I tend to agree, and let's face it, NZF are pretty quick to take a portion of their fees off every single registered junior player in NZ and most of those kids get absolutely f*** all back from NZF for their contribution.
I don't really agree with that ThreeFourThree.
The NZF component of junior fees is approx. $5 - $15 depending on the age of the kid. I reckon that represents pretty good value, especially with the Whole of Football plan now in place.
Senior fees are higher of course but still only in the $40 region per season.
The bottom line here is that affiliation fees only contribute about $1.5m to NZF's total revenue of around $9-10m per annum. It's fuck all really, especially when you consider the type of sums being talked about to hire a new CE ($350k min) or stage an All Whites game at home (the Jamaica game apparently cost $500k).
There are so many things that NZF members expect NZF to do, but we don’t actually contribute very much to that. Another example of NZ football fans having champagne taste on a beer budget.
Your statement is a bit misleading - so let's review some of the components of the WoF Plan...
FTC (Federation Talent Centres) - User Pays
NTC (National Talent Centres) - User Pays
Referee Development - User pays
Coaching Tickets - User Pays
I can't speak for what NZF have done for midget football in the past 2 years (before that the sum total was absolutely zero directly unless you count the glossy coaching manual or the Player of the Day certificates - which were likely entirely funded by sponsor money anyway) but based on the fact that a number of clubs were effectively running development programs already along the lines of WoF I suspect NZF have done very little for the fees in some cases. According to their own blurb though NZF talk about WoF funding coming from a combination of SPARC, community funding and commercial sponsors.
I understand what you are saying in regards to costs, but NZF really are their own worst enemies most of the time - implementing some of JVs suggestions would go a long way to boosting NZF profile amongst (at least) the junior footballing public and I'm sure that there are numerous other ways to give back to the community at little cost apart from time.
Apologies that this sounds like a total rant but find myself all too often asking - 'what were they even thinking ?' in relation to NZF these days and for every piece of good work they do, they then seem to follow it up with some piece of mind-bending craziness.
And to be honest it's the clubs that are putting in all the hard work and developing the base skills in these young players - NZF doesn't even see them for the first time until they are 11.
Rant over... :)