How the FFA got youth development so wrong

Back in the days of the golden generation, the multitude of South American players went to continental Europe especially Italy and Spain, while Francophone Africans gravitated towards Ligue Un. These players are now flocking to England, the once-traditional stomping ground for Aussies abroad and this will accelerate after Brexit where EU nationals may prefer the lesser paperwork and stay on the continent,

I've stated elsewhere that people overestimate the coaching structures that were in place at the time and the golden generation actually point to the migrant coaches at their various clubs who were largely responsible for their development. This had largely dissapeared in the final years of the NSL and our 1999 u17 team that made the world cup final produced functional but unremarkable players at best. Even it's brightest star Josh Kennedy was the last of the old style of target men.

There are shades of grey between black and white. The experts recognise the shades. I didn't say Leckie was particularly skilful, just that he is far more skilful than he used to be. Again, shades of grey.

@Redondo Everyone can have an opinion on any topic. I choose to embrace the opinions of people who are experts in any field. So, on player technical development I'll listen to people who know what they're talking about. The fact you introduce Matt Leckie into this discussion is utterly baffling. Matt Leckie is a wonderful athlete. He's mentally tough. But, he is exactly the sort of technical incompetent that stifles the National Team. If Matt Leckie had better touch, he'd probably have scored early in the match against Peru and his passing accuracy in the attacking half would have been higher than 58% at the World Cup tournament. If you can't see the difference between the technical competence of Daniel Arzani & Matt Leckie, then this discussion is futile.

Nemesis It's a myth to say skills 'must' be developed between ages 6-12. That's probably the most effective time to learn skills because kids have far more freedom to devote time to leisure activities. But, the truth is, skills can be learnt and enhanced at any age. It's not a binary proposition. Rep team coaches, at all age levels, should do what Alan Jones did when he coached the Wallabies: identify individual skill deficiencies and make players devote additional time to upgrading those particular skills. Leckie is a great example of how a top level athlete can gradually improve over time. He is much more skilful now than when he first appeared in the national team. It's frustrating to hear people say that coaches of top level teams can only work with what they're given. It's just not true.

Waz - Numerically your discussion is indisputable but when you add in your final sentence to the equation the whole spectrum changes. Quality is an excellent use of a word when it applies to coaching of youngsters,and it is in this area of our vast numbers of kids that some sort of "policing" is going to have to take place, and the ability to gain a certificate from the internet is certainly not the way to go about it. In my journeying around junior fields I still see far too many "coaches" trying to emulate those "dancing dervishes" we all see on TV, shouting and gesticulating to their charges,guys they have paid millions of dollars for, assuming that they were procured because they could play the game. You say the FFA are going to have to supervise and assess the performance of the academies but is this the same FFA that employed 2 Directors of Coaching who reportedly wrote and re-wrote our new curriculum and then walked away from their efforts leaving the facilitations of their purported ideas to others to implement. You have much more faith than I do on this subject. Cheers jb.

I am amazed at the lack of people who cannot define the problem with football in Australia (which i am sure if you research) will point to a rather simple solution to why our youth programs are falling behind. Not to many years ago we were the envy of many of footballing nations (Japan included) on the AIS developing and creating forward plans for our talented youth. Like many of you I was involved in Junior football and through the years had hope for the thousands of talented footballers being given a chance. Bring in Geoff Gallop (WHO?) - he was and is a rugby league man through his own admission he had noting to do with football (soccer) and since his appointment has created such a division in Football that is easily seen. The other football? codes in Australia vowed not to let Football (Soccer as they know it) take over Australian sport as it was by 25- 1 registrations per month. FFA took over AIS to strangle development (duh) since he has had the power this was done very quickly, the AIS was working to a degree and needed tweeking not putting out to clubs who were trying to establish themselves in front of the biased and limited sponserships available to them, at the time the A league clubs were fighting all other codes, to be recognised and generate capital to enable them to run development programs. The AIS was essentially a starting model (if it s not broke don t fix it) the FFA (Gallop) identified this and took control which ultimately failed. The FFA who control licences in this country then tried to compact the league teams by denying Wellington a renewal of there licence - who intervened after much public anger - FIFA There are many instances of interference by this man and his team at the head of FFA to try and disrupt football in this country and is winning. Many years ago the football community got over there ethnic differences and moved on. Since Gallop and his Plan, Football has gone backwards Why is this not looked into and fixed. The Australian Rugby Football league, Australian Rules Football are behind this man why are we so blind.

jb One AIS Academy (or “finishing school” as someone more correctly called it) is not going to be as good as 9 Acadamies. Not least because the AIS has only a couple of years with each student whereas the HAL Acadamies will have them from U12 (in Roars case U6) through until U21. So that is better a better volume of kids getting attention and over a longer period of time. The closure of the AIS is an irrelevance in this debate imo. You then go on to broaden the debate to the quality of the Academies, a very valid point. The same arguments exist the world over and apply equally to AIS as they do A League Acadamies. It’s to be hoped that someone (the FFA) is paying close attention to quality. .

