- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Announced over the weekend, the Smith Review will be tasked with conducting a full examination into the running of football in Australia.
As reported on The World Game, the review will:
“…assess the structure, governance and administration of football in Australia, examine the development of its positioning for the Asian Cup and identify key opportunities to ensure the financial viability and sustainability of football in Australia. It will be conducted in conjunction with, and with the support of FFA.”
The Smith Report will be the latest in a long list of reviews that have been formed to examine the game in Australia.
As Michael Cockerill has already noted in the SMH, this latest review is the fifth in the last 30 years with the Booth Report (1981), the Bradley Report (1990), the Stewart Report (1994), the Crawford Report (2003) all preceding the Smith Report which is expected to be completed before the end of 2011.
The Smith Review has been given wide-ranging terms of reference with which to examine the administration of football in this country, but it will all come to nought if several key threshold questions aren’t addressed.
What do we want football in this country to be? Do we want it to be the dominated sport in Australia? In winter? In summer?
Do we want a system which supports our best players to stay in the local games for as long as possible or moves them overseas as soon as possible?
Do we want a system that integrates and encourages a clear pathway from small sided games right through to the senior national team or do we want one that has multiple pathways?
Do we want arrangements that maintain pre-existing state set-ups or integrates them into a single national system?
One hopes that these questions are asked first before an assessment of the structure, governance and administration of football is conducted.
Coming up with conceptual frameworks and financial models to underpin the funding of football is all well and good but there won’t be any benefits if these key questions aren’t sorted out first. There’s no point looking at whether the foundations for a garden shed are correct when we are looking to build a mansion.
Once these threshold questions are answered, then the different pathways to achieving these objectives can then be examined.
Accompanying the setting of objectives for football in Australia must be an evaluation of appropriate accountability mechanisms to track performance over time.
The renowned guru for public servants everywhere, Sir Humphrey Appleby, once said, “If people don’t know what you’re doing, they don’t know what you’re doing wrong.”
He was not coming from a place where transparency was the desired outcome.
But if football in Australia is to continue to receive funding from governments (not to mention the interest of registered players everywhere as to where their money goes), then shedding some light on what happens within the administration of our game must be part of the deal.
Measuring performance can be fraught with risks. However, some parties are fond of indicators which can easily be presented in league table or as rankings on a list.
Using indicators like qualification for major tournaments or number of juniors nationally compared to other sports only presents part of the picture.
Instead, indicators should be selected that can be used like tin openers which seek to not only identify areas of underperformance but also the reasons behind it.
These types of indicators are more appropriate as they encourage improvement over time rather than the achievement of narrow targets which can often result organisations hitting the mark (targets) but missing the point (overall objectives).
The final ingredient which needs to be included is a commitment by all parties to stay the course over the long term.
Patience is a virtue which is all too rare in these days where match results are available in real time from all over the world, where managers are given only a few matches to turn around a season, and where consumers and other organisations expect instant results before the 24 hour news cycle moves onto the next big thing.
The extract at the start of this article seems to indicate that the hosting of the 2015 Asian Cup in Australia was the impetus behind the launching of the review.
Hopefully the 2015 tournament is not seen as the end point of this process, but a major launch pad from which to reach future milestones.
My initial reaction upon hearing the news of the Smith Review was how far the game had come in this country that even after a period of massive growth for football, more was still expected. I don’t think that would have been the case in the world of ‘old soccer’.
My thoughts then turned to the old 12th Man sketch of the call of a football match involving Australia which included all those made up foreign sounding names like Hecanski, Fillyouresky and Gotanitch.
Just like in that sketch, we’ve passed the ball to (the substitute) Smith (“I hope I’ve pronounced that correctly“) to take the game in this country forward.
Are you the ultimate team manager? Pick your own superstar team and go head to head with other football fans for glory and cash prizes on Draftstars. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.