We're not Stakeholders we're shareholders

Okay. I admit it. I’m struggling to not bask in the glow of the footballing world coming to the realisation that the leaders of the Football Federation of Australia really do have no idea what they are doing.

Following on from Boozy Bec’s article last week the footballing world has collapsed around the ears of disco Damian de Bohun, David Gallop and the FFA board and while the football public have given them a chance to play out from the back all they have done is throw the ball in their own net.  

Nothing exemplifies more how much they have missed the mark than the message around the ability to appeal a banning decision.  From the start of the week pronouncing you cannot appeal to Friday’s statement that there has always been an appeals process to the disastrous performance on Fox yesterday from disco Damien where he stated a process was being implemented.  How do you get so many things wrong and so many different answers to the same question?  Because you lie, because you don’t value the people paying your salaries enough.

The two things that might finally wake someone at Oxford Street after months of neglect is the reaction from groups other than active supporters.  

There has over the years been a sense of entitlement from active supporters and the irony of active supporters of a plastic league biffing the ‘against modern football’ slogan about is not lost on me but this has spread.  It’s not ‘just’ the active support who have realised that the FFA are incompetent, no longer can people write it off as being a vocal 5% and who cares when there are 20000 other supporters in the ground.  Well what you have done now FFA is annoy those other 20000.

The resounding applause from the rest of the ground as the Northern terrace left on Saturday night should be ringing in their ears of the FFA leadership as it means it’s not just a vocal minority embarrassed by the behaviour of the Football Federation but it is all football people.  Of course based on Sunday’s almost bizarre appearance on FOX I suspect it has once again fallen on deaf ears.

Meanwhile the all-important Stakeholders are offside as well. Apart from a few outliers at FOX who are obviously more beholden to de Bohun’s expense account than others...

...the football media are calling for action and Mark Bosnich’s ‘discussion’ with de Bohun yesterday should go down as a watershed moment for the A-League but I suspect it won’t.

Club chairman have almost universally condemned the situation and sided with their members and supporters and even the Fox Sports social media accounts are more supportive of their viewers than the FFA.  You can only imagine how the league’s sponsors are viewing this with many fans refusing to support those sponsors while the current regime mismanage the league.

Finally we’ve heard a lot lately from the FFA (through insinuation) and their media lapdogs that supporters are not Stakeholders.  No FFA we’re more important than that.  We’re your Shareholders.  We play this game, our kids play this game, our friends and family play this game.  We pay our subs that pay your salaries and allowances.  We pay for A-League tickets which fund the clubs to give you a product to sell.  We pay for your expense account disco Damian.  We are your shareholders.

I suspect that at the highest level of corporate governance the voice of the Shareholders should remain paramount and it quite clearly doesn’t.  The FFA from the Chairman to the PR department could not care less about their supporters and take their attendance and blind support for granted as they continue to do an immense amount of harm to our game. 

You are there to advocate on behalf of us, to represent us to give us and our sport a voice and a place on a national or global stage.  Your role is not to mute us or to undermine us, to side with those who wish the game of football would just go away.  Your role is not to side with the ingrained Sheila’s Wogs and pooftahs mentality that all football fans are just ‘ethnics’ looking for a fight.

It’s time for change.  The Board needs to be changed to accurately reflect the views of the shareholders and advocate for them.  The incompetent management needs to be gone and the A-League needs to decide its own destiny.  The league has been heading for this point for two years now and the time to prevaricate has gone.  Steven Lowy has walked into a train wreck of which his father is not entirely absolved of blame and it’s time he and his lap dog of a board made some decisions to fix this from the top down.