Won’t someone think of the Children

It’s been an interesting 12 months for youth player development in Australian football.  At the start of last A-League season the normal hype was being thrown about the National Youth league developing talent and being an important pathway for players to full A-League contracts but how quickly things have changed.

From these platitudes we have now ended up at a point where the National Youth League has been turned into nothing more than a token commitment to a future pathway for players, the national Under 17s have been humiliated at the world cup and the clubs have lost any obligation to promote players from within.

I guess the first signs on this slippery slope were the rumblings in March last year that clubs were not happy with the costs of the competition and the obligations they had to enter the competition even though it is part of each club's licence to have a youth team. 

Next up was towards the end of last season as Melbourne City started having injury issues player appeared from around the world and around Australia to replace these players when the City youth team had just won the National Youth League, once again proving the FFA enforce their own policies based on a one rule for some policy.

Once the FFA had undermined their own competitions and authority so much there really was only one direction and that was the reduction of the national Youth league and the movement of the youth teams to the state based competitions.  This of course was the final nail in the obligations for the clubs to provide injury cover from their youth teams.

It is also a very odd choice as the Youth league was also the method of getting fringe players match fitness during the season and helping players recover from injury in match conditions.  How this will work in the revamped 8 game plus finals (yes, really) season seems impossible to me.

This brings us on to this morning’s result in Chile.  Now while we got a result against Argentina, they are clearly a side in decline and the fact that we were relying on a New Zealand win against Paraguay to even get out of the group was a concern.  Then while New Zealand were suffering an unlucky exit to a 4^th minute injury time penalty to Brazil we were surrendering meekly 6-0 to Nigeria.

Now, while I fully expect to see the coaching staff get the full Ange treatment from Craig Foster as he prattles on about whatever footballing nation he is currently enamoured with maybe we need to go back to where we started in this.

In that team were only four players currently with A-League clubs, three form Melbourne Victory and one from the Central Coast Mariners - interestingly the only two clubs that seem to provide more than lip service to the concept of player development.  The majority of the side play for the FFA ‘excellence’ side that finished so far last in the Youth League last year that some questioned whether they even started.

Meanwhile across the Tasman the Wellington Phoenix supplied five players to the New Zealand side and the Wellington region supplied a further four.  Of those five, two of those players are on full first team contracts at the Wellington Phoenix.

Following rejection of applications to enter the NYL in Australia the Wellington Phoenix owners have looked at how they can develop players for their own club but also the good of New Zealand.  With fulltime School aligned academies in both Auckland and Wellington prospective players are being recruited as young as 13.  National team Captain Winston Reid funds 2 players a year to scholarships to these academies – both of whom are in Chile.

Above the Academies the club has a side in the New Zealand National Youth League and a team in the New Zealand national domestic competition that provides a place for players returning from injury, a place for fringe players to maintain match fitness and more importantly a place for the next generation to develop.

Aligned to this is a winter team playing in the local regional competitions.  Including the first team this gives Wellington a five tier commitment to developing players and is so well run and such a success that two Australian youngsters are likely to pave the way next season for an increase in recruits from this side of the Tasman. 

Why are our young players going to New Zealand?  Because the programme there is better than the majority of our clubs offer, because they can get an A-League chance there.  This year the Phoenix have seven players in the first team squad who have come through this system as it develops, and along with the three players they have signed from the Australian State Leagues have the strongest commitment to player development of any side in the A-League.

I guess the question out of this is why a club in New Zealand can achieve this but the clubs in Australia can’t?  Certainly the Phoenix have a stable ownership group and driven people behind the scenes but - despite the FFAs best attempts - so do many of the other clubs in the A-League.  Maybe it’s just that the Phoenix understand what sustainable means unlike the decision makers in Oxford Street who make all the right noises but did nothing to enforce the development rules they established.