Football Australia CEO James Johnson had a chat with Paramount+ commentator and the host of SEN’s The Global Game podcast, Simon Hill.
Johnson was a recent guest on the show to discuss the National Second Tier, as well as the reason for the lack of funding in football for the national team.
Over 400,000 people have engaged with the social media posts of Football Australia, which is not a surprising figure due to the build-up of the Expression of Interest (EOI) which has been a topic of many football fans and players alike in the broader local community. From everything that James Johnson has seen to date, there is exceptional interest for this to go ahead.
With the men’s national team achieving their best result on the world stage since 2006, narrowly missing out in a hard-fought battle against the eventual winners in Argentina, and also to add the women’s national team preparing for a historic FIFA Women’s World Cup campaign co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand, the interest and the ever-growing engagement and success of football in Australia has been more prominent.
The recent split of the A-Leagues from Football Australia presents a special opportunity for the governing body to direct and invest resources into an excellent standard of measure for football development and performance that is capable of producing and improving the connection of various levels, pathways and participants throughout the Australian football ecosystem. For these goals to become attainable, the Board of Football Australia is confident that this is the right time to create a National Second Tier and set in motion a new and exciting future for the sport in the country.
From his appearance on The Global Game podcast, Johnson stated:
“We’ve really tried to steer away from it from becoming competition with the A-League, it’s actually the opposite and it needs to be complementary to the A-League and also the NPL and broader ecosystem and that’s why this competition is really fabricated on a winter competition, one that’s going to be focused on sporting merit.”
In regard to how the two competitions will align in the future for the second division, as stated by Johnson these discussions have occurred with the CEO of Australian Professional Leagues, Danny Townsend, who has been very supportive of this concept, and also the process to introduce an aligned transfer system. This will be beneficial for the younger group of players who are not getting minutes for an A-League club to be loaned out to a second-tier club to develop their skills.
However, James Johnson briefly mentioned why the Socceroos do not even get $1 from Sport Australia via The Global Game:
“At this point, the Socceroos do not get $1 from Sport Australia, because the way the funding model works for high-performance sports in Australia, which is decades old, is it focuses first of all on Olympic tournaments only, the men’s World Cup is not considered important for the purposes of high-performance funding and secondly your probability of meddling at the Olympics is that we’re probably not going to get a gold medal anytime soon.
“Our view is that this model needs to be flipped on its head and we need to look at more competitions like the men’s World Cup that brings 2 million people together in Australia, we need to look at our competitors because governments in China and Japan now are investing millions and millions of dollars in their national teams.”
Interested clubs would have need to registered for the EOI Response, with the next stage due on March 3.
To listen to the full podcast between Simon Hill and James Johnson, click here.
