Looking at the FFA’s strategic plan for 2016-2019

Looking at the FFA’s strategic plan for 2016-2019

0
SHARE

Tuesday saw the FFA release its strategic plan for Australian football for the next four years, with a particular focus on the A-League.

But is it a plan that will see football in Australia shift in any significant way?

David Gallop outlined four guidelines that the FFA hopes to build on between now and 2019. The main two worth discussing through the lens of professional Australian football is the FFA’s aim to connect more fans with the sport in Australia and the desire to build a constantly successful national side. These two are where the most significant initiatives will come into play as the FFA attempts to reach difficult targets they have set for the country.

READ MORE: FFA focuses on audience and revenue growth in new strategic plan

Their guideline to connect more fans to football is arguably the most interesting one, if not for anything more but the FFA’s goal to have 40% of all Australians supporting an A-League side by 2019. As it stands now, there are currently 108,368 people who have membership with an A-League club. Even if you were to theoretically double that to account for fans who attend matches but are not members, the number would still be under 220,000. That number could be safely tripled to account for fans who do not attend matches but support clubs and that would still only reach under 700,000 people. Just Australia alone has a population of 24 million, so in order for the FFA to reach its goal of 9.6 million fans (40% of Australia), there is still a long way to go.

However, the FFA intends to reach this goal through a number of interesting initiatives. The one that has been talked about the most is the creation of a centralised marquee system to bring big-name players to the country. There is little doubt that this has arisen from the criticism the FFA has received for the lack of big name marquees brought into the A-League since Alessandro Del Piero. However, with Australia being constantly outbid by larger countries like the US and China for big-time players, it will be interesting to see how the FFA expands on this system in the coming months.

The FFA has also proposed to increase the interest in the A-League on TV – the broadcast ratings which interestingly are their measure for whether the A-League is successful or not – by providing the “best live atmosphere in Australian sport”. This is something that to many fans will be surprising, considering the headlines that arose towards the end of last year regarding public walkouts by fans and the crackdown by the police on A-League supporters. How the FFA will provide such an entertaining atmosphere is almost beyond wonder and with no clear outline as how they intend to achieve that, the goal is one worth looking towards in the coming years.

However, the main criticism of these goals is that despite the intention to increase fan support, the FFA is still refusing to look at expansion or promotion and relegation in the near future. While chairman Steven Lowy admitted in his open letter that “ideally we should increase the number of A-League clubs” he immediately followed that idea with “but that is a task for another day” and this is the wrong attitude to take. Assuming the FFA meets its goals of having 40% of Australians support an A-League side, that means any new club coming into the competition from 2020 at the earliest will have an immense uphill battle to secure support.

If the A-League wants to increase fan support, expansion is one of the easiest ways to achieve this goal. A competition with more sides will be more entertaining and allow for the sport to grow in markets where there is no A-League team at the moment. Two perfect examples already exist in Wollongong and Canberra, where sizable populations have no side to support so either support random clubs or do not follow the A-League at all.

Expansion would also be more enticing to broadcasters as it would give them more matches to show rather than the measly five a week the league provides now. It is understandable that the FFA wants to create sustainable clubs, but the longer the FFA takes to add new sides to the competition, the more it is going to hurt the A-League.

The FFA has also outlined a goal to create constantly successful national sides, even going as far as to set targets for the national sides through to 2019. This includes the Socceroos making it past the group stage at the 2017 Confederations Cup and the 2018 World Cup and the Matildas making it to the semi-finals of the 2019 Women’s World Cup. These goals are ambitious and at this stage there are simply too many variables to argue whether they could be achieved or not. For example, if the Matildas are eliminated at the hands of Germany in the quarter-finals in 2019, would that be a failure? The FFA is asking for improvement in our performances on the international stage and while it can be achieved through some of the initiatives it proposes, it also requires a significant amount of luck.


POPULAR ARTCLES

FFA-JFA referee exchange program set to continue in A-League rounds 23 and 24

Young Pararoo Taylor Harvey talks future of Paralympic football [VIDEO]

What We Learned – Socceroos squad announcement


It is in this area that the initiatives are the most exciting to see proposed and the FFA deserves to be praised for its intentions in this area. With a planned 15 national development centres by 2019, there is a clear focus on youth development, something Australia has been focusing on in recent history under the watchful guise of technical director Eric Abrams. With the FFA also aiming to focus more on the development of A-League youth academies, there is a shift towards the German system that has made the country a world power of the last 15 years.

A rather interesting goal the FFA has set is to increase the number of C-Licensed accredited coaches by 3,500 people by 2019. At the moment, Australia has a severe problem in its coach accreditation system that seems to go unnoticed, and there is no doubt it will be intriguing to see how the FFA fixes this to allow a wider range of people to secure coaching badges. Even a quick search during the writing of this article showed a total of four C-Level courses being held in New South Wales in the next 12 months.

With the cost of these courses starting at $1,155 and being reasonably time intensive – candidates must attend seven sessions and if they miss one, they instantly fail the course – there is a high difficulty in achieving these badges as well as almost entirely shutting out prospective younger coaches due to the high cost and time demand. While the FFA has not yet discussed how it will reach its projected 3,500 new coaches by 2019, it is still a goal worth aiming for and one that can only help Australian football grow in quality.

The Strategic plan for 2016 to 2019 is an interesting one as it outlines just where Australia could head in the near future. While most of the work is being done off the pitch and off the screens, it is the ones that are aiming for the screens that are justifiably the most talked about. However, it seems that on those points, the FFA is stuttering yet again, with goals that want to be ambitious but initiatives that seem to fly in the face of those goals. To put it simply, if the FFA wants to have 9.6 million A-League fans by 2019, it needs to find another way to draw people in besides a large marquee fund.

What are your thoughts? Let us know by dropping a comment below via our Facebook comment box. Make sure you follow us on Twitter @Outside90 and like us on Facebook.