Wheelchair football’s Victorian return comes with challenges still to face

Football Victoria has opened nominations for two board director positions ahead of its Annual General Meeting on May 25, with the governing body explicitly seeking candidates with expertise in investment and fundraising, digital innovation, and people and culture to meet the modern challenges facing football administration in Australia’s most populous football state.

Nominations close at 6pm on Monday April 20. All candidates will be assessed by an Independent Nominations Committee against the requirements of FV’s 2024-2028 strategic framework, which is built around five pillars: clubs and competitions, participants, pathways, facilities, and the organisation’s future direction.

The appointments arrive at a moment when football in Victoria, and nationally, is navigating a participation boom that has significantly outpaced the infrastructure, governance and financial frameworks built to support it. The game is growing faster than the systems designed to manage it, and the people who sit at the top of those systems will determine whether that growth becomes sustainable or starts to work against itself.

A Sport at Crossroads

Football is now Australia’s largest club-based sport, and Victoria sits at the centre of that story. Participation numbers have climbed sharply in the years since the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, and more recently the successful AFC Women’s Asian Cup, with junior registrations in particular placing pressure on community facilities, volunteer workforces and competition structures that were not designed to absorb growth at this pace.

The consequences are visible at ground level. Councils across Victoria, many of which did not anticipate the scale of football’s expansion when planning their sporting infrastructure, are now confronting a facilities gap that is measurable in cancelled training sessions, overloaded grounds and clubs turning away players for want of adequate space. Drainage, lighting, changeroom access and pitch availability, have become pressure points that no amount of elite-level visibility can resolve from above.

The incoming board directors will inherit that problem directly. Football Victoria’s strategic framework names facilities as one of its five core pillars, and the organisation’s ability to make the case to government, councils and private investors for the kind of sustained infrastructure funding the sport requires will depend significantly on the financial and advocacy expertise sitting around its board table.

Football Australia and Football NSW recently called on the NSW Government to establish a $343 million grassroots facilities fund in response to the same structural pressures. Victoria faces an analogous challenge, and the director recruitment process signals that FV is aware its board needs people who can drive investment portfolios and revenue streams, not merely administer existing ones.

The Commercial Dimension

The case for bringing investment expertise onto the board extends beyond facilities. Australian sport sits within a $41.7 billion economy, and football’s share of that landscape is growing in ways that create both opportunity and complexity. Broadcast rights, commercial partnerships, digital platforms, and the expanding role of sports betting in the revenue structures of sporting codes are reshaping how governing bodies at every level think about financial sustainability.

Football Victoria’s competitions, including NPL, state leagues,  and an increasingly significant women’s program, represent a substantial commercial asset that has historically been underleveraged relative to its scale. The appointment of directors with investment and fundraising competencies is a direct acknowledgement that the next phase of the sport’s growth in Victoria will require a more sophisticated financial strategy than the one that got it here.

The digital innovation competency sits alongside that commercial imperative. Football is generating more data, more content and more participant interaction than at any point in its history in Australia, and the governing bodies that build effective digital infrastructure now will be better positioned to manage participation, retain players and engage communities at a scale that was not previously possible.

Governance and Equity

Football Victoria’s nomination process includes a constitutional requirement for 40:40:20 board composition. It translates to 40 percent identifying as women, 40 percent as men, and 20 percent of any gender.

The equity means decisions made at the board-level, about facilities investment, participation pathways, and community engagement have a direct impact on who gets to play, where and under what conditions. A board composition that reflects the diversity of the football community it governs is better placed to identify the structural barriers that data alone does not always surface.

FV CEO, along with the Independent Nominations Committee, will assess candidates against the full range of competencies outlined in the strategic framework, including governance experience, demonstrated involvement in football as a player, coach, referee or administrator, and an understanding of the broader football ecosystem.

The sport is at an inflection point. The foundations have been laid by decades of community building, volunteer labour and grassroots investment. What happens next, whether the participation boom becomes a lasting structural shift or a wave that recedes from insufficient infrastructure to sustain it, will be shaped in no small part by the quality of leadership at the governing body level.