It’s been a progressive year at Football Victoria. We re-branded to Football Victoria and revealed a new brand and website.
There was a strategic re-alignment at the commencement of the year where the organisation made a conscious decision to focus on the following four strategic pillars:
- A high-performance culture that earns mutual respect from the game’s stakeholders;
- An obsession for the prosperity of our clubs as the foundations of the game’s ongoing growth and development; building capability for our clubs to perform to an optimum level;
- Vital facilities and infrastructure that secures the game for the next 10 years; and collaborating with clubs, local government, federal government and the FFA;
- Participation growth through positive inclusion initiatives and programs that make football fun and accessible for men and women, boys and girls, and people of all cultures, ages and abilities.We had a successful year in 2018.
We unlocked around $100 million from state and local governments to invest in local community facilities and infrastructure. This was achieved on the back of our facilities strategy where we revealed that based on population increase and continued participation increases that we will need an additional 420 full size equivalent pitches by 2026 to cope with the demand. Furthermore, we also revealed that in 2018, 12,500 boys and girls of all abilities missed out on playing the game of their choice because our facilities have reached saturation point.
The state government also has announced that they will fund a business case for our state home of football so that we further scope what this will involve and which location.
We now have over 350,000 participants in Victoria and our biggest growth is coming from girls and women where we expect to reach 50/50 gender equity participation by 2027.
Victorian Clubs featured prominently on the national stage with Melbourne Victory winning the A-League Championship, Bentleigh Greens featuring in the semi-final of the FFA Cup and Heidelberg United participating in the NPL National Finals.
In 2019 we will reveal or new four year strategic plan which will expand on the strategic priorities of 2018.