Hey Craig Foster: Leave those kids alone!
The brief for this article began with an email discussion with the Editor of UPRA Football Magazine in my motherland, the UK. My football writing had taken a back seat in my life in the last year and with the A-League season about to commence the time was ripe to produce a piece about the development and emergence of elite youth players in Australia. That vision soon changed when my research hit a few speed humps. The obstacles being that currently Australia is in the midst of a crisis when it comes to the emergence of future world-beaters across all top sports.
The overall London Olympics performance of Australia was lacklustre at best, with the Olympic Committee Chairman John Coates calling for more dollars to enhance sport from the grassroots. Individually football needs a steroid-laden injection to wake itself from a self-induced coma. Just weeks ago Football Federation Australia’s Technical Director Han Berger laid his cards on the table: “We are currently not developing enough top flight players. The reason being is that youth development in Australia is all over the place.” In the aftermath of a defeat to world football minnows Jordan, he talked of “self-interest” and a lack of cohesive effort to develop talent as well as hammering the nail in the coffin of many a budding youth coach down-under, “I’m sorry to have to say this but youth coaching is general is still very, very poor.”
In August this year ex-Socceroo and now established football pundit Craig Foster launched his scathing but honest assessment as the new FFA head-honcho David Gallop was appointed. Foster summarised that the A-League needs to move towards “a centralised marketing, management and governance arm” as the MLS in the United States employs to become more stable financially to benefit every club. He argues Grass Roots football has become obscenely expensive and the long-term vision is being drowned in administrator’s salaries. I personally have heard Australian friends complain that the current system is not a ‘top down’ process in that money is not filtered down to grass roots as in the majority of the world’s footballing associations, the dollars are sent upwards to the very top. Foster asserts that if the fat-cats are to be paid handsomely they should damn well earn their money and spend time in the community and become part of local football: “Every employee of FFA should be required to spend time at an Association, a Junior Club, find out what it means for a volunteer to manage a club…(for) a mother to spend whole days in a tuckshop to raise a few hundred bucks for her child’s club.”
Looking back to the national team golden generation of Kewell, Viduka, Cahill, Schwarzer, Emerton, Bresciano, what was so drastically different in youth development twenty years ago? The Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) runs the AIS Football Program, founded in 1981 with the aim of developing young Australian talent to play for their country at a national level in their teenage years and eventually become the backbone of their full national side. Foster claims the scheme has been mismanaged drastically in recent years with the majority of ‘talent’ not developing to become even A-League players. The A-League runs it’s own National Youth League that the AIS competes in against its member clubs. Adam Howard of football blog OS Aussies goes a step further and suggests that Foster’s claims are easy to make to blame the game’s authorities and lack factual clarity. Howard states the Golden Generation were developed at club level by being thrown in at the deep end as seventeen, eighteen and nineteen year olds: “…whether it (the AIS) really helped to make them the success stories they became is questionable. First team football is where a young player’s natural talent is really honed into what it takes to be a professional footballer. This is the opportunity players like Viduka, Emerton, Okon, Zelic and so on at a young age were given in the NSL.” He also points out that at a national level, the senior players are playing far later into their careers and the room is just not physically there for youngsters to take the stage.
The FFA and leading bodies of the game have shown some willing to deliver new programs and guidelines, mainly in response to their National Competition Review (NCR) released in May this year. The review highlighted over a decade of a system that according to Foster: “…grew organically without a nationally consistent structure.” It plans to address the issues of poor coaching, poor governance, compensating clubs that invest heavily in youth development, official reporting from one source for each club such as a Technical Director and shifting the focus and support back to state-based and A-League clubs to develop talent.
Positively, A-League level clubs such as the Newcastle Jets have recently launched their ‘Emerging Jets’ scheme, designed as a partnership between the club, Northern NSW Football (NNSWF) and the FFA. The main goal to open up an accessible and professionally managed pathway for promising youngsters as young as ten years old to eventually pull on a jersey in the top flight of Australian football, the A-League. Sydney FC have taken a polar opposite approach and as the glamour club of the League have secured Italian great Alessandro Del Piero, a feat that would be hard achieved in the virtual world of Football Manager. And with rumours of Emile Heskey joining Newcastle Jets shortly, they look to be aiming for a healthy balance. Arguably some of the other A-League clubs did not get the memo about long-term vision and are aiming firmly for immediate success, a dangerous game in a competition not known for huge crowds and an abundance of Arab Sheiks and Russian Oligarchs. However with a lack of stars on display, these short-term ego boosts may just inject enough life into the League until the youngsters shine and if they can teach them to add a dimension to their game, their job is complete.
There are some rough diamonds emerging onto the scene in the shape of Sydney’s young gun Tony Antonis but there is very little talk of many youth or teenage sensations. Sadly one of Australia’s huge hopes, Teeboy Kamara of Adelaide United, originally a refugee from Liberia has recently had to halt any contact sport due to a medical condition. Admittedly many of Australia’s teenagers still leave the shores for Europe before they even make the back-pages of the nation’s media and do not always get regular competitive football. Atalanta’s seventeen year-old Chris Ikonomidis is tipped to make a big impact if given the chance, West Ham’s Taylor Tombides has been prolific so far in his short career in the Hammers’ and Australia’s youth teams and Blackburn Rovers’ Hyuga Tanner could also prove to be a great talent. The anomaly here is that the players are now utilising top European clubs’ development pathways.
In theory the National Competition Review has provided some valuable food for thought, but has it come too late? The report should spawn a blueprint for success but unless a huge collaboration to address the issues collectively is reached, the FFA may as well save its energy and kick back for another decade with cigars perched on their lips. Despite being the biggest participation sport for youth in the country over the last decade, sadly it looks as though football youth development in Australia has skipped a generation. At the very least the issues have been made public, there is nowhere to hide and new FFA chief David Gallop will need the patience of a Saint and balls of steel to deliver a successful solution.
(Photo Source: Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images AsiaPac)
