On 9 December, Football Federation Australia held two crucial meetings. In the afternoon, Steven Lowy’s first chairman’s meeting encouraged A-League clubs to get more involved in the next round of broadcast deals, marketing and recruitment of marquee players. In the evening, FFA chief executive David Gallop met A-League active supporter groups – who walked out of games in round eight and boycotted round nine – to reach an in-principle agreement regarding FFA’s banning process.



The meetings brought positive closure to a year characterised by tremendous highs on the pitch and dismal lows off it. The Socceroos won the Asian Cup in January, the Matildas reached the quarter-finals at the women’s World Cup in June, and the A-League’s most decorated club, Melbourne Victory, won three trophies by November. Yet there was also a lingering, bitter industrial dispute between players and FFA, the A-League’s first full-blown salary cap scandal and the league-wide boycotts by active supporter groups against FFA.

After such a great start to the year with the Asian Cup victory, it was incredible to watch the subsequent calamities unfold. From insane match scheduling (how can FFA still not realise it often gets really, unbearably hot during the Australian summer?) to constant policy on the run (reducing the FFA Cup final ticket price at the 11th hour, after the most loyal fans had already paid full price was never going to be popular), to the Victory-Wellington away strip debacle (white on silver is harder to separate than white on blue, who would have thought?), no error was too clumsy, no gaffe too ludicrous. By year’s end, as football descended into civil war, the Herald Sun was moved to publish a long-list of 32 FFA stuff-ups in 18 months.

Yet no matter the news, at every press conference Gallop and head of the A-League Damien De Bohun emerged dead-eyed to repeat the same mantra: “We want to be the number one sport in Australia”. Even among the football evangelists, you sense it has started to wear thin. FFA is starting to sound like Australian basketball in the 1990s – all talk and no product.

Despite the success of the Socceroos and the Matildas, the inescapable truth is that the A-League is stale, its ratings are flat-lining and several key relationships in the game are strained or broken.

The first example of FFA’s mismanagement was the Perth Glory salary cap scandal, for which the club was disqualified from the 2014-15 finals series. The investigation by Fairfax Media not only highlighted Glory’s wrong-doing, but also the total inadequacy of FFA’s auditing system. It had been happening for four seasons and, without Fairfax’s investigation, probably would have gone on unchecked.

Next was the seemingly never-ending pay dispute between FFA and Professional Footballers Australia. Not only were discussions held in poor faith, FFA ended up losing the PR battle for their treatment of the Matildas, who had just come home from a successful World Cup campaign. After intense media pressure FFA eventually offered Matildas players the minimum wage.

While the national teams were a consistent shining light, when Socceroos boss Ange Postecoglou ventured an opinion on the pay dispute, he was slapped down by his paymasters. That’s the national team coach – a hero to many and a personification of Australian football – chastised by a bunch of utterly replaceable bureaucrats. Laughable. It is to Postecoglou’s credit that he didn’t walk away there and then, particularly considering the Socceroos have gone for so long without a major sponsor. Postecoglou guided the Socceroos to an Asian Cup on home soil. What more could the Socceroos do to provide FFA with commercial leverage? The divergence in football and administrative ability has been staggering.

Rather than give the masses hope, the strategy for expansion has been uninspiring. In October, Wellington Phoenix were told they would not be granted a 10-year licence extension. Almost instantly it galvanised fans and owners across the league against FFA, and generated negative publicity for the A-League just a few weeks into the 2015-16 season.

Moreover, to talk down Canberra’s chances – in the week the city hosted the Socceroos – was a curiously bleak option to choose. No region, city or state league side has been given a clear pathway or time-frame for the growth of the league beyond 10 teams.

Football in Australia has long been an emotional, exhaustingly political sport and FFA has taken a hard line in response. Coaches are slapped down for speaking their minds, club owners have been shackled by FFA’s refusal to allow the league to become independent (despite the recommendations of the Crawford Report), and media are delivered turgid, beige, equivocating statements instead of proper responses.

The relationship between FFA and broadcaster SBS has illustrated an attitude problem. Considering the history between football and SBS, the relationship should be one of the closest in sports broadcasting. Instead it has grown into one of the most toxic. SBS is flatly refused the rights to fixtures of significant public interest, and the governing body has made it clear both privately and publicly that it wants the A-League on a more commercially oriented free-to-air network.

Certainly SBS is not the broadcaster it used to be, and putting the A-League on SBS2 has been a disastrous move. Yet SBS remains part of the soul of Australian football and still deserves more respect than is currently being shown by FFA management.

Meanwhile the fans have been used and abused. FFA’s marketing promises the game is “fan made”, but the active supporter groups this season reached the end of their tether. Indeed the worst administrative cock-up of 2015 was during the A-League boycotts. For many, it went to the heart of what’s wrong with the culture of FFA.

It began with a front-page “name and shame” file of banned football fans in the Daily Telegraph, which was almost universally condemned by fellow journalists, commentators and fans. Yet it came from the very newspaper that FFA has spent a decade grovelling to, leaking stories to and generally prostrating themselves in front of. Ask anyone who works in football outside the News Corp empire and they’ll say the same thing: no relationship is more important to the FFA communications department than the Daily Telegraph.

In this context FFA were hesitant to stand up for their own supporters, and offered deceit and half-truths when questioned over their lack of an appeals process for banned fans. And so the active supporters simply stopped going to games. Think about that. While FFA are convinced that everyone is out to get them, people actually boycotted the teams they love. After a decade of investment in FFA’s project, they wanted to feel they were more important than short-term commercial metrics. Ironically it took a league-wide fan boycott for FFA to truly recognise that they are.

Ultimately FFA have got what they deserve. Their insatiable desire for football to be “acceptable” and “mainstream” has meant that the Tele sports editor – a staunch rugby league man – writing positively about football is seen as some kind of road-to-Damascus moment. It’s the kind of attitude that prompts FFA to request that SBS get rugby league players on their pre-game show. It’s why so few of FFA’s administrators have been drawn from a football background, instead being picked off from cricket, AFL or the rugby codes.

Rather than football being proud of its own people and its own culture, and growing from that base, FFA wants those that don’t care for the game to flick down some scraps. It is a humiliating spectacle, and at some point it has to end.

It is true that FFA has to do a lot with a little. The Whole of Football Plan, released midway through this year, provides a commendable 20-year vision for the game. Still FFA will be under-resourced to deliver these long term and big picture items. There isn’t a lot the governing body can do about that in the immediate future.

What FFA can do is reform its attitude to its constituents and enter the new year ready to listen – truly listen, not just for photo-ops – and act in a more consultative manner. In the same week that active fans boycotted the A-League, football was again shown to be the number one participation sport in Australia for children.

In this context it is embarrassing and unnecessary for Gallop and De Bohun to relentlessly talk about football becoming the number one spectator sport. Give the game space to breathe and grow organically, and maybe one day it will get there. Even if it doesn’t, does it really matter? Football doesn’t begin and end with the professional game – it is already played and watched by a greater cross-section of Australian society than perhaps any other sport.

Of greater immediate importance is to consolidate the successes of the past decade and learn from the mistakes. Hopefully the events of 9 December are a sign of things to come.