Les Murry - SBS head of Football Article

In the five and a half years since, the game has been turned on its head, much of it in super quick time. An unthinkable lot has been achieved. But challenges still lie ahead. The temple of football, to paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt, is yet to be restored to the ancient truths.

In the first of a two part series, we examine the state of our game, breaking it up into five departments, scoring each out of maximum of 20 rating points.

We begin in this edition with community standing and management.

Community standing

The respect football now gets in the broad Australian population is at an all-time high, a splendid position to be in, obviously, but especially given that just a few years ago this was football�s great Achilles� heel.

It is now not only safe to take your kids to football matches but, apparently, the thing to do. There are no national flags and the administrators don�t have funny names, even if the players still do. Football�s image is good. This translates to good marketability. Football is �new money�.

A transition to credible management, under the leadership of Frank Lowy, has thrust football into a place where it can lethally harness the momentum of globalisation, a process that requires Australia to play ball with the rest of the world. And that, in short, means you can�t engage with the rest of the world, especially our region, through Aussie Rules, cricket or even rugby. It has to be football.

Governments are now recognising this. Business is recognising it. The media is recognising it. This means more funding from and higher engagement with government, bigger investment from business and more generous media space and air time allotted to football than at any time before.

This is in some contrast to what is happening with some other, more established sports, seen as rival �codes� of football. Their problem, for the most part, is that they have nowhere to go, no realistic opportunities to expand beyond our shores, giving football an unchallengeable advantage.

In community standing football is a bed of roses but there are still some areas that need attention.

Australian football�s international standing took a blow during last year�s Asian Cup, when we were seen to be cocky, supremacist and arrogant, whilst losing on the field in the process. But reparation is in train and helping that has been the recruitment of Pim Verbeek as national coach, a man well steeped in Asian football and all of its cultural sensitivities.

But away from that, Australia�s international football standing is healthy and rising. Frank Lowy is now a member of the prestigious FIFA World Cup Organising Committee and, it appears, he is soon to sit on the executive board of the powerful Asian Football Confederation.

Australia�s bid to host the FIFA World Cup in 2018, far from being a pipe dream as sceptics would suggest, is credible and achievable. Australia�s hosting of the FIFA Congress in Sydney in May was a roaring success. Internationally, in football, Australia is now a country of some relevance and of growing influence.

The media treatment of football in the Australian community, though improved, is not where it should be. Newspaper space is still disproportionately low as sports editors continue to try and outdo each other in giving oxygen to AFL and rugby league, squeezing football out. This needs fixing.

The television exposure football gets is also unsatisfactory.

A developing football nation cannot afford for long to confine its product to pay television, as is the case now with the Socceroos and the A-League, until 2013. Pay television does not convert and therefore does not grow markets. It is essential that the A-League and the Socceroos reappear on free TV as soon as possible.

Score: 15/20

Management

Football, at the peak of its pyramid, is now being run as a business with utter professionalism, in vast contrast to the low calibre, politically driven style of governance that preceded the Crawford Inquiry.

Frank Lowy, who was ironically part of �old soccer�, provides the vision and the inherent football passion from the top, above a team of lieutenants steeped in business if not entirely steeped in football.

Lowy�s habit of intervention, driven by his passion for the game and a natural understanding of it, was not welcomed by his departed chief executive, John O�Neill, but it should have been. A management team good at business but dreadfully low on genuine football blood always needed a guiding wand from Lowy and still does.

Few realise what a direct hand Lowy has had in some of the most significant of football�s breakthroughs. The entry into Asia, the appointment of Guus Hiddink, the triggering of the National Development Plan, the recruiting of technical director Rob Baan, as just some examples, were all Lowy initiatives. Not to mention how important Lowy has been in the gathering of money from government and corporate sources.

Ben Buckley, O�Neill�s successor, is a different man: congenial and responsive, he actually listens and welcomes input from others, including football people, of which he is not one. Though O�Neill�s place in pioneering a new, professional and creative era in football administration will always be rightfully his, the next phase in steering football forward is, as O�Neill himself has said, for someone else and that someone else is Buckley, a good choice.

On the financial side football is now a business of sizeable turnover, not quite up there with AFL or rugby league but fast nearing it. It is an expensive sport to run, its coffers regularly raided by the expense of running a myriad of national teams in innumerable regional and global competitions. Integration with Asia has been a heaven sent thing but, goodness, it has come at some cost.

But this is only the top of the football pyramid. The sea change Crawford prescribed at the breadth of the game is still a long way from having been achieved.

The peak of the pyramid, represented in the old days by sickly and amateurish administration and an ownership of the game by migrants, has been swept aside, replaced by a white veneer or purity and clean acceptability.

But at its lower tiers, at state and district levels, �old soccer� was just as sick as it was at its top, maybe sicker, and this is yet to be addressed. The veneer is wafer thin.

The recent serious issues raised by Craig Foster concerning Football NSW are a symptom of this. The Australian game�s most powerful and biggest regional body is a living and breathing epitome of �old soccer�, fuelled by power, cronyism, politics and money, without the slightest regard for relevance in playing a part in football�s development.

This paralysis in the game�s advancement needs to be busted apart, and it is the FFA that has to do it. It, the FFA, is the only body that has the power to do it.

And until it does real development will be stalled.

Finally, but critically, there is the question of what to do with �old soccer�, for �old soccer� is far from dead.

In the wake of Crawford, the fashionable thing to do was for �new football� to disassociate itself from what used to govern the game�s image, especially the perceived grip ethnic minorities had on it.

This was logical and wise in the immediate sense. But, sacrilegious as it sounds, long term this will need a second look.

Rejoiced as we all were, me included, at the passing of the moniker that football was �wogball�, the reality is that the migrant communities did an immense amount for football and they should never have been demonised.

One man who knew the value of the love of football its old constituency possesses is Frank Lowy who famously begged the fans of �old soccer� to support the A-League. And they came to the party.

And why did they? Because they love the game too much to abandon it.

But more critically, �old soccer� has tremendous assets, assets which �new football� is not harnessing.

It has infrastructure and real estate, worth many millions in some cases. It has academies and junior development programs that are critical to our technical education.

It has experience in football administration and, above all, passion and love for football, a willingness to give for the game without asking for material reward. For every professional administrator that now makes a living in �new football� there are still a thousand volunteer soldier ants in the forgotten world of �old soccer�, all working away, week in and week out, fuelled only by their love of the game.

This is a tough ask for the FFA: how to tap into these priceless resources without spooking the horses by creating the apparition that �wogball� is about to make a comeback.

But ultimately it is a challenge that has to be faced. Wasting such assets, and going into denial about them, in the name of image protection doesn�t make an awful lot of business sense to me.

Score: 12/20

Beyond this, three more departments in the state of the game, need examination: national teams, the A-League and technical development.

All that in this space next week.