Bruce Holloway: Tough administrative gig poised to get tougher

Auckalnd City FC celebrate a goal during the final of the ASB Premiership match between Auckland City FC and Hawke's Bay United held at Kiwitea Street. Photo / Dean Purcell.

New Zealand Football's announcement of funding support from Trillian Trust for the ASB premiership this summer, and the unprecedented scheduled broadcasting of 32 of the season's 59 matches by Sky TV, represents a major breakthrough on the two most challenging fronts for the code: finance and publicity.

In football parlance they've just gone 2-0 up inside 10 minutes.

But national league is a 90-minute game, and NZF haven't bagged a 3-pointer in a long time at this level.

So those involved in domestic football have every right to be wary on whether such early good form can be reproduced in subsequent phases of the national body's master plan, now being rolled out in the wake of consultative meetings over winter.

NZ Football is espousing a new vision in which national league entrants not only run men's and youth teams, as occurs at the moment - but also senior women's and futsal teams participating in a "coherent national structure," according to an advance release to clubs last week.

And within three seasons the objective is to expand the league from eight teams playing two rounds (14 games) to 10 teams playing 30 games per season.

Or, to put it another way, the national league will, by 2017-18, be running for over six months of the year, possibly from July to March, to tie in with the Oceania League schedule.

NZ Football's securing of broadcast coverage and gaming trust funding for this summer gives a fig leaf of respectability to such a bold vision.

But it can't completely mask the fact that overall such a strategy must inevitably make involvement in the national league more expensive, demanding, and sapping for its administrative base than it has been since it was first introduced in 1970.

Under the new vision a national league entity might take diverse forms: a club, a privately funded franchise, or a federation.

But regardless, this is shaping as perhaps the most imposing structural challenge league entities have contemplated since 1998, when a working party shocked everyone by briefly mooting that the national league should embrace a "South Pacific Cup" format, including a team from Fiji and a $120,000 entry fee.

Whatever the league's form, it is already a massively taxing exercise, in which most entrants regularly end up in deficit from annual budgets well in excess of $200,000 and gate receipts are relatively derisory. Waibop United ran the most frugal campaign last summer with a $180,000 turnover, but still required a financial injection from its federation backers.

It means income is seldom meeting the costs of operation.

But we are now embracing a vision of almost doubling the number of games in a season at a time when extra demands of women's leagues and futsal are about to be stacked on top.

That's a tough gig for an amateur base.

In my recent publication, The National League Debates: A potted chronology of the twists, turns and conflicting ideas in New Zealand football since 1990, one 1997 chronology entry put it this way:

It is hard work being a national league club. By its very nature, the national league attacks the onion of a football club, removing layer after layer of club life until it gets down to the little sliver of ambition and commitment at the core. Similarly, the bedrock of addicted national league diehards must drill their ambitions like an oil well, down and sideways, through the muck and thickness until they strike a club layer solid enough to allow them to eke out another year.

And that's without trying to be all things to all people in by throwing in women and futsal.

Which raises a couple of questions. Does Manchester United have a women's team? Does Arsenal have a futsal team? And if so, why do we not hear so much about them? The answers may provide a clue to the problems inherent in trying to be all things to all people.

Our best successes in football tend to come from outfits that do just a few things - and do them well. For example, Claudelands Rovers - modest performers in men's football - have just won the women's northern premier league.

Would they have been able to do so if they were spreading their resources by also catering for futsal?

It's understandable that New Zealand Football would want to embrace a larger national league.

The existing format lacks critical mass, though it is sobering to remember it was reduced to this size after the first two seasons of the current summer iteration purely because a majority of entities were baulking at the cost.

And again, that was without catering for women or futsal.

In my Waikato backyard at least, the elongated season will create as many problems as it solves.

The inevitable overlap of summer with winter means the existing franchise - the federation-run Waibop United - will be in direct competition for players with the clubs that have until now been its traditional feeders.

There is nothing wrong with that - that is how it was for generations before the introduction of a summer league - but it does mean any ongoing national league entity will have to eke out its own distinct facilities and base.

And players will have to choose. Aspiring elite players will naturally be drawn to the national league in preference to the northern league.

Though with far more manageable cost structures, northern league clubs will then be able to easily pick-off a handful of "marquee players" with lucrative cost reimbursement packages.

The biggest challenge the game faces at national league level is sustainability.

In the first 20 years of the national league 39 different clubs dipped a toe in the water, taking the game to centres such as New Plymouth, Invercargill, Gisborne, Mt Maunganui and Nelson. The turnover was both a strength of the code and a weakness.

By contrast the past decade has offered relative stability, with Youngheart Manawatu the only casualty.

But the new deal appears destined to significantly ratchet up the basic requirements for fronting.

When the first summer national league was invoked for the 1996 season, Soccer New Zealand - as it was then called - made it clear it wanted to promote elite clubs rather than "amalgamations of clubs or newly-formed single-team organisations".

Criteria included having a wide membership base and being involved at all levels of junior and senior football, including the women's game. "Pick a club and get behind it," was the clear message.

But by 2004, when the summer league was being reinvented for a second time, the criteria had swung 180 degrees, to the extent that franchises or entities were constitutionally required to be explicit "one-team" clubs.

Even the addition of youth teams was an afterthought, so strong was the desire of officialdom for administrators not to be distracted from the prime vision of concentrating on running a successful national league team.

This reversal pithily illustrates the impermanence of even the staunchest administrative mantras.

The national league has already had more last chances than Judith Collins, with a farrago of often contradictory football visions.

So if our latest national league prescription seems overly optimistic, don't get too worked up.

The higher the bar is set, the more likely failure becomes.

And our own football history shows us that nothing lasts forever. If the latest vision proves unsustainable, be assured that out of necessity it will be tweaked further down the track.

So if your club or franchise doesn't like the new national league criteria specifications when they are announced in the coming weeks, just sit this one out and catch the next bus.

Bruce Holloway is a former national league administrator and author of The National League Debates: A potted chronology of the twists, turns and conflicting ideas in New Zealand football since 1990, which is available via www.nationalleaguedebates.weebly.com