world class footballer’s life.

Is it a glimpse of what the future holds for the careers of our best cricketers?

Adam Gilchrist, now 36 and on his victory lap, has acknowledged he will join the Indian Premier League upon retirement, and nobody holds that against him. He’s been a dedicated member of the Australian team, an entertainer par excellence and seems a decent bloke to boot. But it’s no secret that he’s coming to the end of his usefulness in a younger man’s game and will fly to India to cash in while he can. Good luck to him.

The difference for soccer players is that the A-League is not world’s best practice and, by global standards, pays only chump change. So the comparison is limited, but, with the popularity of Twenty20 now undeniable (84,000 fans two Fridays ago at the MCG and fewer than 50,000 for yesterday’s 50 over match), our players are in demand in an entirely new way.

It’s hard to imagine Brett Lee, for example, not returning home for a Test match because his IPL club won’t let him. The baggy green exerts a greater pull than the Socceroo jersey. But it’s not impossible to imagine Brett Lee arriving from Calcutta just a week before day one of an Ashes series. Teammates Mike Hussey and Michael Clarke might join the squad from Johannesburg, Stuart Clarke from St Kitts.

Then there’s that hapless, highly talented second rank of Aussie cricketers. How many of them are going to wait ten years for one shot at the big time when they could move overseas, play against the world’s best and earn ten times the dough offered by the Bushrangers or the Bulls? Indeed, there’s already a hunger for this sort of professional mobility within the Australian squad.

Over the weekend, Cricket Australia spiked an article by Andrew Symonds which criticised the bureaucratic hurdles his employers were putting between him and his ambitions to play in the IPL. Commenting on the banned article, Symonds told the Sunday Herald Sun:

Right now a lot of the boys in the Australian side are excited about maybe taking part in the Indian Twenty20 series called the IPL in April.

But we can’t quite work out what’s going on with the chiefs at Cricket Australia, who seem to be trying to run interference by putting up a heap of red tape.

Cricket Australia claims the article contained inaccuracies, but the problem here is not that some Australian players want to play elsewhere. It’s that Cricket Australia clings to an increasingly outdated idea of the game, one of gentlemanly loyalty to one’s nation above all else.

Today’s cricketers compete in a global marketplace. Like their soccer-playing counterparts did long ago, our cricketers are realising their value both as members of an all-conquering team and as individuals. Each player is now a business unto himself.

How long before a player like Andrew Symonds hesitates when considering his next Cricket Australia contract, pointing out that certain clauses might constitute a restraint of trade? Does such a situation threaten the very fabric of the game? Or does it simply offend the sensibilities of those yet to recognise the creeping influence of commercialism on how our players see their own careers?

It was, after all, the ICC which embraced Twenty20 internationally in a bid to boost audiences, and it is Cricket Australia which gleefully collects the gate. Best be careful what you wish for.