Sharpen your scalpels, friends. Another FIFA World Cup post-mortem has begun.
As is becoming tradition, the Socceroos' exit from a major tournament -- and the frustrating manner in which they did so this time around -- has thrown a harsh spotlight across the domestic game, with football fans, pundits, and administrators alike offering their views on what went wrong, why, and how to fix it.
One of those was Football Australia's new executive director, Heather Garriock. The day after Australia's penalty shootout loss to Egypt, Garriock was offered up to attending media alongside new CEO, Martin Kugeler, to talk about what the future looks like.
"One thing is missing in Australia, and that's a long-term vision for the game," she said. "And that's my job as executive director. It's going to come from the board, it's going to come for the football department to implement it. And we do need direction. We do need a football strategy, and we will be developing one.
- Lynch: Football Australia has to ask tough questions after World Cup exit
- Juan Mata buys stake in A-League's Melbourne Victory
- Embattled Western United eye A-League lifeline
"That's one of our key priorities, and from a football methodology point of view, how we play the Australian way is really important for us. In Australia, we've lacked a DNA of football and the Australian way of playing and that's one thing that we need to embark on.
"We've always had a physical nature, we've had that mentality that is 'never say die', and it's a character of being able to play until the end. We don't want to be just that; we want to make sure we can play football.
"We've got to have a defensive mindset... but creativity is really important, being adaptable, flexible, and versatile is really important for the Australian way of playing."
Setting aside the fact that Garriock has been on the Football Australia board since 2021 and therefore could have had these conversations an entire World Cup cycle ago, the suggestion of developing a visionary strategy for the sport ignores the fact that Australian football already has several.
Let's start with The National Football Curriculum, developed in 2017 by former national technical director Han Berger. And if there was any doubt about the purpose of this 300-page document, its subtitle is literally "The Roadmap to International Success."
The Curriculum lays out the vision, scope, playing and coaching philosophies, and "building blocks" of how to transform the domestic game to underpin the semi-professional and professional pathways that feed the national teams.
Berger defines Australia's playing style as this: "A proactive brand of football, based on effective possession with the cutting edge provided by creative individuals. Defensively the key components are quick transition and intelligent collective pressing. The playing style is underpinned by a strong 'team mentality,' capitalising on Australia's traditional strengths."
Sound familiar?
Broken down further, this "DNA," if we really want to call it that, looks like this: "Dominate and control the game through effective possession; Get the ball and our players into goalscoring positions in a structured manner; Break down compact defences through individual skill and creative combination play; Strive to possess the ball; Win the ball back through quick transition and intelligent collective pressing."
But this DNA doesn't evolve on its own; it requires an entire domestic footballing structure that is aligned in support of the same vision. The Curriculum has an answer to that, too.
For example, when explaining the purpose of the National Premier Leagues (NPL) -- the state-based, semi-professional competitions that sit beneath the A-Leagues -- Berger insists on particular minimum standards to ensure this level functions as a cohesive youth development system, including:
All clubs must have teams in all age groups from first grade to under-12s
All clubs must have a long-term youth development mindset where they can "only raise a competitive first team by filling it predominantly with young, self-developed players"
All coaches must be appropriately accredited and trained in the National Curriculum
And all clubs must "publicise their registration fee structure in order to put a halt to the culture of using youth players and their parents as the source of income to fund the first grade."
Berger also insists on extending the length of youth seasons from six to 10 months per year, bringing it into line with the rest of the advanced footballing world and -- in perhaps the most important line of the whole document -- ensuring "players will be exposed to year-round football in an elite or professional environment, ideally at no cost."
The National Curriculum is almost a decade old now, yet Australian football appears to be facing the same problems and asking the same questions. Why?
Ultimately, the problem can be boiled down to the anecdote that opened this story: everybody thinks they, and they alone, have the answers. The sport's goldfish memory means that any kind of lessons, ideas, expertise, or reckonings that have come before are conveniently forgotten.
Take the NPL: a layer of the pyramid that, a decade ago, Berger identified as a key youth development pipeline.
Why is it that young players accessing these pathways still pay thousands of dollars per season, only to never actually make it to the senior side? How many future talents from low socio-economic backgrounds -- particularly big migrant families or those in regional areas -- are priced out of these pathways?
Are the clubs involved in these competitions actually prioritising youth development, or do they see it merely as an additional source of revenue to fund their senior players, some of whom have already had careers in the A-League Men? How many financial and playing opportunities are these aging former pros taking from the next generation, and who is holding clubs accountable for that?
Players seeking further development are then funnelled into unregulated and exorbitant private academies or commercially driven A-Leagues clubs, whose own strategy for Australian football development remains a mystery beyond selling young players to overseas leagues for foreign coaches and clubs to develop instead.
Then there is the other major pillar of the National Curriculum: coaching. Why does it remain prohibitively expensive to earn qualifications as a coach in Australia, and why are there so few paid roles to help incentivise coach development?
How is it that the majority of Australia's most qualified women head coaches have moved to overseas leagues or national teams in the past five years, instead of staying here to teach the next generation behind them?
Further, are the coaches who can afford (both financially and time-wise) to earn their licenses actually aligned on the type of playing and learning philosophies that Football Australia's own Football Coaching Process publication advocates, and that coaches who are hired for major roles are aligned with our national identity?
In that sense, it is baffling that the famously defensive Tony Popovic was the right choice to lead a Socceroos awash with bright, attacking talents or aligned with the brave, proactive style that many of us believe our national teams should be capable of playing.
Beyond the elite level, why does the grassroots game rely on a culture of volunteerism -- of mums and dads who put their hands up because nobody else will -- at formative ages in players' development? What is the point of having such high community participation numbers if there are so few qualified people to coach them?
Finally, what role should the federations -- state and national -- who are ultimately responsible for running the sport, play in all this?
They have the power and authority to demand transparency and regulation of registration fees, of setting best-practice governance standards, of mandating and rewarding opportunities for locally developed players and coaches.
They appoint the Socceroos and Matildas managers who select the players who represent us on the global stage and tell us a story about who we are as a sport and a nation, and who go on to inspire generations of emerging players, signalling to them who they can be and how they can get there.
They can decide together to put the good of the game above their own political in-fighting and make the kinds of hard but necessary decisions -- such as reconstituting Congress to limit (or remove entirely) the power of states and A-Leagues clubs -- to bring Australian football into global alignment and march into the future with clarity and purpose, as their competitor codes are currently doing.
Indeed, Football Australia offered up a vision of how to achieve this back in 2020 titled the XI Principles for the Future of Australian Football, which provided solutions to all sorts of issues from governance to commercialisation to youth development to coach development to registration fees. It's all laid out there, with some of the ideas such as a domestic transfer system, the revitalisation of the Australia Cup and National Second Division, and a national calendar already in place.
So why do we need to spend more time and money on yet another strategy? To paraphrase Johnny Warren: when are we going to stop talking about qualifying for a World Cup, and when are we going to start talking about winning one?
As all of these pre-existing strategies imply, Australian football requires nothing less than a revolutionary transformation of the structures and cultures that have calcified and become entrenched within and around it over decades if it is to reach its potential.
From the National Curriculum to the XI Principles, there are clear solutions for how we can address these problems, but bringing them to life requires leaders with enough courage, humility, and perspective to swing a sledgehammer through the sport and rebuild it from the ground up, even if it means shattering the foundations of their own power.
Until that happens, we will return again and again to this same conversation every four years, wondering what needs to change for football -- from the grassroots through to the NPL and A-Leagues through to the Socceroos and Matildas -- to become the thing so many of us believe it can be.
See you in 2030.