FFA Congress: What is it and why does it matter to Australian football?

Amid cricket's ongoing dispute and recent coverage of pay deals in the NRL and AFL, it's easy to overlook the fact soccer is having its own boardroom dramas.

It can even be hard for soccer fans to be completely across the impasse on the Football Federation Australia (FFA) Congress, which has carried on for months, given plenty of the attention has also been focused on A-League expansion, a national second division and the recent free-to-air TV coverage announcement.

But now the world governing body could turn the sport in Australia on its head in the coming months.

FIFA is set to get directly involved in the dispute and could even rip apart the FFA board before the end of the year.

What is the FFA Congress?

Right, let's start from the top. The Congress helps decide how the sport is run across the country.

It elects the members of the FFA board to three-year terms and approves changes to its constitution. Think of it as the FFA's equivalent of the AFL Commission.

State and territory associations, as they have for many years, still wield a lot of power. They have nine (NSW is split into two) of the 10 seats on the current FFA Congress.

All parties agree this overall number needs to expand. In fact, the number of seats of similar bodies overseas run into the hundreds.

What is the dispute?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there isn't a consensus on how expansion should happen. Both the FFA and A-League clubs (through the Australian Professional Football Clubs Association) say they want to see fair representation on the Congress, but disagree on what that looks like.

FIFA would like to see various stakeholders represented on the Congress, such as women's soccer, futsal, referees, etc.

State and territory associations would argue they look after all these stakeholders in their respective areas and don't want to see their own power diluted.

The A-League clubs want a greater say in how the game is run, with one eye on an independent competition.

An FFA proposal rejected by FIFA would have increased the Congress from 10 seats to 13, giving A-League clubs three (up from one) and one to the Professional Footballers Association (PFA).

It would have also involved a second stage where all the groups would come together to decide how the Congress should expand again in the future.

The FFA says its proposal was supported by 80 per cent of members (being eight of the 10 seats, but rejected by the clubs and Football NSW), enough for the resolution to pass.

But FIFA's Member Associations Committee said the process, "does not reflect an appropriate representation of all stakeholders".

What happens now?

The issue is set to heat up later this month, when a joint FIFA/AFC (Asian Football Confederation) "mission" comes to Australia to get the parties to come to an agreement.

In a statement released by the FFA on Thursday night, chairman Steven Lowy said: "We look forward to working with FIFA and AFC representatives over the coming weeks."

"As I said in March, FFA wants to see an expanded Congress for Australia that reflects the way the game is evolving in this country but also protects and promotes the interests of the whole of the game."

Is there a deadline for this?

Mark down November in your calendars.

There first needs to be an Emergency General Meeting (EGM) to get the expanded Congress passed. Then an Annual General Meeting (AGM) is needed by the end of that month, that will also vote on two FFA board positions.

Perhaps even more importantly, FIFA's Member Associations Committee says if an acceptable expansion of Congress was not in place by November 30 it will recommend a "normalisation committee" intervenes.

A "normalisation committee"? What is that?

It doesn't sound like the sexiest of phrases, but it had newspapers and websites frothing over the past few days.

Words like "overthrow" have been used, with Argentina and Guinea cited as recent examples of when FIFA have had to directly intervene.

In the case of Argentina, the normalisation committee was tasked with being "in charge of running the daily affairs of the Argentine Football Association (AFA), (and) revising the AFA statutes".

FIFA could disband the FFA board, set up an interim one until the Congress issue is resolved and then set up a new board.

For a sport that has stymied its own growth in the past because of poor governance, it is the very last thing it needs.

But if Congress expansion isn't settled soon, Australian soccer could be kicking another own goal.

With the subordinate state bodies controlling all but one vote, the FFA has effectively been able to get its people “voted” on to its board, subverting a key principle of good governance.

“The current FFA board is no less ‘stacked’ than the former Soccer Australia board was,” whistleblower and activist Bonita Mersiades told me in 2016, as the depths of FIFA’s concern over the FFA’s governance practices came to light. “It’s simply stacked another way.”

In response to FIFA’s grievances, the FFA originally proposed a 15-member model which would give the A-League clubs more power, but leave the states' voting block still in charge.

The counter-offer from the clubs and the players’ union, the PFA, removed this power from the states. But with just 16 members, it leaves Australia a long, long way behind the rest of the world (as does the FFA’s updated 16-vote offer).

Consider the case of Norway. Its congress contains around 350 members. It is a set-up designed to inspire confidence in the organisation’s democratic practices. And it is hardly an outlier.

Camille Boillat and Raffaele Poli analysed the governance structures of a range of member associations (MAs), and published their findings in 2014’s Governance models across football associations and leagues.

Every European MA they studied had a minimum triple-figure membership. The congress of Italy contains close to 300 members, while those of Germany and France each had over 250.

Even Europe’s smallest congress, found in Switzerland, has over 100 members.

Japan, an emerging football nation and a good point of comparison for Australia, has a 48-member congress. It’s a similar story in Brazil.

Only New Zealand Football, with seven members, had fewer members than Australia.

Special Interest Groups

Size isn’t the only area where the proposed reforms are lacking.

In other MAs, special interest groups have strong representation in their national congresses.

These groups typically include, at a minimum, ones representing players, coaches and referees. Often there is a member for the futsal community, and another for women’s football.

In South Africa, members representing doctors, intellectual impaired footballers and army footballers are amongst 12 such groups given a spot in their congress. England has a place for a member representing racial equality.

Elsewhere, you can find representatives for supporters. Indeed, the EU has called for fans -- who, lets face it, the game would not survive without -- to have a greater voice in their MA’s congresses.

But the lack of such groups has always been an issue in Australia.

Under the Soccer Australia model, only referees were represented. The Crawford report, which reviewed the old system and laid out principles for the FFA to adopt, called the lack of such representation a ‘critical’ concern, and called for futsal players, women, players and coaches to also have a voice.

Instead, none got a voice, making the Australian congress a rare example where special interest groups are entirely voiceless.

The proposed reforms barely go far enough in addressing this. While players and female footballers will get a seat, all the other groups will be kept silent.

The inclusion of interest groups not only gives a voice to more people involved in the game, but would dilute the power of the two main voting blocks, the states and the A-League clubs.

State and Territory Power

Whatever model is adopted, the power of the state will be diminished. But none of the proposed reforms address the overrepresentation of the territories.

In the days of Soccer Australia, each state/territory received a number of votes based loosely on their size and participation base. It wasn’t perfect, but the Crawford reforms suggested a similar model.

The model chosen by the FFA saw the one-state (or territory), one-vote system used. Although common in other Australian sports, the voting scandals at FIFA have highlighted how problematic such a system is.

Smaller states can be easily bought off or won over, giving them undue influence on the affairs of the organisation, and thus exposing the congress to corruption.

Not even the Senate gives the territories the same voting rights as the states, yet in the FFA Congress, the Northern Territory and ACT are as powerful as New South Wales.

Meanwhile, Tasmania, with barely two per cent of the country’s population and less than two per cent of registered players, has the same sway as Victoria.

Unfortunately, the clubs and PFA have not tried to do away with this system. Unsurprisingly, neither has the FFA.

FIFA’s working group hands in its solution to the impasse between the warring parties at the end of this month.

If it is serious about reforming the FFA, it might consider scrapping the models currently on offer and implementing something in line with world best practice.