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Australian football’s development is best looked at in phases. Phase one was ending the NSL, which was dysfunctional and inward-looking, though some great parts of football’s history came out of the NSL and the clubs.
Phase two was the establishment of the A-League. John O’Neill did an excellent job, and the first A-League season was an outstanding success.
Phase three was the development of the A-League and Australia football in general. This included the media deal with Fox, joining Asia in the FIFA groupings, and expanding the A-League.
Phase three saw the new media deal and recent development across the state associations, and the appointment of a new manager of A-League operations.
Phase four will be the next media deal, in four more years. What it brings will largely be dependent on how well phase three is managed.
But it’s time to reflect on what has been, and what is still to come.
The achievements over the last seven and a half years are many. Football before the A-League could not afford to bring European players back to play in a national match.
It had little to no media presence. The coverage was was generally of bad news. Today we have three broadcasters. SBS has the Friday night A-League matches and delayed Socceroos World Cup qualifiers; the ABC shows the W-League; and Fox has the A-League, Socceroos, and ACL matches.
The ABC broadcast all A-League matches online. FFA will have a budget approaching 100 million when the new media deal and other income is added together.
We need to thank a few people who have got us this far. John O’Neill did an excellent job in the establishment of the A-League. As for Ben Buckley, I was never shy to criticise his lack of media skills, his slowness in promoting FFA and football, and the terrible mistakes in the expansion teams chosen. But I also always said what he was doing behind the scenes was impressive.
Some of this back-room stuff involved developing national training programs, developing technical coaching standards, creating the pathways for the NPL, and for a future Australia Cup, and keeping the best talent we had in football rather than drifting to other codes.
Some of this work is only becoming obvious now.
The AFL experience brought by Buckley to developing and creating national standards and accountability, given the various political goings-on in the state associations, was impressive. Since 1955 the associations and many of the old NSL teams could not stand each other, so his work here must be commended.
Special thanks too to Lyall Gorman, who turned around the A-League in its darkest hour to date.
FFA have appointed Richard Sargent to Head of A-League Operations. Richard comes with 10 years of MSL experience, and years of experience in association football on Sydney’s North Shore.
I think FFA will introduce a knockout cup and a develop a relegation and promotion system. However, the promotion part will only take place when the A-League has more clubs than it has now.
Teams will be selected from the NPL using MLS methods rather than European methods based on the competition tables
How do we grow our crowd attendances and television ratings? We need media. I have been trying to make some sense out of the ratings to see where football stands.
Accepting we do play in summer, cricket is our main competitor. It is therefore interesting that Ben Buckley appointed the former marketing manager of Cricket Australia, whose role also includes scheduling of matches.
The A-League and football in general are particularly popular in the younger age group, from 18 to 34. Older demographics, particularly those over 50, do not have the same support for football.
It is interesting to note that football ratings have failed since the Big Bash started. The ratings for the cricket this summer have been falling, but are still well ahead of football. However the demographics were positive for football in Australia.
In the recent ODI match between the West Indies and Australia, only 39% of the audience was under 39. The total viewer numbers for the match were 243,000.
Two things stand out for me as we develop over the next four years. First the traditional codes have high viewership in the over-50 demographic. They appear to watch and just not turn off. For the future of football, it is important for us to work out how exactly to capitalise on our popularity in the younger demographic.
I hope the next four years deliver a considerable growth and connection with the football family.
We have a new media deal, a unified code, an excellent CEO, who has underneath him has two young guns from Cricket Australia and the MLS who both have football experience.
Finally, I must thank Frank Lowy. Mistakes were made, particularly with expansion, but we have Frank to thank for where football stands today.
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