Don't look now, but football in Australia just changed shape, right from its very DNA. You won't see it until late next season or more likely the following year, but a change in the game is coming, borne of a new generation of coaches with a different view of the game and its foundational methodology.

The shift has me more excited about anything in Australian football since we qualified in 2005 for the World Cup in Germany. Why? Because the quality of our coach education directly determines the quality of our coaches, which is the primary determinant of the quality of our players. It's a simple linear equation that ends in success.

New breed … Tony Popovic meets the media. Credit:Steve Christo

It has taken a long time, and been a hard road to hoe to challenge our coaching fraternity to self-examine, face our inadequacies, and resolve to improve and bridge the gap to the best nations. But often the first step is the most difficult and in the past two years in particular, cultural acceptance has reached critical mass and the pace has quickened.

Now everyone is hungry to learn, desperate for information, looking for answers rather than aiming to disguise weaknesses, and our coaches have adopted a new mentality of constant learning as a fundamental requirement of the profession. That, too, is a welcome change. We are now treating our coaches as professionals; technicians who must undertake a lengthy and increasingly rigorous education process. From this comes a newfound respect for what they are, not just who they are.