Schwab should lead football from the top

Trouble is he put it out there and then proceeded to forget all about it until now and all that time junior fees have continued to increase. But you're right RC, Fossie has been onto it previously and I neglected to say that. Apologies.

Not sure why it matters Bondy -- if my arguments have merit or otherwise it'll be found in the articles, not my CV. You're not alone though being more concerned about who's talking than what is being said -- I've just been looking at Fossie's piece on TWG on junior club fees and he's getting about 90% support for the notion that HAL is stuffed unless the situation changes. Whenever I've raised that issue in here we've got a somewhat different response -- anti-HAL, anti-sokkah, AFL fan, just making it all up etc etc. Pity I'm no Socceroo or high junior fees would have been addressed about five years ago when I first started banging on about them. Anyway, the deaf ears and blind eyes aren't my problem, that's one for football supporters to ponder. Do they really think they can make football better by simply shooting the messenger and denying inconvenient truths? What I will say background-wise is that there are three distinct 'branches' of Australian domestic soccer, HAL, the state leagues and juniors, and I would recommend football supporters familiarise themselves with the business models of the three tiers so they can begin to appreciate that their survival and success is inter-dependent. Brendan Schwab is an important player because he's one of the precious few insiders with the faintest idea about how the entire machine works -- most with a vested interest only look after their particular patch as if the various elements all work independently and that approach makes everyone's job so much harder. That's not to say there aren't a lot of people around who know what's going on but their insider status get revoked pretty quickly when they start calling for changes and threatening the feathery nests of those leeching off the present mess. It's a funny old game. I've received late-night threatening calls from "old soccer" for being seen to be associated with "new football" and when I concluded new football was no better and probably worse than old soccer, I've had "new football" on the blower after midnight. Lovely people, all of them. What do you think is going on there, Bondy? That's the trouble with corruption -- stolen money and unearned privileges is small beer next next to the damage the secrecy and cover ups cause.

Hi again TC, So far as financial barriers to participation go, the risk is all football's -- it's no skin off anyone else's nose. Tennis Australia had this debate about 15 years ago and it went with the coaches' point of view -- get the participants to pay top dollar for their coaching and they'd deliver us champions. That didn't work because to be in 'the system' cost a small fortune and all that's left around elite junior tennis these days are kids from already financially comfortable families so the talent pool so much shallower and now the whole sport is struggling, with Tennis Australia resorting to counting kids in one-off clinics and in-school programs as 'registered participants' to keep up its ASC funding. FFA's national curriculum says "traditionally the most talented players have often come from a lower socio-economic environment. .... Therefore, the assumption is justifiable that this situation causes a substantial loss of potential talent." FFA aren't being bleeding hearts -- the fine motor skills and muscle memory for football take ages to develop and a kid to who a football is a luxury tends to spend more time developing those skills than kids who who spend 20 hours a week on their X-box etc. Craig Foster weighed in today with his take on the situation http://theworldgame.sbs.com.au/craig-foster/blog/1059837/The-high-cost-of-playing-the-game-we-love

Yep, TC, the by-words these days early talent identification and 'pathways'. Football isn't alone on that, it's just following the same tried-and-failed AIS model our other Olympic sports follow. The AIS model makes sense for sports here that don't have many participants. Slinging $millions at a handful of participants on AIS scholarships under world-class coaches can beat the system and pick up medals in sports we don't actually play here. It's harder to beat the system in mass-participation sports though where the depth of the talent pool counts more than anything else. Introducing early-talent ID and elite-pathway model into sports with already large participation jacks up their costs, reduces participation and kills of any chance that sport has of finding those one-in-10k players who might be world-beaters. Read all about it in David Crawford's "Future of Sport" -- it's got all the numbers, canvasses all the alternatives and permutations and where they'll take us. As it points out, pumping money into elite sport actually damages the grassroots. Is that what sports with grassroots really want? The route we've chosen -- not my choice, I wrote letters of protest to the ASC -- is one that pumps govt money into elite soccer and jacks up grassroots participation costs and -- Crawford says, not me -- is all good news for the AFL and the NRL.

Hi Wookie, Some say its the AFL and NRL's media rights that explain the difference but that falls apart as soon as we throw numbers at it. If there are 400,000 kids playing soccer (some say there is double that) and we want FFA's next media rights deal to knock $300 off each one's participation costs, that's, er, $120 million a year. Those are conservative figures, of course. The fee gap is greater than $300 and some say there are nearly a million playing football in Australia. Also, soccer juniors in so-called 'talented player programs' (about 10,000 nationally, it's a pretty loose definition) are up for thousands of dollars each -- up to $6k for state reps. Last I heard, and it was from an unreliable source, the AFL was chipping in about $30 million annually to grassroots footy. Can Ben Buckley pull of a media deal that delivers $150-200 million a year to the grassroots? Hmmmm. It's a lot of money but that's what the participants are presently chipping in and about two-thirds of it goes into the black economy that's been around soccer clubs forever -- they used to fiddle the books on player transfer fees -- ask Fozzie, Kimon, Filan, they got done over over like everyone did in their day -- but now that's been curtailed and clubs don't win Tatts for flogging off players, club officials feel obliged to skin every kid who comes in their door lest their lifestyles suffer. Nope, the best I can come up with is junior fees being based on a percentage of Lionel Messi's contract -- it's whatever the market will bear. The high fees partially explain the drop-out rate from u-13s onward -- huge fees make sense if you're Lionel Messi and you'll get them back a million-fold, but the second a kid and/or his parents work out he's not good enough to play professionally, they sensibly go and spend that fortune elsewhere and leave soccer to the trainee pros.