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.

Just do what's best for our game you idiots

Seriously?

While we've been looking at the myriad of cock-ups and PR gaffs that the FFA are making on a daily basis the biggest one (well apart from the whole Jack Warner thing) keeps simmering in the background and sticking its head back up usually as the FFA offer an ill-informed and innaccurate view on the subject

Since the PR trainwreck that is the FFAs recent treatment of the Wellington Phoenix started the FFA statements and behaviour have been erratic at best with them offering four different reasons or examples of what the Wellington side need to do to appease them all of them more baffling than the next.

This week of course has seen more backpedalling than this:

...as the rest of the A-League clubs have given the FFA a 'what the hell are you thinking' message.

When this first started the message was that the Phoenix did not 'bring enough' to the league when everyone seemed pretty sure that what it meant is that the Phoenix aren't offering a few million dollars to buy a spot in the league like a South Sydney team are.  This was then extended into talk of Metrics, although as we've proven here the Phoenix meet the majority fo those metrics better than a number of the clubs on this side of the Tasman.

Next up was Lowy's bizarre squatting rant which as detailed above was pretty easily dismantled by anyone with access to Google and the catastrophic facts behind the A-League audience this season.  Yesterday it was David Gallop demanding that other parties add more to the club (as in pay for it) with a pretty clear indication that he meant New Zealand Football and Sky TV New Zealand.


As we have repeatedly pointed out, the lack of TV money from New Zealand lies squarely at the feet of the FFA after they showed the same business acument they have been displaying daily in selling the rights for a pittance to Sky in New Zealand, although it turns out that the $900k Sky pay may in fact be about what it is actually worth if viewer numbers consider to freefall on this side of the Tasman.

The suggestion that new Zealand football fund it is also laughable.  While not in the same league as the FFA for gaffes and blunders they do their own fair share whether it's getting disqualified from the Olympics or wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on appealling that unwinnable situation.  The one thing that is clear though is that New Zealand football run on a shoestring budget, their national team plays around 25% of the games the Socceroos play, their national league has less player payments than the state leagues here and most years they barely make a profit.

Again, as we've disucssed NZ football do contribute to the A-League side for a 6 figure amount each season but the assertion that they should somehow pay more for an Australian club side is laughable.  The FFA sell the rights to FOX for a ten team league including the Phoenix.  Why should New Zealand Football fund more of that than they do now and how would they?

Next up today it's Frank Lowy claiming the Phoenix need to represent all New Zealand  displaying a complete lack of knowledge of the market he is trying to sell this league to and football in general.  There is long evidence that a first time game in another venue will bring a big crowd but the novelty will wear off and the great idea of a travelling side ends up losing the fans they already have as well as failing due to the lack of Novelty factor when away from home.

As an example take a look at St. Kilda's short lived New Zealand experiment.

David Gallop should well know this.  He oversaw the Auckland Warriors become the New Zealand Warriors and attempt to take games away from Auckland and all it managed was to diminish the home support in Auckland and one off successes when they played away followed by quarter full stadiums for the next visit.

Surely it is the FFAs job to raise the funding for football and more importantly isn't that the whole reason Frank Lowy is the leader of our game and why he has annointed his son to replace him.  If they can't do that and are now expecting the clubs to do it for them why do they still have jobs?  Once again we come back to the need for the A-League to be run by an independent group who actually have the best interests of this game at heart instead of Lowy and his trough feeding friends who have little idea of what the sport actually needs to move forward.

Isn't it about time the FFA just shut up and listened to the owners of the clubs, the stakeholders in the game and the supporters and give the Phoenix a 10 year license.  They are better run than at least five, maybe more of the clubs here so let them get on with it and maybe when you can find new owners for the disasters you are overseeing in Brisbane and Newcastle you can get Qantas to fly them to Wellington to see how a committed owner and a committed city can make our league look better.