We’re into the final part of our chat with Liam Bentley, and today’s Part 3 covers all things women’s football, from NPL, WPL to the junior structures.
If you missed it:
Without further ado, here are the final questions:
Where is the NPL process at for the women’s game?
It’s at a critical stage at the moment. FFA have released their draft framework and we’ve already met with some key stakeholders and we’ve got three or four key groups that we want to meet with, all of which are NPL clubs. We have Women’s Premier League clubs who we’ve already met with. We have a women’s standing committee who we’ve been in contact with and also the rest of the female football community, which we’ll be having a release of the draft framework for the feedback.
At the moment we’re at the very basic football framework. What coaching licences should the coaches at this level need? What should the points cap look like? What’s the club criteria supposed to be? FFA have asked us for that feedback and we went back to the FFA and said: ‘well Liam Bentley can give you his feedback but that’s Liam Bentley’s view. What we would like is to do is actually do a genuine consultation’. I know that word has bad connotations of the last NPL process but a genuine consultation with the football family in Victoria on how we’ll move forward.
We’ve got to go back to the FFA by mid-June with what Victoria wants. From that they will give us the framework and then we start looking at the Victorian structure. We’ll look at where we are at in terms the clubs who can apply and we’ll do more consultations. We want to do a couple of roadshows, forums here and there, then it’ll probably open around August/September, and hopefully have it all ticked off by October so the clubs will have a good lead in time to set themselves up and we avoid the issues of early 2014.
So we are looking at a 2015 start?
Definitely, 100%. No question, that was in the mediated outcome of last year between the FFA, the co-signatory clubs and FFV, that the female NPL will be implemented in 2015.
Will the NPL Women be semi-professional, or will it remain amateur as the Women’s Premier League currently is?
That’s one of the things that we’ll have to consult about. The question is there of ‘if men get paid, why can’t women’? We’ve seen the upshot, and we’ve seen the downside of what happens when players get paid. There’s a lot of proud traditional, big Victorian clubs that are now not at the top level of the game because of financial issues. We don’t want to let our female clubs follow that same path.
However, it could be said that in the model of NPL, there will be a much better structure to allow them to pay players but be smart about it and do it by the book. It is one of the questions that we will ask. Anecdotally I’ve asked clubs should we have semi-pro women, some clubs say definitely yes, some clubs said not a chance. It will be an interesting debate once we get into that conversation.
So will it be more of a short-term goal or a long-term goal for the competition to be fully semi-professional?
It will be long-term. I would love to think that we can have a semi-professional women’s league over here because you attract more players and hopefully that means better players coming through, and that’s why people are willing to spend their money. But it’s a long term prospect at the moment.
There is a visible gap between the top half and the bottom half of the Women’s Premier League, will the NPL have rules that will reduce that gulf?
The number of teams will be crucial. Probably the majority will admit that 12 is too many teams for the Premier League. We probably don’t have at the moment 12 clubs set up to be top Premier League teams. That doesn’t mean we can’t have 12 in the future because you’ve got to look at the rest of Victoria as well. Bendigo, Shepparton, Gippsland, all these places are strong women’s football areas.
It’s going to be designed to reduce it because the clubs that get in are going to have to reach a certain standard, but there’s always going to be a winner and there’s always going to be a loser. There’s going to be a team that finishes bottom of the league. What we want to do is make sure those teams that are finishing at the bottom of the league are still developing the players to come through.
You have to look at someone like Brunswick City [in NPL1], who are really starting to focus on bringing the U20s through. In two or three years time when the points cap drops, they’re going to be in a much better position because they’re going to have many more players coming through that will be part of their senior squad.
That’s what we’ll be looking at for the women as well. We’ve got a points gap coming through, you want to have the right players playing for your club in order to play within the rules of that points gap.
What can be done to increase that talent pool though? Because it’s only big enough to supply seven top teams if you look at the WPL table as it stands at the moment.
To be honest the NPL is going to be a part of that. We’re looking at developing coaches in the women’s game. That’s number one. The number one reason females leave football is because of bad experiences with coaches. The data is there. We need better coaches. We need coaches who are doing the right things to develop those players. There will be natural attrition, some players will leave and more players will come through. That’s going to build up talent.
The other thing is to start looking at skill acquisition. Now the FFV are currently looking for a Female Development Officer, and part of that role is going to be doing skill acquisition with females as well. So that’s another 10, 15, 20 girls coming through at 11 – 13 years old who are going to be getting that skill acquisition training which will put them in better stead.
If we look at the men’s competition, 11 of the NPL clubs now run acquisition programs. That’s not going to be the first team in 10 years, but that’s more players that are coming through and getting that skill acquisition training. That’s what we’ll be hoping to do with the women’s as well. Train more girls, get more girls into the system, that’s what it is. There’s no two ways about it. Sheer numbers are what kills us. We don’t have the numbers of that level so we just have to increase that number.
