At the FFA Regional conference, Han Berger elucidated why he devised a specific football curriculum in Australia.


When Berger examined countries with constant success, he used three criteria.

1. The countries consistently qualified for senior World Cups.

2. The best players played in the best leagues in Europe. If not their own they exported good players to EPL, La Liga, Serie A and the Bundesliga.

3. Their under 16s and under 20s consistently qualified for underage World Cups.


The countries identified as meeting these criteria were:

Europe: Spain, Germany, Italy and Holland.

South America: Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.

The other successful European country, although only having a top class system since the mid 90s and the Michael Platini revised curriculum, manifesting in Clairefontaine, is France. It just meets the criteria, although much of it has been recent.

At the FFA regional conference, one state TD mooted Portugal. One person out of 170 suggested England.

Having identified the successful football countries the FFA NC was devised based on these aforementioned nations coaching systems. The only one not included, is Italy, because even though they have common ground with the other four European nations, their style of football is essentially reactive, according to FFA. The other European quartet are essentially proactive, which in FFA's infinite wisdom suits the Aussie psyche.

France, Germany, Holland and Spain have cohesive and holistic national coaching systems with high numbers of qualified football coaches, particularly at Advanced Level, that is C Licence or higher. England has very few trained coaches compared to the big five on the continent.

Many stakeholders in football, allude to what a fantastic coaching system was in place in Australia, when a Golden Generation of players were produced.

What FFA found with developing football countries and backwaters, is that sometimes there were Golden Generations. From time to time, ad hoc coaching systems produced a very good Croatian team in the late 1990s, a good Yugoslavian team a bit earlier and Australia had quite a number of players playing in good Euro leagues around the time of 2006.

The coaching systems, carried out by national federations in these countries have not been particularly cohesive and holistic. Fleeting success has been by chance or in spite of the system, rather than because of the system. At times, good luck, when everything happens to align by chance, has been the reason for fleeting success, according to FIFA.

However, with these developing countries there has been intermittent success, not constant success.

The nation to look at closely, who we are emulating very closely, is Belgium.

They are 10 years down a new plan and system. Japan started theirs in 1993. Germany started theirs in about 2000.

Belgium and Germany decided they were producing inferior players to Holland next door. They wanted to be exporting greater numbers of players per capita head to the bigger leagues, like Holland.

In the big Euro leagues, playing style was considered paramount over results. In Australia rep coaches have been interested in results. Now, and it happened to me this year, I was evaluated by the FFT Technical Department for the type of play the team used to create chances on goal. How many chances were Proactive or Reactive?

What the FFT Technical Department, under the jurisdiction of the FFA Tech Dept wanted was goal chances created in BP that left the keeper to the defensive line, moving through the midfield and up to the forward line.

They wanted to see the BPO team have no touches of the ball at all in the modulation from defence to attack. Results were deemed secondary. Style of play was paramount. This system emulates what occurs in France, Holland, Germany and Spain.

If you haven't seen it already - check out the "Acting and Reacting" section of the Euro Technical report - some interesting stats: http://www.uefa.org/MultimediaFiles/Download/TechnicalReport/competitions/EURO/01/86/72/05/1867205_DOWNLOAD.pdf

WHats to stop any other nation dowloading the pdfs off the football australia website and also becoming a world powerhouse.

=d> :lol:

Interesting to see what sort of introspection and evaluation has been done in other countries by their national technical departments.