Waz - I would hold fire on your assumption that "A-League academies" will produce the "finished articles". There is much evidence in existence that just having an "academy" is no guarantee to producing a production line of A-League standard players. Glasgow Rangers are a good example of this ,under Dick Advocaat they established a multi million dollar (some say $25 millions) establishment in one of Glasgow's elite suburbs and to the best of my knowledge in it's 17 year history has produced only 4 players whose names you may recognise, the goalkeeper McGregor, (Hull City) the full back Hutton (Spurs and Aston Villa), a winger called Chris Burke (Cardiff City) and of course Charlie Adam.(Liverpool and Stoke). By selling these players to southern clubs it could be said the "income" would have helped clear the overall cost ,but I think you would agree that 4 "notables" in 17 years is not a high return. The other disturbing factor is that over those 17 years the number of coaches employed almost matches the number of players to "graduate". Cheers jb.

Nem - Many who have talked on this subject have just refused to do the simple arithmetic that points out what you are trying to point out. Actually the problem being manifested now goes back far beyond the Golden Generation ,for as you rightly say the GG's technical education started long before those lads paraded their skills on the world stage. A part of football history has been kept under wraps for so long it has almost been forgotten. In 1974 a man came to Australia with one thought in mind,he was going to improve the coaching level in this country by employing a coach in every state whose main task was ,not to coach a team,but much more importantly ,coach coaches. He travelled the country running seminars for any interested parties,be they players committee men,or just interested parties. He very quickly observed the fact that to teach adults the principles of football he needed men who were not only qualified coaches but also qualified school teachers.Makes sense ,doesn't it ??? However, as usual ,the establishment in football didn't take kindly to this use of sponsorship money, (Rothman's Cigarettes), and ,true to form this educator was quickly burdened with tasks outside his intended path ,such as coaching national youth teams etc This was in the years 1975/6 and if one calculates in the manner you have the GG would have been around 6-7 in those years. So what was different about this man's aims and philosophies? Nothing really, he preached avidly that youngsters of that age should be playing in small sided games on smaller pitches and in past discussion on here many of the GG have expressed they played on small fields with smaller teams in their early junior days.. So what happened?.The ASF ran out of money and when cigarette advertising was banned this coach ,and his work, were pushed deeply into the background. Then followed a barren spell when football coaching stagnated at the 6-12 level and it came as no surprise to some that in 2008,at great cost, the "new" FFA introduced a Dutch based curriculum heavily based on small sided games with smaller teams,plus the use of a 4-3-3 system for seniors ,a system that the 1974 Socceroo team had used in Germany in the World Cup.!!!!!! So is it any surprise that we have had a 20 year gap in youngster development,and even now there is no guarantee that this new/old curriculum is being used widely across the nation. Cheers jb.

The AIS could graduate about 15 players per year. The 9 new A League Acadamies will graduate about 135 young players per year. Add two extra teams through expansion and that’s 165/year. That’s much better. Can you imagine Europe having only ONE Academy in it as Australia did for decades - how many talented kids didn’t make it in to the AIS each year .... 100? 200? The model being followed in Australia is now the same as the rest of the football world - when will we learn in this country that we can’t act like we are “unique” ... what we need to do has already been tried and tested, best practice is there for us to follow and AIS was not best practice. The moment the A League were allowed to open their own academies, which only occurred this year, the best young kids would opt to go there and not to the AIS which was then, as a consequence, dead in the water.

For example the youth teams, the u17s and u20s have barely practiced and played no games this year prior to there AFC Youth Championships later this year and are expected to qualify for there world cups? It’s no wonder our youth don’t do well like they used to. All the other countries in the AFC have invested in youth and have done much better than us and we haven’t even qualified for a youth World Cup since 2015. But the FFA should never cut costs on a important part on our development of players so something like the FFA COE should have kept in part for players that are not in a-league clubs. As they say, if you don’t invest in youth then you don’t have much of a future and the FFA have put youth development on the back burner and now we are paying the price at Socceroo level.

