Progress Report - 2 years since the WC

I completely agree with this. Women's football in NZ has been a bit of an unheralded success story but I get the feeling that times are about to change. Netball is crap, football is a much better sport both to watch and play.In terms of the men's game things are a bit harder to judge. We have a great generation of players just starting out their club careers (Wood, Rojas, Kosta, Gleeson, Reid, Smith, Howieson, Keat etc) but there still seems to be a significant disconnect between age-group football and broader ideas about developing football. Our Olympic qualifying campaign was less than impressive and decisions like leaving out Rowe from that squad or Chettleburgh from the U20s are bizarre. While we have good players coming through there are still a couple of positions� where we look potentially thin: the most worrying is defensive midfielders as Elliott has retired and Vicelich can't be too far away. Maybe those private academies will help to develop the next generation though!One of the problems I think is inherent in NZ football (and I have seen it in cricket too) is the prevalence of nepotism at provincial age-group level. Too often talented kids are left out so the coaches son and his mates can be in the reps and these players just drift away from the game over time. I used to coach a team of 14/15 year olds and one of them had a younger brother who was maybe 8 or 9 and was by far and away the best kid of his age I have ever seen, but the family were immigrants and the kid wasn't even invited to trial for the regional rep team because he didn't know anyone. I'm not sure what's happened with him since but I remember thinking at the time that it was ludicrous that such a talented kid was missing out. A more professional approach to the management of age-group football would go a long way to helping the sport IMO. Also, there are a large amount of immigrants from Africa, Europe, Asia and even South America who play football at parks on the weekend with their mates but don't take part in formal competitions. If they could be encouraged to join clubs and so on I think it would really help develop a broad base of football players to draw on in future years. However I think there exists a certain amount of casual racism which excludes these players or at least makes them feel unwelcome (I used to play on a team that was mostly Indians and Arabs and we often got called terrorists, and sometimes worse, by opposing players. It really pissed me off as a pakeha lad too because I like to think my country should be above that sh*t) Even if this is only the actions of one or two idiots here and there it is enough to put people off, and rightly so I think.We shouldn't forget the difficulties facing developing football in NZ. We are geographically isolated which makes arranging freindlies against quality opposition hard, and this in turn makes raising the profile of the AWs hard. Talented young footballers in NZ might pursue other sports because football is not as high profile here too. NZ is also a tiny market which means we can't afford to support a professional league, and Australia's joining with Asia has made getting NZ teams into the A leaguemuch harder than it otherrwise would have been. At the same time, we have the advantage of being the Oceania heavyweight now which effectively means we get entry to every FIFA tournament except the senior men's WC, but even for that we only really have to win a 2-legged playoff.One heartening thing to see is the amount of young football fans out there though. Rugby is suffering from over-exposure and poor management, and globalisation of media etc means that kids can follow football easy as, plus it seems like anyone who owns a playstation or xbox has the FIFA game, which also helps raise the profile of the real version of the game. Hopefully this means that footballl will continue to rise in popularity.Anyway, that is my take on the state of football developoment in NZ. Overall I think the future still looks pretty rosy but NZF needs to continue to strive to develop coaches and players at all levels of the game, or else the success of the 2010 AWs will just be another 1982 all over again. I'm not currently convinced that they have done enough, but I'm also not currently involved in youth football so maybe there's stuff going on I'm not aware of.

I think the nepostism thing is a bit of red herring - any kid who walks away from a sport they are talented at because they missed out on a team they think they should be in, is likely to walk away from the sport later due to some other reason.

Who is responsible for overseeing implementation of the WOF plan regionally?  And who is in charge of the programme nationally?

Football Development Managers in each federation.

Director of Football Development in NZF.