SYDNEY, April 17 (Reuters) - Birmingham City's Trinidad and Tobago striker Dwight Yorke has signed to play for Sydney in the new Australian A-League, which kicks-off in August.
"Suffice to say that he's come here for a lot less money than he could have made in the Middle East, and I think that speaks volumes for exactly what he wants to achieve out of this move," Harper said.
"He could quite easily have gone (elsewhere) for a great deal more money and retired even wealthier."
Yorke is the English Premier League's seventh all-time top goal scorer with 122 goals but has not played for Birmingham City since January and the club is happy to let him go.
The striker's signing comes two months after Sydney announced they had hired former German World Cup winner Pierre Littbarski as their coach in the eight-team A-League.
The old competition was scrapped after the government called for the entire board of Soccer Australia to be sacked and replaced.
The board had long been criticised for the way it ran the sport but the push for change intensified after FIFA reversed its decision to award Oceania an automatic place in the 2006 World Cup.
The new board, made up of some of Australia's richest and most powerful businessmen, set about restructuring the sport and developing a constitution and one of their main aims is to ditch Oceania and join the Asian Football Confederation.