As pointed out above, the FFA COE wasn't a development scheme, it was initially run under the AIS Soccer Program by Ron Smith and developed players for the Young Socceroos (u20s), so players entering it were generally already fully developed and it was essentially a finishing school for talented youth players. This program was funded by the Australian Sports Commission and given access to all AIS resources. Later football was demoted in category within the Australian Sports Commission and funding was cut along with access to the AIS resources, players were no longer residing at the AIS and had to be bilited out to familes it was also at this time that it changed to focus on u17s rather than as a finishing school (which is what the likes of Viduka, Bresciano, Grella Aloisi all came through. So it's incorrect to say that the FFA were cutting costs, or that we have lost the progam that produced the golden generation, because we'd already lost that when funding was cut by the Australian Sports Commission.

It’s become a problem no doubt, the biggest disappointment is why FFA are cutting costs down on youth development schemes like our youth teams to getting rid of the FFA COE. If this isn’t the wake up for the FFA to act then I don’t know what would.

This is the difference as well, we are changing our style & we are picking more players based on technical ability instead of physical abilities & this brings us back to the field against the Asian countries especially.

It's generally accepted technical training for football must be developed between ages 6-12, which means, apart from Daniel Arzani, the 23 man squad who represented AUS at the World Cup Tournament would've started & mostly completed their technical education before the new FFA was formed under Frank Lowy's Chairmanship. So, all the blame for technical deficiencies across individuals in the team can be blamed on everything and anything but not the FFA. In fact, we cal look at Arzani as being amongst the success stories of "new football education" that's been driven by the FFA. And, Arzani is not the only one. Italiano, De Silva, Atkinson, Tongyik, Theoharous, Pasquali Caletti, Deng. They're all technical footballers who all started their technical training after the FFA released its Blueprint for Football Education in AUS - aka tthe National Curriculum.

Judging our progress based on youth teams is flawed without looking at the context of the performances. We lost the final of the 1999 u17 World Cup in New Zealand largely by ceding possession to the Brazillians, holding out and going to penalties. Only Josh Kennedy from that team really made a name for himself at Socceroos level, a lot of the products of that team became nothing more than servicable A-League players eg Wayne Shroj, Iain Fyfe, Dylan Macallister, Mark Byrnes, Louis Brain, Shane Cansdell-Serriff, Jess Vanstrattan, Lucas Pantelis and Jade North. I've watched our progress through all of our AFC and FIFA youth tournament appearances and we definitely are making progress even if the results don't show it. Our players are far more comfortable on the ball, we play with the intent to attack but a naivety at the back. Often the bad results stem from the same issues as we have at senior level, opponents who sit back and defend or alternatively poor nations who just players at the older end of the age group who are able to physically over power us.

Did they move away from football or did they just go to the pathways that offered them the best chance of success which no longer meant staying at the formerly NSL clubs? I watched a tv sports segment a couple of years ago that talked to the golden generation about their experiences of coming through the systems and a lot of them touched on the lost generation of coaches because of the death of the NSL and removal of ethnic-based clubs from the top of the pyramid. Almost all of that generation would have come through those clubs and expressed dismay that a lot of the coaches, many of them migrants, were lost to the game when the ethnic-based clubs were no longer a pathway to the top. Many, they believed just gave it away without passing that knowledge on to the next generation of coaches. It would stand to reason that our current generation has largely come through the period between the NSL (03/04) and when the FFA started to focus on re-educating coaches within the curriculum (2009) and further when NPL was implemented (2013 onwards). The Arzani's of today would have been 10 when the whole curriculum framework had started. A child born in 2009 would only be 9 years old now so it's 10 years before we even see the first kid who has spent his whole life under the curriculum, though if you look at maybe kids who start playing football at age 6 in 2009 they would be 15 now so we should start to the real outcomes of what we're doing very soon ie players like Christian Theoharus and Jacob Italiano.

Yet they have made every WC since!!!!!!

The lack of development at youth level is the biggest challenge we faced and the most disappointing aspect of Australian football this century. We don't have the finances or resources to keep up with other nations. We have not made any progress since 2005 and the poor results of our youth teams, young Footballroos, U20s and Olyroos would confirm this.