FFA CEO James Johnson | 'Let's put football first' | 'Unifying' the game in Australia | The task at hand                    Fox Football Podcast             

 New FFA CEO James Johnson has sat down with Adam Peacock to outline exactly how he plans to build football in Australia back up.Johnson eyes the systems in Japan and Germany as 'relevant' for Australia's ecosystem and wants FOOTBALL back in the centre of the game's priorities... and that will feed commercial revenue. Basically, he plans to flip the cycle on its head.Here's more detail:
-'It's about bringing the sport back together' - aligning football in Australia again (1:00)
-Transforming the organisation to one that can operate in a global system or 'global player', like Japan, US & UEFA (3:00)
-'Putting football first' & 'optimising our football products' in order to then capitalise commercially (7:00)
-The A-League is 'unbundling' from the Federation (7:30)
-Johnson's preferred national models are Japan and Germany, and they're far more 'relevant' for Australia than the EPL model (8:00)
-A full look at the Australian football 'cycle' that Johnson wants to create (10-13)
-Johnson sees women's football as the greatest growth area (12:00)
-Johnson's vision for a 'domestic transfer system' to connect grassroots clubs to NPL to A-League - incentivise clubs to develop players, with a distribution coming back down. (13:00)
-Marketing the A-League, the national teams and the FFA (17:00)
-'Focus on getting domestic game right' (25:00)
-The modern challenge of having Australians getting opportunities in Europe (27:00)
-The types of players Johnson's a fan of (28:00)
-When Johnson learnt the importance and values from community (31:00)
-'Fans are our most important stakeholder' (32:00)          

Good interview, plenty of platitudes but lots of interesting stuff to listen to.

There's nothing overly new being said, he wouldn't be the first to mention the importance of becoming a global player in the game, but his examples or templates to follow are curious ones:  Japan, ok I can see that one, then Germany, hmmm, then UEFA, well, not sure how they're a template for us, and then the US, I cringe every time someone mentions the US as an example to follow.