HARRY Kewell won't be playing for Melbourne Victory or any other A-League club after all, it seems.

Not that we have Harry's word for that.

As usual, it was his manager Bernie Mandic doing all the talking, telling Melbourne radio station SEN negotiations with Football Federation Australia to bring his famous client "home" had broken down and his fading career would now continue in some other country.

SEN audio: Hear what Harry's manager said

Whether that's the final word remains to be seen.

Victory doesn't concede that it is, chief executive Richard Wilson - struggling to contain his frustration - saying the club remained "very hopeful" of getting the deal done.

FFA also did its best to sound optimistic, but without any suggestion of upping the ante.

Is Harry's manager playing games to drive up his asking price? Have your say. Add your comment below.

The veteran Socceroo was silent, as he has been - publicly, anyway - since the saga began when news leaked out that Victory was on his case early last month.

Kewell has been like the phantom of his own soap opera: more or less invisible. He made one brief visit to Melbourne, apparently, and is now in Europe.

He has done no interviews about the prospect of removing himself from the big stages of Europe, uprooting his young family and returning to the relative obscurity of Australian club football, all major decisions.

Well, he's never much liked doing media anyway so no real surprise there - except, perhaps, for one thing.

The key element of the negotiations is that he won't just be a marquee player, he will be the best marketing tool the competition has ever had - in other words, he would be expected to talk his head off in public.

For now, though, Mandic is the front man, as he has been since he first met Kewell as a gifted kid in Sydney nearly two decades ago and recognised the potential for them both to become multi-millionaires - which they have.

Famously, he is believed to have pocketed about $2 million when his boy left Leeds for Liverpool.

Based in Paris and with a name more familiar to Australian soccer fans than his face - he wouldn't be widely recognised walking the streets of Melbourne - Croatian-born Mandic is a skilled negotiator.

The jungle drums have been saying for a week the deal with Victory was as good as done, with FFA topping up the marketing component. An announcement was believed imminent.

So one surprise was when Mandic said Kewell had signed in-principle agreements with both Victory and Sydney (Wilson said nothing had been signed). A bigger one was the call that it was all off.

Kewell would decide on another team, somewhere else, by today, he said.

Whether this is old-fashioned brinkmanship - Mandic simply trying to drive the price up further, which is his job - became the subject of much speculation.

Victory wasn't going there yesterday, but its unwillingness to shut the door suggests it believes the game might yet be won in extra time.

reedr@heraldsun .com.au

Twitter: @Reedrw

Originally published as Victory unsure of Harry's intentions