Club Football is Community Football - "More than a Club"

Clubs are the building blocks of Football in our community.
Develop our players - all of them in their turn - and develop further those of the players who have some talent that goes beyond the normal. People have all sorts of ambitions and dreams in Football and they are all as good as the other. Helping people be the best they can be is at the heart of development. But never leave the Clubs out of the picture.
In recent times it seems some of us may have lost their focus. Lets get it and them back.

When Craig Foster blogged on his expereince / observations of that wonderful football club Barcelona, he made these observations:

Mes Que Un Club. Catalan to English translation: More Than A Club.


A grand vision statement which encapsulates, in just four words, so much about FC Barcelona which is admirable, whether the historical centrality of the football club to the Catalan identity which suffered so greatly throughout the history of Spain, the importance placed on human values and principles of social support which underpin the work done by the FCB Foundation in Africa, or the adherence to a philosophy of playing stylish, attacking football in the face of a game which increasingly moves in the opposite direction.


Whether it is the club’s insistence on accepting honours with humility, a practice that has been well exercised recently with the Copa Del Rey and the Primera Liga titles locked away, or the notion of being member-owned in an era of oligarchs and listed clubs, FC Barcelona seems something of an anachronism but I have travelled to Catalunya this week principally for one reason, to divine the secrets of one of the world’s most successful academies, responsible for an impressive production line of homegrown players like Iniesta and Xavi, Bojan and Piquet, as well as Messi and Puyol.


Importantly, though, also a system that has produced a homegrown coach, Pep Guardiola, something which has become far rarer in top flight European football even than first team players with an attachment to their own club.


The model of the FC Barcelona player is clear, a versatile operator who can keep the ball in the face of suffocating defense, plays comfortably with both feet, has an outstanding tactical insight and plays always with an attacking mentality. Just, in other words, what we aim to produce in Australia and, one could say, precisely what we currently lack.


Watching the training of players aged from 7-13 in the first few days and speaking with the FCB coaches, the greatest impression is one of educational structure and integration.


The approach is extremely professional, facilities of course superb , with parents and players adhering to a code of conduct and whilst the sessions are clearly enjoyable and at times fun for the youngsters, they are intense, entirely with the ball, and are highly structured into the annual program with monthly cycles with a common objective both technically and tactically.


The coaches’ role is one of correction and guidance, and this is the missing link in Australian coaching, the ability to read the players and correct the decision making and positional play, most still stuck in the basic techniques, the ‘drill’ mentality.


This is a school of football with every session integrated into the progressive educational curriculum, and this requires an outstanding coach education system which, as proven by Guardiola, clearly exists here at FCB .......
.....
My visit coincides with that of a young Australian, Joe Calletti, who has been selected to train with the FCB escola, or football school, for a week and gives an added insight into the integration of one of our own into the FCB system.


After his first session, in which he performed well, when asked his impressions, 10-year-old Joe had this to say, “very hard.. their players were very tough, and play very fast”.


The players train with intensity, and in their play can already be seen the core elements of the ‘Barca way’ – fast movement of the ball, passes always through the defence on angles and excellent movement in support of the attack, reason why Joe found the play fast, because young Barca players are focused on their position, Australians on the ball.


So there we have it - a Club is more than just a Club - at any level, anywhere. The primary Football education comes through the Club!


Now on to Les Murray, who speaks to a related issue around Clubs and community, in the conetnxt of the recent trouble at North Queensland Fury:

If Don Matheson refuses to bleed more money at North Queensland Fury then the club should quickly be handed over to those that would find it harder to walk away - the community.
Don Matheson, as reported in a TWG exclusive, is about to walk from being majority owner of North Queensland Fury.
It seems The Don, a thoroughly decent and well-meaning man, has done enough bleeding from his wallet, which he says amounted to about $40,000 a week.
He now suggests the Fury should turn towards becoming more of a community based club: "The team will be far better as a community owned side with a broad base of investors," Matheson told the World Game.
"That creates an environment where people have a sense of belonging to the club."
He’s right on the money. Community based clubs have a history of financial stability. As opposed to privately owned clubs, going broke is not a common part of their pattern.
Even the old NSL, not exactly a shining model for professional football management, can be proud of its record in keeping bankruptcies, financial collapses and club closures to a minimum.
In the NSL’s 28-year history between 1977 and 2005, some 42 clubs participated for just six club closures: Canberra Cosmos, Sydney City (which withdrew but went on to exist in lower leagues), Collingwood, Carlton, Morwell Falcons and Northern Spirit.
In the five year history of the A-League five of the ten participating clubs (originally just eight) either went bust or had to be bailed out by the FFA: Perth Glory, New Zealand Knights, Adelaide United, Brisbane Roar and now, it appears, North Queensland Fury.
That’s an attrition rate of 50 per cent versus the NSL’s 14 per cent. It doesn’t make happy reading.
Why is this so?
Well, it’s not because the NSL clubs, or indeed the NSL itself, were better run. Far from it. What has a lot to do with the NSL clubs’ high survival rate is that most of them were community based clubs.
Communities tend not to walk away from clubs when there’s a financial bleed. On the contrary, they often rally and respond, helping to bail their club out of its troubles.
It is instructive that in Spain and Germany, where membership and community based ownership is the norm, clubs almost never go to the wall.
When there is financial trouble the banks tend to prop them up, partly because the banks are part of the very community the club represents.
And community based clubs tend to be more popular, attracting more fans and indeed sponsors because the fans have a tribal sense of ownership of their club.
This does not happen with privately owned clubs where the life of the club is only as long as the depth of the owner’s pocket, and the fans generally hold only resentment for the rich bloke who owns ‘their’ club.
In Spain, Real Madrid will never go to the wall, despite its outrageous spending on player transfers, because no bank would dare foreclose on such an institution.
But this is not guaranteed for example in England where private, often foreign owners are seen by banks as exactly what they are – opportunist speculators who will sell out or simply walk when things turn bad.
So thank you, Don, for hanging in for as long as you have. It’s time now to hand the keys to the people.

Clubs make Football possible. When we plan on developing the game, we should do it through or in conjunction with our Clubs.

Go to the World Game to follow up on Les Murray and Craig Foster's (more content please Craig) blogs;