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Opinion

Professional football can thrive only with strong community football support

(Photo by Visionhaus/Getty Images)
Roar Guru
20th July, 2022
49

Part of football’s issues over the decades has been its one-upmanship. The professional football community in Australia is polarised between various groups all thinking they have the knowledge to solve our issues.

It’s actually laughable, as most simply shout out slogans and have key attack lines towards other groups.

I can’t stand NSL folk almost willing the A-League to fall over. Equally I can’t stand people wanting the former NSL sides to collapse.

The truth is many, if not most, football folk in Australia see our issues as being easy to fix. Further issues can be fixed with simple ideas. We compare ourselves to Europe and South America. Anyone who even suggests our sporting environment is a tad different is quickly told we are not unique.

The very simple if unpleasant truth is the mix of teams in the NSL was never going to get mainstream support, no matter how successful.

We don’t have football community support in professional Australian football.

The world is in the grip of an attitude that says ‘you don’t need to understand to manage’. It’s specialists versus generalists. Each sees only the lack of their expertise in the other. The ancients moved in tribes because all skills were needed to survive. Industrialisation accelerated the way we could all work separately but together as a society.

Technology has enabled large numbers of people to survive without understanding how anything works while forgetting how each of us still relies on others.

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It certainly allows senior executives to think they know what is going on ‘at the coalface’. The humble dashboard somehow became the Holy Grail.

Generic football

(Photo By Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

Fundamentally the Australian Professional Leagues, Football Australia, and the state and federal NPLs use their power and influence together with corporate backing to bamboozle the football community. Failures are translated into successes or reinterpreted as events beyond their control. Ineptitude is just covered up.

If pushed, as in the need to publish annual reports, performance is measured against fast-moving goalposts instead of five-year strategic plans.

The victim is the football community, many of us stoically continuing to support both professional and community football. The community has no voice and is too geographically and demographically diverse to reach, key APL, FA and state and federal platforms and decision-makers.

The people running the game think differently. They’re all about the corporate image, branding, performance indicators, revenue streams, managing outcomes, profit yields, the corporate family, marketing – all stuff that is important to them, but you wonder what the relevance of it is to the rest of us. Professional administrators speak a different language.

Football in Australia doesn’t need saving, it operates and flourishes at all levels except the professional level.

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Professional football in Australia at all levels needs to understand they need community football to support them, but they do nothing to attract that support.

As an outside reference, Major League Soccer in the United States has exploded from where it was in 2000. In part that’s because the MLS identified a number of major issues they needed to solve and then build around. Two they saw as critical were football-specific stadiums so that they could control their grounds and also a 32 or 34-week regular season plus playoffs. The season length is equally critical in Australia as well.

By taking a long-term view of where they sat and what was achievable, MLS and USA professional football in general have grown.

Our issues are many but fundamental to grow Australian Professional Football is to connect to the player base, engage the player base, and change the perception of how the player base views Australian Professional Football. This is neither simple nor does it have simple solutions. Community Football is IMO the fundamental base starting point to build from.

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