If you dip in and out of NZ domestic soccerfootball like I do and have tuned in for the first round of the 2021 season, you may be wondering what the heck is going on. New club names have appeared (West Coast Rangers, Northern Rovers) and familiar names are showing up in unexpected places (Auckland City - now in the Northern Premier League!)
Restructure
This year NZ Football (NZF) decided to shake up the top level domestic competitions. The way the system has worked up to 2020 is clubs played in their regional leagues during the winter season, and following this there was a shorter national competition in the summer with regional federation teams formed from players in each federation's network of feeder clubs.
For 2021 the format of the competitions isn't going to change much, but qualification will change to a Champions League style process with the top clubs in each region qualifying for an inter-regional competition.
Mens league
The new National League will also be expanded from 8 to 10 teams including 4 Northern, 3 Central and 2 Southern clubs. Yes that doesn't add up - read on to find out why.
With the
disestablishment of the old NZ Football Championship (NZFC), the 8 existing federation teams were set to vanish unless they found new places in the system. So what happened?
- Team Wellington, Canterbury United and Hawkes Bay United did indeed cease to exist. We will see some new names in the National League as clubs from the central and southern regions qualify.
- Auckland City was always closely linked to Central United and the two have now formally merged under the Auckland City name.
- Waitakere United has merged with regional club Norwest United to form West Coast Rangers.
- Eastern Suburbs and Hamilton Wanderers always had regional club representation, so nothing needed to change for them.
- The Wellington Phoenix reserves are an exception, they used to play in the NZFC and will continue to participate in the National League as the 10th team. Apparently it's a condition of the Phoenix's A-league licence that their reserves play in a national level competition. I imagine the Phoenix saves a lot of money by fielding their reserves domestically instead of flying them to Australia with the first squad.
So this year there will be a minimum of one name (Phoenix) from the old NZFC, and a maximum of four (add Auckland City, Eastern Suburbs and Hamilton Wanderers if they qualify).
2021 is a transitional year for the Southern League. Unlike Northern and Central, its catchment covers two existing premier leagues - Mainland and South - and it was considered too disruptive to suddenly merge these into a single league for this year. Instead the existing leagues will run a shortened season to July, after which the top clubs from each league (5 from Mainland, 3 from South) will contest a shortened Southern League from which the top 2 will go qualify for the National League.
There is a lot at stake for the 16 premier South Island clubs in the first half of 2021. 8 will qualify for the new Southern League, while the rest will remain in their regional competitions. From 2022 onwards clubs would have to win their regional leagues to gain promotion to the Southern League.
Womens league
The Womens National League has undergone a similar overhaul but club strength is not considered high enough outside the north, so it will be 4 qualifying northern clubs vs 4 federations covering the rest of the country (the existing Southern United, Canterbury Pride, Capital Football and Central Football will remain). Since previously there were only 3 northern federations (Auckland Football, Northern Lights and Waikato-Bay of Plenty), more northern players will get to play in the National League.
The qualifying odds are also good for the northern teams as the Northern Premier Womens League only has six clubs in this first year of the new structure. Why only six teams? There were eight last year. Claudelands Rovers is one absentee - they were in the NPWL last year but are not fielding a team this year, and I don't know why. They came last, but I thought there was no promotion-relegation last year due to Covid. You can read on to find out what happened with the second missing club.
Why the change?
OK, so why is all this restructure even happening? Maybe if we take a look at why the NZFC was established in the first place. For the decades prior, there had been a persistent problem: clubs struggled to fund the expenses associated with national level teams. The number of clubs that could participate kept changing, sometimes dropping out in the middle of a season. In 2004 the federation system was put into place to provide some continuity at the national level.
But recently both NZF and the clubs seem to be much better resourced than they used to be, with some clubs clamouring to be allowed to play at the national level. It seems club-based promotion-relegation is now viable.
Also NZF has stressed that they want development pathways
for younger players coming through, but the federation teams have stacked their
teams with experienced old hands and imports instead of giving youngsters enough
opportunities. Clubs concern themselves with a range of player ages and can
take a longer view on development. In theory federations should care about player development too, but in practice it appears that regional rivalry and prestige ultimately mattered a lot more to them.
NZF has gone further with this by also setting minimum quotas of younger players for the clubs' first teams. You may be scratching your head as to why NZF is insisting on this. English Football wouldn't demand that Premier League clubs must have under-20 players in their squads. The difference is elite football is not fully professional in NZ; at best it's a stepping stone to a professional career elsewhere in the world. But the pathway is difficult if the top domestic competition has no space for promising talent and is filled with journeymen and tourists. NZ's football star of the moment is Sarpreet Singh who is now at Bayern Munich. Arguably his career progression would have been much harder without the youth programme at the Onehunga Sports club and Wellington Phoenix's emphasis on player development. NZF wants to continue to foster these talents because they will inevitably pay back in the form of international appearances, publicity and later on, coaching. The long game is to lift our national level which will increase the popularity of the game in NZ. NZers are notoriously fickle fair-weather supporters, so success is a prerequisite for crowds.
Overall I think the restructure is a good thing - as long as the clubs are strong enough to sustain their participation, and NZF stops tinkering for a long long time. Continuity and longevity are the hallmarks of successful sporting leagues, and pop-up federation teams offered little in this regard.
And finally
And what about Northern Rovers? Sorry, that was a red herring. Forest Hill-Milford United and Glenfield Rovers have indeed merged to form a new amalgamated club, but neither was ever a federation team.
However you could say the merger was an indirect consequence of the restructure, as suddenly there is a lot more at stake. Every club playing in their top regional league now has the chance to go all the way to the Club World Cup and earn a minimum six figure payday - which is a lot for NZ football! So all the regional clubs will be looking at what they can do to make themselves more competitive.
For Northern Rovers a
merger was part of the plan. Both clubs were in the women's top flight, and their merger has actually shrunk the NPWL. So that's the second "missing" club.
South City Royals is another new club this year in the Football South Mens league with Caversham and Dunedin Technical merging to maximise their chances of qualifying for the Southern League. I salute their avoidance of boring merger names like Dunedin United or South Dunedin. Some of the quirkier club names are out of the running for the National League this year and will have to gain promotion - FC Twenty11, Stop Out.
Last year it was a similar story for Auckland United. Onehunga Sports and Three Kings United decided to merge to position themselves better to bid for a federation team under the old system. By luck of timing Auckland United is now well set up to compete for that big Club World Cup prize.