A lot of that will come in the participation side as well. We are looking at other ways of structuring the game in women’s football and young girls football to try and attract more people to play. It’s a very, very social game for junior girls. They want to play where their friends are playing, so we want to keep those players engaged in the game and hopefully after a couple years of engagement from 8-12 year olds, they’ll start to realise ‘well I’m a good player, I can actually go to play in the NPL as well’.
That is a long-term prospect because the numbers aren’t there at the moment, but I’d love to think that in 10 years time, we’ll have 15-20 top class women’s teams and those teams are filtering through Young Matildas, W-League and Matildas.
Another issue with participation rates is with the junior structure, especially among community football. There seems to be a distinct lack of clubs available, what can be done to entice other clubs to start embracing women’s football?
Look it’s tough. We need to educate the clubs in terms of what a good women’s football environment is. There are just some clubs who just aren’t very good at catering women’s football and you don’t want to force girls to go to those clubs. But that doesn’t mean we just leave them and say you never have to attend women’s football. There needs to be education; again it’s going to come with numbers, it’s going to come with demand.
If you’ve only got a small pool of female players, and you’ve got a club that does it well and a club that doesn’t do it so well, they’re going to go to the club that does it well. So then you’re asking the club to change it’s culture, to work really hard to get no players because they’re going to another club anyway.
We are building those numbers though, we’re looking at small sided football now, we’ve got more junior girls teams than we’ve ever had previously. Junior girls SSF teams are free to enter, and if you enter a junior girls SSF team, you get a free boys team as well. So that’s the stuff we’re trying to encourage at that bottom level.
The best use of resources is to start at the very bottom level. There’s no point trying to hammer and get U17-18s girls at the moment, we need to start at the bottom and work our way up. If you look at how many teams we’ve got at U16s, 17s and 18s, and you look at how many SSF teams we had when those girls started, then you would say it’s X amount of those girls going through. Even if we stick with that and we haven’t improved it, X amount of the girls that are in the SSF now would mean you’re probably going to double or triple the number of girls team at that level over the next few years.
The big focus is on the grassroots, on the SSF. At that U8s level, you’re talking about 6-7 girls that you have to get onto the park. So you can get your boys team for free, tick the female inclusion box and not have to pay a cent for any of your teams. It’s not big money, it’s $60 to enter a SSF team but it’s just a little sign from us to say we don’t care about that, we’d rather just have the players come in.
For the clubs that do get the NPL, what’s going to happen to the second, third or more senior level teams that some WPL clubs field in the State League’s?
This is a part of the discussions that we’re going to be having. At first glance I think it’s going to be the same scenario as the men’s NPL. Obviously you can’t have more than one men’s team in State League but you did have Third’s teams, and they had to let them go. Either create another community club and have those girls accommodated there or they go play for another club, because the focus genuinely needs to be for this team, for this club coming into NPL.
It’s really hard work. Ask any men’s NPL club and they’ll tell you there’s more pressure and demand put on them than anything they’ve had to do ever before. Having community teams, because the way the constitutions are written, everyone deserves a vote within your club. Now if you’ve got more players who are community orientated and your club because you have two or three State League teams, or six, seven community junior teams, then they all deserve a vote. Now if they all deserve a vote you actually more people who are non-NPL and development focused voting in your club.
We need everyone in that structure at that club to be focussed on the ultimate goal of being a top NPL club and bringing those players through. If someone’s there for a kick about in State 3 or State 4 and they’re just there to enjoy their football and are never going to make the elite levels, then they have a very different focus of what they want from a football club, what they want from a committee.
Moving along to the WPL now, the clubs have had a vote for how they felt the season should finish, has a decision been reached?
We’re not leaving finals, we’re keeping that. Surprisingly not all of the clubs replied when we asked that question but the ones that did, the majority feedback that we got from them was that they wanted to stick as is. Which is fair enough. I’m not a big fan of changing things mid-season. There may be one game moved to mid-week to have the Grand Final moved to a better venue.
Essentially what will happen is we want to have a double header with the W-League and the WPL Grand Final at Lakeside Stadium, subject to confirmation of W-League fixtures and venues. We can’t get Lakeside on the current week it’s scheduled, so we’re going to bring it back a week. There’s a week that can be moved to a mid-week fixture, we’ll move that mid-week, and put everything else back a week, then we can basically have that massive day.
How will having to play out the season as is affect the bigger teams with W-League players though?
It’ll be a struggle, but I think it’s a chance for their fringe players to show the depth of squad that they’ve got. It’s not uncommon to us here, I mean we’re in the cricket heartland in Melbourne. How many of those players actually play for their clubs then go away to play for their state or their country. It happens, it’s not ideal, but I think looking at the bigger picture, having the Asian Cup here will do more for football than most things the FFV could do in the next 12 months so I think we’re just going to have to cop it on the chin for this one year and move on.
-END
So that is all we have from the long chat, hopefully you’ve all enjoyed the three part series!
For the other parts, click the links below: