What the future holds for futsal in Australia

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Credit: Football Australia

The return of the National Futsal Championships is a huge boon, according to two people key to the development of the game within Australia.

Last month Football Australia announced the return of the National Futsal Championships, pitting states against each other in a tournament that has been on hiatus since the start of the pandemic.

The Futsalroos – the FIFA recognised national team for Australia – have competed at eight FIFA Futsal World Cups, and the game has a rich history and strong participation in Australia.

The 2019 National Participation Report, produced by Football Australia (FA), shows the game growing in participation by 36% – with 63,031 registered players. The National Futsal Championships will feature close to 1,000 participants from over 100 teams being involved from states and territories across the country.

James Johnson, Chief Executive Officer of Football Australia, was pleased with the re-introduction of the National Futsal Championships and the reinvigoration of the F-League and looks forward to growing the futsal footprint in Australia.

“As part of our clear strategic agenda, we outlined a vision to create a national program for futsal and beach soccer by working closely with our Member Federations in a unified, inclusive and collaborative manner,” he said in a statement.

“With the culmination of this process, we are delighted that Football Queensland and Football Victoria will be hosting the National Futsal Championships in 2022 and 2023 respectively.

“There is a clear appetite throughout Australia for football to increase its imprint through futsal and beach soccer.  Queensland and Victoria now have the opportunity to showcase this and bring it to life over the next two years, in a way never seen before.”

The 2022 and 2023 Championships will be hosted in Queensland and Victoria respectively – two states that have embedded futsal within their overall organisational strategies.

Trevor Edwards, Head of Futsal at Football Queensland (FQ), is the tournament organiser for the 2022 National Futsal Championships. He believes that FQ is seeing success in futsal because they have linked it with their football strategy in the state.

“We see it as a game in itself, but also linked in with the entire football family,” Edwards told Soccerscene.

“We are looking to develop the F-League in Queensland into a conference style where we have northern, southern, and central competitions in the state. That might take a few years to get to, but that is our target for futsal.”

Anthony Grima, head of Futsal at Football Victoria (FV), explains that it is essential for Australian football to develop futsal alongside the 11 a side game.

“After the 2021 National Futsal Championships were cancelled due to the devastating impact of COVID-19 on sport and the community, we needed to work together to regain momentum, and confirm hosts for the tournaments in 2022 and 2023 to ensure our community had a calendar they could work towards,” Grima said to Soccerscene.

“The tournament is the pinnacle event for Futsal in Australia and is the largest of Football Australia’s national tournaments.”

The National Futsal Championships is seen as a way to strengthen pathways for junior development, as well as grow the game within Australia.

“It is essential from a state perspective. We would like to see that continue and grow. In previous years since the national F-League became defunct, there hasn’t been a pathway for juniors to make the national selection for the Futsalroos. We’d love to see that pathway come back and develop,” Edwards said.

“Not just your pathway for national teams, but also pathways and processes for really strong grassroots participation, coach education, and referee education.”

The F-League, Australia’s last national futsal competition, ended in 2016. Grima thinks that a relaunched national futsal competition is vital to the development of the game in Australia.

“A National Futsal League is crucial for any country who wishes to participate and compete in international tournaments,” Grima said.

“In addition to the National Futsal Championships, state-based F-Leagues could potentially link up with a National Futsal League that links all the champions together and forms the pathway for both male and female players, coaches, and referees.”

In recent years, the small-sided game has been recognised for its ability to supplement player development for football and also increasingly as a sport in its own right.

In 2016, a game featuring legendary Brazilian Falcao and Bayern Munich’s Douglas Costa drew a crowd of over 2,000 people in Melbourne.

With states collaborating towards a common goal, futsal will only continue to expand within Australia.

“There are many initiatives that we can plan to elevate futsal not just in Australia but on the world stage. It is clear that Football Australia, under the leadership of James Johnson, wants to grow the Futsal footprint in Australia,” Grima said.

“Futsal’s inclusion in the ‘XI Principles – for the future of Australian Football’ back in October outlined a vision to create a national program for futsal and beach soccer by working closely with the Member Federations in a unified, inclusive and collaborative manner.”

Edwards shared the same view as Grima towards growing the game.

“As a whole, we are excited as Member Federations to be involved in the development of futsal. We are excited with the collaboration that is happening, and I hope we can keep pushing the sport together so futsal continues to grow in this country,” Edwards said.

When the National Futsal Championships kicks off at the Gold Coast Sports and Leisure Centre on January 5, 2022, it will have the backing of the entire football landscape.

Those involved in the game are committed to see it be a grand return for the tournament, to ensure the continuing growth of the game is not only maintained, but expanded and elevated in the months and years to come.

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Northern Motor Group joins FV as Official Automotive Partner

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Image credit: Football Victoria

In an announcement made last week, Football Victoria (FV) announced the Bundoora-based company as its Official Automotive Partner for the next three years, ushering in a new partnership driven by local identity.

Built in Victoria

The alliance betwen FV and Northern Motor Group stands as the latest locally-backed partnership in Victoria’s football landscape.

Furthermore, FV Executive Manager of Commercial, Chris Speldewinde, outlined why a connection with Northern Motor Group is an exciting step forward for the organisation.

“Northern Motor Group are one of the biggest and most respected automotive businesses in Melbourne and we look forward to working with them as our official automotive partner,” Speldewinde explained.

“It’s been an exciting offseason here at FV, with several key partnership signings coming on-board, and we are thrilled to welcome Northern Motor Group to the family.”

This season, partnerships within the Football Victoria pyramid have highlighted immense support from local businesses. With shared identity, values and commitment to the community, partnerships like this are set-up for success.

 

What the partnership will bring

The three-year partnership will look to provide Melbournians and FV staff with a range of benefits, from vehicle access to offers including:

  • 2-years free servicing
  • $500 cash back
  • $500 worth of accessories

Thus, the partnership will look to help locals and participants across FV, reflecting both parties commitment to giving back to the community.

“As enormous supporters of football in Victoria, signing on as Football Victoria’s official automotive partner is something we are very proud of,” said Northern Motor Group Dealer Principal, Nick Soklev.

“For over 40 years, we have been helping Melbournians find the car that is right for them, and we look forward to welcoming he Victorian football community to our dealerships.”

 

Final thoughts

Helping the community, providing exceptional service and creating a welcoming environment – the common values shared by both parties.

For FV and all its participants, Northern Motor Group can be the driving factor which propels football in Victoria to new standards in the years to come.

How Football Victoria’s Opens Board Nominations will Address the Game’s Rapid Growth Demands

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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.

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