At least there's a few of our young guns starting to get a shot like Bandeira, Rowles, but still most of these guys should be seeing decent HAL time by now. In reality only handful are.

Two Vuck lads selected, that's good to see.

Bang. Someone get me a nail, and someone else get me a head - ardtho's will do.

I have to respectfully disagree with you here.

The culture is already here.

The culture you speak of was built on the back of 1950's migration and the number of clubs that were established, run & maintained within that milieu.

There is no point reinventing the wheel here. Waiting for a whole new generation of supporters to spawn from an A-league environment, while hoping against hope that "Old Soccer" dies a slow death is a painstakingly slow and shameful process to be going through.

The problem is that we are obsessed with playing out of shiny new stadiums & averaging 10k supporters for each team across the league. Why is this important?

Why is it that other 'football-centric' countries such as Portugal can have 13 teams in their league averaging 5,000 supporters playing out of boutique stadiums, but a "niche" market like football in Australia needs 10k?

Why do A-league teams have to be born out of population centres of 500,000, when successful teams in the past have spawned from small villages & towns.

Why do they need to be strategically positioned in the marketplace (corporate marketing speak) as alluded to in the Whole of Football report, as opposed to coming from communities with a long history of football support?

The FFA has within it, a number of folks who are completely out of touch with how a successful football pyramid can and should be run.

As I and others have mentioned previously, it is hard to see us going anywhere without a more comprehensive football pyramid comprising of a large base of professional clubs. You can't rely on 9 clubs to do the heavy lifting. Simple as that.

in principle its ok to have any style at senior level and have youth style designed to optimize technical development rather than results

but at the moment at senior level we have ange who is an excellent coach and plays a proactive style

what would be the point of ange playing a style that doesnt come naturally to him when at best a reactive style gets similar results at senior level

Portugal just won the European Championships not playing in the style prescribed. France reached the final playing in a kind of hybrid style between proactive and reactive football. The Italians tend to play reactive football.

The Germans are one of the few to play an entirely proactive style. They are the only ones who have a back four with very aggressive wing-backs and tend to have just the one central defensive midfielder. They can do this because they have the resources to do so without compromising their defence. Their entire back four is rather athletic and their midfield dynamic.

Most other nations don't have the resources, so they settle for a kind of hybrid depending on whether they're better at attack or defence.

Two things. Firstly, perhaps the Australian youth teams can play in a slightly more idealistic style than the NT because results aren't quite as important at that level as style is (but results still matter at that level, it's just the balance is different). Secondly, at senior level, unless we want to carry on conceding between two and three goals against each top class opponent, Ange needs to find entirely new footballers or adapt his formation just a bit.

Same size as usual, except up to 2 extra games to work out the 5th place team if/when South Korea make the top 4 (having already qualified for the 2017 World Cup as hosts).

Agree with you - no super exciting names in this squad. Of course Deng/Gersbach/De Silva/Kalik (overseas) look the best prospects, but other than them only Rose, Mells and Blackwood are seeing regular gametime. Hopefully a few can kick on and really excel this year - by 18/19 real development should be starting to show.

Edited by some guy: 12/7/2016 12:48:46 AM

This debate will have to wait for tomorrow but all I can say is this batch and the last haven't been promising. This is an expanded tournament, isn't it?

All good points but,

My concern is the lack of planning you cant expect to grow the sport and create a stronger national side with only 9 pro teams, we can all agree that the national team pool right now is the weakest we have had in a long while, everything should reflect to the top.

But when the FFA's main priority right now is marquee players rather than trying to make the game and national side more stronger at all levels for me its a cause for concern.

Which goes back to the pathways, only 9 pro teams in a country like australia will not harness the large participation and junior base in the long run.

Of all those little kids who play soccer, how many go on to become senior players?

Keep pulling the wool over your eyes...:roll:

It's not a question of excuses.

We are a little niche here.

Regardless of how many people 'play', the amount of people who 'follow' a team, passionately, madly, where it is the most important thing in life after family, are very small.

Particularly with a bunch of 'new' teams.

