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Forget code wars - Growth is the key for football

What kind of leadership does football in Australia require? (Photo by Paul Barkley/LookPro)
Roar Guru
19th October, 2014
58

If I could get a dollar for every time I’ve heard of a comparison between Football and the other codes in Australia, particularly in the last couple of months, I’d be a very rich man.

Now, I’ve been following the game for over 25 years, so I can understand the raw optimism of football fans. But at the same time I can’t bring myself to subscribe to these so called ‘Code Wars’. They are a myth, a concept which were started by certain sections of the media, created to protect their own vested interests.

Hopefully nobody reading this is naive enough to think that the media’s number one role in today’s society is to report the news!

In my opinion the tag of who is the number one code in the land is in the eye of the beholder; most in Victory, Western Australia and South Australia will tell you there is only one code (AFL), and in the northern states of NSW and Queensland the biggest code is the NRL, which dominates all the headlines up there.

To me, the start of the 10th season of the A-League should be about celebrating how far the game has come, what it’s achieved in these last 10 years in Australia, and to continue to learn from the mistakes that it’s made in that time, as there have been a few. But that’s ok, it’s a new league started from ground zero. It’s not a competition.

For Football, there’s only one word that should matter at this stage of its life – Growth. This is all it needs to keep doing right now, just as it has been for the last three to four years.

The A-League is only nine seasons old and the new FFA Cup has just started. The game is slowly breaking down barriers and changing old perceptions. Its now become part of mainstream sport and society.

Clearly Foxtel recognises this already, by contributing to the majority of the current $40m per year TV deal. We still only have 10 teams at the top level, with a $2.55m salary cap.

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The game has had a chequered history, which has always been heavily fractured, and for the code to keep growing, it needs all the tiers of the game to keep coming together, and that’s slowly beginning to happen.

I think the game’s in a very good position today, it’s still in its early growth stage, but it needs to keep growing, which I think it will. In 10 years time I can see;

– 12/14 A-League clubs, giving us an extra 6-12 games per club and a longer season
– Every club with an academy down to under 6’s
– Every club with their own training facilities
– Squad sizes increased to 30 from the current 23 to increase depth
– Salary caps increased to a minimum $6m per club
– $1m prize money and a direct ACL spot for the FFA Cup winner
– Good amount of prize money just to qualify for the ACL, and $5m for the winner of the ACL
– A good sized TV deal for the A-League, of at least $100m per year or more, with some commercial free-to-air component

It’s very hard to put a number on what I think attendances will be in 10 years, but maybe an average of 20-25k, as it’s definitely possible.

Attendances are very hard to increase dramatically, particularly with the size of our population, but steady growth as we’ve seen for the last three seasons is the most sustainable sort of growth.

Another massive opportunity for growth is the fact that the A-League doesn’t solely rely on money coming from within Oz for it to prosper and grow. With Football now becoming massive in Asia financially, and as we’ve seen with the Manchester City owners buying Melbourne Heart, we could continue to see this type of investment in the A-League in the future. And while I don’t condone 100 per cent foreign ownership, if done right and managed correctly, it can take the game very far fairly quickly in this country.

We’ve had 10 brilliant years of the A-League, with massive ups and downs, the next decade will be huge for the game in every way. I can’t wait to see it unfold.

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