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The Professional Footballers Association under Brendan Schwab has the clearest vision of any of the sects wandering the corridors of football power, so it was no surprise the PFA was the first to weigh in with its response to the announcement of Warwick Smith’s football review.
Like they say, always back self-interest, at least you know it’s trying, and no one around football has more to fear from the A-League folding than the lesser-light Australian players who make up the PFA’s rank-and-file – they would be the biggest losers, and not by a little, but about ten lengths.
Maybe that is why the PFA has been more motivated than anyone else in the fight to identify the problems confronting football in Australia?
Among the jargon about restructuring and reexamining relationships, some of the areas the PFA wants Smith to look at could easily be taken for expressions of social conscience more than industrial relations.
Professional players, one would think, would only be peripherally interested in “the development of a confident football culture”.
Why would the players’ union be concerned about FFA’s post-Lowy succession? Players don’t play for FFA, they play for clubs.
Professional footballers, you’d think, would be the last people on earth to be dying in a ditch over “the comparatively high fees charged to registered participants.” They’ll never be paying them again.
They’re not peripheral issues, they’re central; each is crucial to the A-League’s survival and well within the player union’s gamut of self-interest – screw up any of them (or allow them to remain screwed up), and a national league is a marginal proposition. Players’ jobs will be on the line no matter how many hat-tricks they bang in.
Thankfully the PFA is focusing on sustainable solutions rather than an answer of just throwing more of other people’s money at it. The last thing football in Australia needs now is another decade wasted on image-transforming gimmicks as an alternative to implementing real reforms.
The development of a more confident football culture is a no-brainer; football’s solutions won’t be found in crusades or farnarkling or tiddlywinks supporters. As they say, faith can be caught but it can’t be taught; forcing the issue is counterproductive.
Confidence is being comfortable with what is, not pining and whining about what isn’t or other folks not getting it. The evangelist trying to bludgeon into the unconverted a love of football to validate their own feelings might as well have teir insecurity tattooed on their foreheads.
That would be a giant leap forward, the football culture presenting as a comfortable and contended community and not one bleeding with frustration and division because it’s not where it wants to be.
The Lowy succession is another big one – as it presently stands constitutions-wise, the A-League franchises have no defense against FFA falling into the hands of hostile elements from the state federations.
Lowy’s legacy is looking pretty thin at this stage but he can redeem himself in the wake of the Smith review by making the governors accountable to someone other than club officials, if not for the sake of the grassroots participants and the good of the game, then the commercial security of the A-League. It’s not a World Cup but it would be a gift that kept on giving.
Football’s stated reasons for pumping money into the A-League are looking more disingenuous by the hour, with junior club fees so high that whatever synergies were meant to come from that media exposure-participation nexus went into a negative feedback loop years ago.
Football’s preferred solution to date has been for head office put its hand out to taxpayers and billionaires so the top-end of the game can attract new customers to its branches – despite the grassroots clubs jacking up their fees to capitalise on the rush – and FFA is back to the taxpayers’ trough looking for handouts.
Surely if we just make the A-League bigger than Ben Hur, we’re home free?
That depends on whether it matters if most kids can afford to play the game, and that is a lot fewer when they’re expected to help subsidise Cecil B. De Mille’s hobbies too. The more kids that walk away because of costs, the greater the cost burden is on those that remain, and that’s a one-way street; future-eating.
Thank heavens the PFA has fingered that fatuous argument.
Exorbitant club fees tend not to make much of a splash in the minds of governors accountable to the clubs charging them, and the football media tend to dismiss it as a concern confined to second-tier sport and none of their business, so it’s not on too many A-League supporters’ radars. To see it takes an awareness of the big picture as well.
Wasn’t Andrew Demetriou a players’ union man once like Brendan Schwab is now?
Sounds like a succession plan to me.
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