Those of us who were adults when the A-League started will start 'following' a side (becuase we want football to succeed) but it is unlikely to have the same crazy importance compared to a little kid who has grown up madly following a club, and carries that into his adult, consuming, money-spending, key demographic adult years.

It is this majority of crazy fanatical support that drives everything.

When everybody in any reasonably sized town shares that common culture, it becomes mainstream.

At the moment, the A-League is still on the periphery of mainstream popular (and therefore corporate) culture.

We just have to have the next generation of kids, brought up following Victory, or SydneyFC, madly, and then we will see the kind of support that can support a multi-tiered professional league structure. We need to make sure teams don't fold, that Victory or SydneyFC don't suddenly change to some other franchise, so hat this fanatical level of support can develop organically.

Unfortunately, culture takes time to breed, much as we'd like to rearrange society to our ideal.

Edited by Hellya: 11-7-2016 09:21:54

Would I be right in saying that only 5 of the 23 players included in the squad trained at the CoE??? What does that say about the way forward? where 6 of the blokes included are solely from WSW's academy!!

More kids play football more than AFL and rugby league not sure of the facts but its been said that football is the number one junior sport in the country.

But hey keep on coming up with the excuses...

But no other sports that Portugal has absorb such a large chunk of the male population as aussie rules and rugby do in Australia. Soccer is the only football code in Portugal.

If you think this factor doesn't affect soccer here, you are deluded.

I found today the young socceroo's squad has been announced for a training camp.

Im just going to load up the squad.

Portugal have other sports too and they seem to go just fine, aus. football 'cant do' attitude will continue hold us back

I honeslty don't buy the excuse that we have other sporting codes so therefore we cant create an national second division to which eventually has pro and rel system.

The cant do attitude will only hold aus. football back, the future is at stake and the FFA and the state bodies must work harder together to create a better player pathway to which our young players can develop to their full potential because in the future success or failure of the Socceroos is on the line

I read that the FFA want to create 3000 elite players instead of the 24 at the AIS, how could create this when the current parameters would not meet with the FFA's main objective of producing more elite players?

Both go hand in hand and its something is done about, the talent is there but now give them the chance to shine!

Would be ok if it's only technique required to play a game of football. In saying this will be a great game. Was tough last time around and will be great to see how it goes when it counts in India

Hearing that there's a squad announcement for the under 19's can anyone post the link??

Welcome zugzwang52 sounds like your there watching. If so please keep us up to date.

There is total agreement on this issue in Australia.

Yes & of course there will be the usual detractors on here saying, but it's France & Germany...their population is so much greater than ours, of course they have more players to choose from and can form bigger leagues.

Or we could look at a country like Portugal with half the population of Australia, a third of the GDP and geographically positioned in one of the worst performing continental economies in recent memory.

All of their players meet the big-5 averages despite not being a big-5 country nor having the equivalent facilities to call on from.

We could dream of players like that. Griezman, I see he had played 179 games for Real Sociadad by the time he was 23! Scored 46 goals too. Others like goetze 120 odd bundelsiga games and a world cup winning goal by 22, reus almost 150 games by the same age too. Obviously these guys are elite. but shows what you need to get there. Even look at lukaku - 23 and around 200 professional club games.

Number of games played by Big-5 club players up to the age of 23:
Goalkeepers: 77
Full Backs: 103
Centre Backs: 101
Central Midfielders: 109
Forwards: 120
http://www.football-observatory.com/-Ratings-eng-

Too few clubs leads to lack of game time and obviously that stunts development. We have players between 22-25 that are still considered young here and played about 50 professional games. You have many players in Europe who have played about 150-200 games by the time they are 23

I reckon they need to look at their own operations.

This bit is a worry. Why can't the ACT of Townsville or Darwin for that matter play out of a little boutique stadium like Man City academy plays out that holds 7 or 8 thousand punters.



I understand what the FFA are trying to do but they need to loosen up the entry criteria a bit.

10 teams is not enough. 12 and 14 are a problem though too. What do they do? Play each other twice (not enough) or 3 times (too many).

Definitely don't want to see an AFL type draw eventuate.

Lol paulc trying to stay relevant. What a wanker.