It has been great to see the game starting to bouncing back after the past few months of uncertainty but COVID-19 has further exposed some of the challenges we already were aware of in football. The coming years will require us to look closely at how we run football in this country to ensure we are safeguarding its future, and creating a solid base to grow from. 

As such, in May we appointed a Steering Group to lead a Deliverability and Sustainability project, looking into areas of the game where improvements could be made. This group is made up of Mainland Football CEO Julian Bowden, Central Football Chair Jamie Hall, Northern Football Board member Mike Davies, NZF CEO Andrew Pragnell, former Football Fern Rebecca Rolls, Independent Director Liz Dawson and myself, with facilitators David Hansen and David Steel. 

From the group’s meetings, four areas emerged to focus on:

1. The integration and alignment of competition structures
2. The scaling of shared services and structures
3. Shifting culture by building on diversity and inclusion and
4. Developing and supporting the wider football ecosystem.

Each of these challenges will have:

• A working brief
• Invited participants to sit on the works stream and contribute to the development of the work.

The timeframes on this work are based on moving quickly over the next 10 weeks with the aim of having a draft plan with actions for consideration for NZF stakeholders by October.

Football is a complex system and we do not see this as a standalone piece of work that will necessarily address all of our challenges in the game at a single point in time. In fact, this work could throw up other challenges which we as a football community will need to consider going forward.

To ensure that as many voices as possible are heard I will be holding an open forum via Zoom with the first one scheduled for 16 July at 7.30pm. If you wish to participate in this please contact Tracy Brady at Tracy.Brady@nzfootball.co.nz by 5pm on 15 July. To maximise the benefit of such a forum, I ask that those who wish to participate send in questions or comments prior to the Zoom call.

Yours in football,

Johanna Wood

President

Article added: Tuesday 14 July 2020