FFA and soccer in search of a new direction as David Gallop steps down

Soccer is in need of a new leader as David Gallop prepares to stand down from Football Federation Australia.

Outgoing FFA chief executive David Gallop. Picture: Richard Jupe

The Olympics were under way and the sporting world at play when Frank Lowy welcomed John Hartigan onto the gleaming deck of Ilona, his superyacht moored in London’s Canary Wharf.

Over coffee and beneath a warm, late summer sun, the billionaire boss of Australian soccer and the recently retired Australian chief of News Corp talked about the challenges facing the game and, at Lowy’s invitation, who best to take on one of the most difficult jobs in sports administration; running the FFA.

“The conversation changed pretty quickly to David,’’ Hartigan recalled. “To stand up in the middle of what was going on, day after day, at the NRL, showed the quality of his leadership. Even the people who were down on David accepted he was a strong administrator.’’

David Gallop, NRL chief executive for the previous 10 years, was also in London for the Games. The next day, he met with Lowy and Australian soccer landed its new chief executive.

As an experienced, pragmatic administrator with no romantic attachment to the sport, Gallop’s brief was clear: to drive soccer’s commercial growth, to secure a big TV deal and, as one observer put it, to “help the game lift its head out of its own arse”.

Seven years after that meeting, soccer in Australia appears to have resumed the position.

Two weeks ago, Australian soccer severed its most valuable asset, the A-League, from the FFA, at once making Gallop’s position redundant in a dramatically altered administrative landscape. To the surprise of few, he announced he would quit his post at the end of the year.

The FFA board, constituted in the Lowy era as an independent governance body intended to promote the interests of the game above club self-interest, is now elected by and politically beholden to the 29 members of an expanded Congress.

The stand-alone A-League will be governed by a newly created body, still to be finalised.

While the Matildas competed in France, the New Leagues Working Group nutted out an in-principle agreement with the FFA for each of the 12 clubs to be represented on the new body, along with two FFA representatives armed with a “good of the game” veto right.

The A-League has promised to help fund the operations of the FFA by providing an annual contribution — in the first instance $4.5 million — but the FFA won’t see that money for a while. For the first four years of the club-run A-League, those funds will be ploughed back into the competition. The FFA will be left to make do with what it receives from FIFA, national team sponsorship and its share of the existing broadcast rights deal.

In effect, the FFA goes from being a $120m sports organisation to a $30m or $40m organisation responsible for preparing and fielding our national teams and nurturing community football. It will need a good chief executive but not one that comes with Gallop’s price tag.

So who should run what’s left of the FFA? Not for the first time, some of the sport’s most prominent voices are calling for a “football person” to become the next FFA chief executive. This has long been an article of faith for people who passionately ­believe soccer can become the dominant football code in ­Australia, and the A-League can grow in the image of the powerful European leagues, once the game is placed in the hands of someone who shares that vision. Gallop, ­although ambitious for soccer, was more concerned with securing the game’s place in the national sporting landscape than dreaming of Europe.

Since the A-League’s formation in 2005, the three FFA chief executives have been drawn from other football codes; John O’Neill from rugby union, Ben Buckley from the AFL and Gallop from the NRL. SBS broadcaster and ex-Socceroo Craig Foster says that for both strategic and financial reasons, a football person is needed to heal a fractured game.

“At a time of growing division, trust and credibility are critical factors from 2020 and beyond,’’ Foster said. “It would be next to impossible for a fourth consecutive chief executive to come from outside the football industry itself, in my view. The trust and credibility deficit is too great.”

Foster wonders what the A-League might now look like had a “football person” been in charge from the start. Would the A-League have started with two teams in the big cities, creating marquee derby games straight away rather than assigning one team per market?

Would a football person have understood the importance of the clubs establishing junior academies to produce elite players who by now, would be playing for national teams and earning money for the clubs via international transfers, instead of allowing elite youth ­development to stagnate?

Would the idea of boutique stadiums have been pursued with more vigour, instead of requiring A-League teams to play matches in costly and oversized venues? Would expansion been driven more by market research than available capital?

“The question for football, both the independent leagues and the governing body, is not whether a CEO from inside the game is desirable, but what are the opportunity costs of recruiting again from outside,” Foster said.

These are good questions but no longer questions for the FFA. Whoever takes over from Gallop will step into a very different job. Stripped of its financial clout and management of the A-League, the FFA will mostly wield influence through its relationships; with FIFA, with state, federal and local governments, with the club bosses and the national teams.

Gallop’s successor will need to be as much a diplomat as an ­administrator, engaging with state federations to lobby government for grassroots funding, to ­secure the 2023 Women’s World Cup and to establish centres of ­excellence.

“Without running the competition, the person running the FFA is largely a political appointment to appease the commissioners and where they want to position Australia in international soccer,’’ Hartigan said. “That is going to be nodding like a circus pony, I would have thought.”

As an organisation, it will be small, stretched and heavily ­reliant on its slice of the six-year, $57.6m a season broadcast rights deal that Gallop helped negotiate three years ago. FFA lists less than $7m of net assets on its balance sheet. One way for the governing body to secure more capital would be to replace the state federations with a genuine, national structure. This will be fiercely resisted by the states, but former FFA ­director and 1974 Socceroos goalkeeper Jack Reilly is an advocate.

“One governing body with professional management in each state, all trying to deliver on the same agenda,” is his mantra.

The A-League clubs will soon be in control of their own competition but this won’t immediately make them profitable. The $346m figure Fox Sports paid for the rights to broadcast A-League, Socceroos and Matildas matches is now well beyond what the broadcaster assesses the rights to be worth. Television ratings for A-League matches have tanked since English Premier League matches shifted to Optus. In the absence of a ratings surge, the next broadcast deal will bring in less money than the last one.

With this in mind, one of the new A-league teams, Western United, is pursuing a radically different business model. The club plans to build a 15,000-seat stadium for their team, paid for by private investors, in the Melbourne suburb of Tarneit, about 30km west of the CBD. Income from a residential housing precinct and a mixed-use commercial property development next to the stadium will underpin the entire project, with the backing of the local council in Wyndham, one of Australia’s fastest-growing municipalities.

Final planning approval is still required but Western United are confident they will be in their new stadium within about three years.

“It sounds self-serving, but we think we are the future for A-League clubs,” said Western United director Lou Sticca. “We will control food and beverage and all the other things at the stadium. It will be there for the club, which won’t pay rent and have to share.”

The business model, if successful, promises a way forward for clubs. It is less clear how the latest upheaval in football will best serve the broader interests of the game.

When the Howard government commissioned David Crawford to conduct an independent review of soccer some 15 years ago, the game was in a mess. Crawford, the architect of the modern AFL Commission, found that for soccer to flourish, it needed an independent board and an appropriately qualified chief executive to oversee a management structure capable of achieving budget, business plans and strategic objective.

Today, soccer in Australia needs these same things. Instead, the FFA board has been politicised and its power diluted, the game’s business plans and strategic objectives have been cleaved in two and one of Australia’s most qualified chief executives is heading for the door. A senior soccer administrator shakes his ahead and asks a question that no one has yet answered. “Tell me, why are we better off?”