The Corner Flag sat down with the head of the NPL and WPL Liam Bentley during the week to discuss some of the issues and goings on around Victorian football, in both the men’s and women’s game.
Over the next few days we will bring you the full interview in stages, and the first part covers all things NPL at senior level.
Jump to Part 2: NPL youth + cup competitions
So without holding you back any longer, here is the first question:
With the NPL hitting it’s halfway mark for the season, how have you seen it so far?
It’s gone really well to be honest. I’ve said to anyone that will listen, the day I got given the NPL portfolio that if you told me that we’d be here in June, I’d have bitten your hand off for where we are. I think it’s been a credit to the clubs to be honest. They had a really short turnaround and there’s been teething problems but I’m really happy with where it’s at just now.
I think most clubs, if you could have said where could be and what kind of league we would have and the way the clubs have been set up, said that in January/February we’d have this by June I think they would’ve jumped at the chance as well.
Which team/players have caught your eye so far?
To be honest Avondale Heights for me have been a massive shock. I went to watch them in the State League Playoff last year, and then when they got into the NPL I thought well, they’ll slot into NPL1 and they’ll be a decent team in there. Now, they are ten points ahead of everyone and going for promotion. It really is fantastic and obviously they have got the big game against Bulleen in the coming week.
I think also it’s hard to look past South Melbourne. They have got one of the youngest squads in the NPL and to go 14 games in the league and cup unbeaten, it’s hard to look past them. But it’s been interesting, a couple of little teams, Ballarat and Goulburn Valley Suns, everyone was asking questions about them. GVS is struggling a little bit but Ballarat have caused a few upsets, a few surprises so it’s good to see them doing well as well.
Do you think it was right to expose Ballarat and Goulburn Valley Suns to top flight football straight away?
I think so, the step had to be taken. Ballarat have proven that it can work, being to Ballarat and to the stadium up there, it’s a massive football town and they will go from strength to strength. I genuinely believe that. Goulburn Valley Suns, it’s a little bit different up there. They weren’t a club to start with, that’s where Ballarat had the leg up but per head of population there’s more footballers playing in Shepparton than there is in any other regional centre, so it’s a massive football town and we need a focal point up there.
Whether that focal point in going to stay in NPL or drop to NPL1 over the next couple of years will be left to the competition but I think it’s important for the kids in Shepparton to have something to aim for because a lot of quality footballers come from Shepparton so it was a slight risk, but it’s certainly not been a failure. It’s been very good in Ballarat and having that foot in the door straightaway in Shepparton is going to be a big step in the long run.
One club who has been given a bit of stick for their facilities at the moment has been Avondale Heights. What sort of dispensations have clubs like Avondale been given to get their grounds ready?
I think my phrase for this is ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’. We can’t expect councils or clubs to be able to facilitate literally overnight. What we’re trying to do generally is raise the bar in Victorian football. If we get to a point in three years time where rather than having three or four Class A facilities, we may have 10 or 11 Class A facilities by working with clubs and councils, then that puts Victorian football in a much better state, and that’s what we want to get to.
Avondale Heights, as much as they got a lot of criticism at the start, they’ve actually done a lot of good work. They’ve got the fence around the ground now, they are putting an extension onto their clubrooms, getting a media area, getting a bigger scoreboard, this is what’s happening over the next 6-12 months for that club. That’s what we need to be looking at. Avondale Heights have come in as a club from State League 2 into NPL1, and in a year or two they’re going to look back going ‘we played on an open park. Now we’re playing in a fenced park with a media area, extra change rooms, a bar above the clubrooms’, all that stuff is happening.
Other clubs that don’t have grandstands, media areas, we’re working with them. What we’re doing at the moment actually is we’re going through all the facility audits with every club. So going to every club, measuring every changerooom, every pitch, ticking off the box according to all the rules of competition. We’re going to try and get the easy things first so if there’s no media room, or extra change room, hire a room. Go to hire temporary rooms, get some scaffolding for TV. Get a scoreboard, whether you build a scoreboard or whether you hire one of the light up boards that you see in roadworks. That’s what the GV Suns have done. They never had a scoreboard, they parked one of them up there and it’s a fantastic scoreboard for the day.
What we’re trying to do is get the quick stuff done quick, get the easy stuff done when we can and we’re going to be helping clubs do that as well. We’re not going to basically say here’s your audit, you failed X, Y and Z, fix it, too bad. Internally when we send our audits back out to the clubs we’ll be saying ok, you missed the criteria on this, this and this, here are ways you can resolve it, here are some solutions.
We’re looking as well into temporary grandstands for clubs as well, to try and strike up a good deal that we can get for a club, or put them in touch with the clubs to say ‘we need a grandstand’. If Avondale Heights league form goes on, they’ll get into NPL next year. On commotion, next they need a grandstand. What are they going to do for that? What are the solutions we’ve got? I think everyone understands, it’s probably an easy thing to pick on for a lot of the clubs or people who are unhappy about one thing or the other but I think it’s a long term prospect in terms of building these grounds to be much better, and have a better fan experience.
We want to bring people back into the game so having that better ground over the couple of years will allow people to look in and say actually NPL is doing good things for Victorian football.
On the subject of promotion/relegation, the rules stipulate that club MAY be relegated at the end of the season, does this mean clubs who don’t fulfil their licence agreements won’t be allowed promotion?
The ‘may be’ has always been in the rules, it’s the same two up, two down as normal. The ‘may be’ is if a club can’t get promoted, we don’t want to end up with a 13 team league. If we say that they must be relegated, and the two clubs at the top of the division below can’t take that spot, then we’re left with clubs 3 and 4, when generally the rest of the rule always states that the highest relegated team [will stay up] if someone doesn’t take the spot.
The ‘may be’ does leave a little bit of a grey area, but it’s very much two up, two down. If people haven’t got the coaching qualifications up to scratch, or at least put the structure in to get that happening they can definitely miss out on promotion. So going by the current tables, if Avondale Heights and Bulleen don’t have everything right off the park in terms of correct licenced coaches, and the financials aren’t the way they should be then they could be denied promotion.
To the awarding of the licences, one of the reasons Eastern Lions pulled out was because they weren’t able to get a deferred 12 month licence as was awarded to Eastern Jets and Murray United. Why was this denied to them?
Eastern Lions were awarded that licence for 2014. Murray United and Eastern Jets applied for 2015, so it was very black and white. You have been given a licence for 2014, you knew what you were signing up for, you knew what you were asking for. To then come back and say, actually, we’re not quite ready, was a bit of an issue. I’m not filled in with all of it but there were internal club issues as well in terms of whether they wanted to be in the NPL so they had to deal with that too. But basically the assessment panel awarded them a licence based on 2014.
It was regrettable, we would have liked to have seen Eastern Lions in there, but they still have the opportunity either through winning State League or to apply at the end of the licence agreements so they’ve got time to still build themselves up as an NPL club and be ready to move in when those opportunities arise. The current licence agreements finish in 2016, so 2017 is the next window. But if you win State League 1 and you have your club ready to go, you can apply, you can actually come into the NPL if you meet the criteria.
What will that mean for the 30 clubs in the NPL next year if a State League 1 club does apply successfully?
We wouldn’t kick a club out. You got your licence, your licence agreement runs until 2016, unless of course you commit breaches which can mean you lose your licence. We don’t want to kick any clubs out, and we’ll be thinking very carefully about putting teams in as well. We don’t want end up with 75 NPL clubs. Or in a warped kind of way we kind of do, because an NPL club should be a much better run club than they were previously. We do want to get in there and we do want to get our State League clubs starting to think like that so they can aim for promotion to being an NPL club and be ready to go.
On the crowd front, have you been happy with the number of fans turning up to games so far this season?
It’s one of my genuine focuses, the match day experience. The crowds at the start were massive, such as in the first game for Heidelberg against South, where we got a bit of criticism for having a Thursday night game, but I think the proof presented itself in the pudding in terms of having three and a bit thousand people at the game.
The league will play a big part in [the success of crowd numbers]. At the moment South Melbourne are very far in front, and we don’t have finals in 2014, so it becomes less of an attractive prospect to go and watch a team. That’s definitely a factor. Long term that probably won’t be a factor, because we’ll have a conversation about finals in coming years.
I think looking at the match day experience itself, that’s something that we can really improve on. We’re trying to make professional clubs, and they want to act and be treated professionally but we don’t have match day programmes around the grounds; a lot of us don’t announce the goalscorers; we don’t play a bit of music before the game; we don’t have a scoreboard that works. That’s the type of stuff that will make people walk away from an NPL game thinking: ‘Wow, that was NPL, I’ve been at a different level of football now’.
We’ve got a bit of work to do with that in terms of standardising certain things like the match programmes and announcements etc. but we want it to be organic as well. We don’t want to tell the clubs ‘here’s your match day programme, you have to announce this, this and this’. We want the Melbourne Knights to do it the Melbourne Knights way. We want Green Gully to do it the Green Gully way, but we do want it to happen. We’ll be looking into it over the next couple of months but once we get to Round 1 in 2015, people are going to turn up to a game thinking ‘wow this is different! It’s better than what it used to be’.
The crowds aren’t great, we’re never going to get 10-15,000 turning up to a Premier League match in Victoria anymore, but there’s nothing to say we can’t get regular crowds of 800-1500 to our games. The financial windfall that brings for clubs is quite significant as well, and that’s more money that they can not only put into the players but into the infrastructure of the club, the coaching of the club and basically help raise that bar as well.
There is a bit of conjecture among some in the NPL1 about having to charge lower ticket prices despite paying the same licence fee as the top division clubs. Why is there the difference?
First of all with the licence fee everyone pays the same fee because everyone gets the same service from the FFV. It’s not $40,000 to enter a team. I think that was a bit of a misconception. What we actually did was we based it on what a club who was in the Premier League in 2013 and had these teams from U12s all the way through, plus an average of 17 players in their junior squads and their registrations, add that all up together and it came to around $40,000. They’re not actually paying a whole lot more than what they were paying last year, and that comes from the player and team registration, as well as the service they get from the FFV.
Going back to the question on crowd numbers, are we going to help the crowds in the second tier by the ticket price being increased by $5? Probably not. People don’t want to pay a Premier League price to go and watch an NPL1 game. I would because I’m a football tragic, but there’s a lot of people that will think it’s not worth that amount of money. It is an issue and I’ve spoken to a couple of clubs about this, and it’s an issue we’re going to address for next year. We’re not going to change it midway through the season, I think the backlash from fans and supporters to the clubs and us will be immense, and to bring down the price for Premier League clubs, they have based their budget on that and to then take that away midway through the season would be pretty tough.
Maybe we’ll say next year there’s not a set price and there’s a middle of the road price, that may be a solution, but this is something we’re talking to clubs about this. It’s not money in our pockets, we don’t see any of that money. If it’s going to mean people coming in and out of gates and getting an increase or decrease in gates that’s going to directly affect the clubs. Clubs will probably have their say on this when it gets to the end of the season.
Back on the match day experience you spoke about earlier, Ballarat obviously have their initiative with McDonalds to bring people through the gates, is this involvement with sponsors and the community something every club should look at?
Definitely, there’s a big part in the licence agreement about community engagement, some clubs have done it really well. It’s probably easier for a regionally based club to get the community in because they’ve got a single focal point in the town for that level of football, but there’s other clubs that are doing good things as well.
Now we haven’t been pushing the clubs on that in the first half of the season, because given the rush we just want to make sure the clubs are doing their own things right. But they do have to have a community engagement plan into us in the coming month, to say what you are going to do with community engagement.
There is a variety of stuff that a club can do: engage with your local sponsor and try to provide a better match day experience, that sort of thing. There is hosting local tournaments at no cost to the community clubs, there is working with disability groups, working with rival groups, working with local schools. Talking to Eastern Jets, they already have a partnership with a local school. They’re doing a bit of coaching there and in return get access to synthetic surfaces. So that’s a good community engagement that’s going to build their brand and also give them a big tick of having an extra synthetic surface to train on.
There’s a lot of clubs doing a lot of good things, St Albans have Ryan McGuffy who’s come over as their Technical Director. He’s been up and about in schools to help them in sports days and that sort of thing, and that’s what we should be doing. We’re going to be fairly strict on that, we’re at a new level now and we got to have community engagement. We don’t have the standalone clubs anymore that just look after their own backyard. We have an icon in the community, we have a pillar of football in that area. We want people to grow up wanting to play for their local club and the only way they’re going to do that is to do the work in the community.
You’re not just selling to the kids that want to play in that league, you’re selling it to the parents. If you’re at that school, doing good things in the community, associated with good news stories in the community, people think that’s a club I want to be a part of. If your club’s name is going to the tribunal or in the newspaper, suddenly they think ‘I don’t want my son or daughter to play there’. You see a club in some good news, maybe with a puff piece in the Herald Sun, then you think that’s a nice club, I want to go there. We want to have more of that and less of the negative stuff.
It’s a really big part what we do going forward. It’s been put on the back burners a little bit up until the clubs have got themselves set up but it’s certainly going to be in the forefront of our minds over the next two to three years.
That is the end of Part 1, stay tuned for Part 2 where we talk about NPL Youth issues and the State Knockout Cups.
Other topics to come in later parts includes issues surrounding the Women’s game, with the topic of NPL and WPL finals for this season on the agenda.
So stay tuned and don’t miss any of it!
Jump forward to Part 2: NPL youth + cup competitions