At the start of the month New Zealand Football announced some changes to what’s currently known as the ISPS Handa Premiership which could accurately be described as: extensive. Drastic is another word that springs to mind. Significant is another. Basically it won’t even be the same competition any longer... this is the biggest shake-up to the domestic football scene in a generation and as such, gotta be honest, it took a while to even just accept this new reality let alone get to grips with the specifics. But I’ve had some time to think about it now so let’s do this.

What Exactly Are We Talking About Here?

From 2021 the Men’s National League will be brought into alignment with the winter season as a sort of Champions League style end of year competition. The winter season will happen as normal between March and September, then the top ten clubs from around the nation will partake in a ’championship’ between October and December in a single round robin with the top two teams progressing straight to a grand final. So an additional 9-10 games for these clubs on top of what they play in winter in both league and cup competitions (the Chatham Cup remains untouched by all this... in fact there’s even room to start the year with a Community Shield fixture, cup winners vs championship winners - make it happen, please).

As to how those ten teams qualify... one team gets in automatically and that’s the Wellington Phoenix. So the WeeNix live on to fight another day (although for licensing reasons they’ll need to have a memorandum of understanding with a registered club side – presumably Lower Hutt City which is where their dudes all play in winter). Then the other nine come out of three regional conferences: Northern, Central, Southern.

The Northern Conference is just the NRFL Premier Division and the top four teams from there will qualify. It’s like how the top four teams in the English Premier League make the Champions League, you get it? Then the Central Conference is, again, the Central Premier League with the top three teams making it. However the Southern Conference will take some finessing (which NZF says they’ll be helping to facilitate) as it means that Mainland and Football South will have to combine into a South Island competition in some way, shape, or form. They get two entries.

Okey Doke, What’s That Gonna Look Like Then?

Umm... let’s do a hypothetical. 2020 was wrecked for football in Auckland so we’ll take the 2019 standings instead where North Shore United were the champs. So they’d be competing in the national league alongside fellow qualifiers Onehunga Sports, Birkenhead United, and Western Springs (we’ll come back to the current state of some of these clubs soon, dw). This year’s Central League was won by Miramar Rangers, followed by Western Suburbs and Wellington Olympic. Then let’s just take the current champs from both Mainland and South which’d be Cashmere Technical and Green Island AFC. Meaning that this hypothetical thought exercise would serve up a national league of these teams:

• North Shore United

• Onehunga Sports

• Birkenhead United

• Western Springs

• Miramar Rangers

• Western Suburbs

• Wellington Olympic

• Cashmere Technical

• Green Island AFC

• Wellington Phoenix Reserves/U20s

What About Auckland City and Team Wellington?

They’re dead now. Sorry ‘bout it. Or... will be dead at the end of the current season, at least. The franchise clubs are no longer viable in this format so unfortunately the two dominant forces of the last decade will disappear into the wind. Same goes with a few of those other current Premiership clubs although Eastern Suburbs and Hamilton Wanderers are already extensions of winter clubs so they’re in a better place to roll with this news... however they’ll still have to qualify and neither would have based on those 2019 standings.

The whole point of this is to create alignment between all the leagues in the country. In theory now your local battlers could get a couple promotions and then win the national league and work through the OFC Champions League and be playing Barcelona or Bayern Munich in the Club World Cup. That does depend on what FIFA does with the Club World Cup moving forward... and it’s also enormously unlikely just as it’s enormously unlikely – but theoretically possible – that Boreham Wood or Aldershot Town could one day win the Premier League in England. Those are Football Manager targets not than real-life expectations.

So no more Auckland City but that club does have very close links with Central United so they’ll basically be the same thing moving forward. Similar situation with Team Wellington and Miramar Rangers, though not quite as close. Waitakere United have pretty much become Summer Western Springs over the last two years. Canterbury United are stacked with Cashmere Tech players even if they operate more as a regional rep team. Same deal with Hawke’s Bay and Napier City Rovers. Southern and Tasman aren’t even playing this year anyway. That’s pretty much what’s up with all the current clubs. Rest in peace to these fallen soldiers.

Won’t This Weaken The Overall Standard Of The League?

Absolutely it will and that’s one of the major bummers here. By pivoting in this direction we’ll be seeing different teams competing each year and that means the talent will be spread a lot thinner. The best players won’t necessarily be playing in the national league – a lot of them simply won’t qualify. Plus we don’t need to get into how NZF are intending to crack down on player payments because honestly who cares but I am sceptical about how transfers will work around all this.

The rule is that players have to be registered with their club by 30 June in order to be eligible for the national league. Will that mean a flurry of transfers on 29 June to the top teams? Will players care enough about the national league to allow those top teams to stock up like that? To be honest they’ll probably just stock the shelves in January and February way ahead of time... so will this structural alignment thing therefore emphasise the winter leagues in a way that accidentally undermines the national league? There’s a ‘Player Points System’ gonna be implemented to ensure clubs build their squads in an appropriate way but what the hell that’ll look like we don’t yet know. There are some more squad regulations that’ll be introduced here though.

New Squad Regulations? Pray Tell...

• A minimum of two Under-20 players (as of 1 January in the year of competition) must be included in the starting eleven for every game

• A maximum of four foreign players (plus an additional Oceania player) may be included in any match-day squad

• All registered players must sign an Amateur Player Agreement with with their club

That’s one fewer import than currently allowed and the U20 thing is entirely new, meant to enforce the whole player development thing that NZF is pushing here. It gets stricter in 2022 as well where it becomes 3+1 for the imports and 2+2 for the U20s. As in three imports plus an Oceania player and two starting U20s plus two more in the match-day squad (so could be four starters, could be two starters and two on the bench).

Also any player whose “reimbursements” are in excess of the limits is considered a professional and is therefore ineligible and any fixture in which they played will be forfeited. There are no loans or transfer windows because apparently those are only for pros. You can only be registered with three different clubs in a single year and you can only play for two. Complete competition regulations are being released on 18 December with all the legal technicality yarns.

That’s A Big Emphasis On The Youngins, Aye?

Sure and it’s enough of a point of emphasis that even the national team coach came out swinging for the cause. But while we can all get onboard with the idea of young players getting opportunities... I’m quite uneasy about the idea of forcing those opportunities. It’s a quota system and those things are always morally dodgy. Call it affirmative action but it’s surface level stuff. The majority of Premiership clubs this season have at least one regular starter who fits under this banner and the fact that Auckland City, for example, do not... I mean, do we really care? Does it make a difference? Do they not add to the competition in other ways, like setting the standard for one thing?

Especially since by far the two strongest production lines of young players in this country are the Ole Academy and the Wellington Phoenix Academy. If you chucked this youth player rule into the current Premiership then most clubs would just sign a handful of Ole guys to make up the numbers but next year those dudes will all be playing for Western Suburbs so... yeah, that’s a worry. The majority of professional players over the last few years have come from those two sources. Football in New Zealand hasn’t really offered systemic structures for kids coming up so what we’ve seen instead is a professional team (with its own priorities) and an independent academy pick up the slack. But now every club scrapping for the champo is gonna have to have at least two teenagers playing key roles at the highest local level (and the thing about young players is that they don’t stay young forever – it’s gotta be a replenishing well). Some clubs have very good youth pathways. Some do not.

If you want 19 year olds to be pushing for national league selection then you need to ensure that those players have been getting the best possible coaching and development since they’re at least 13 or 14 so that when they’re 17/18/19 they’re being picked entirely on merit. It’s not an on/off switch, it’s a long term process. Otherwise you run the risk of undermining those players by exposing guys who simply aren’t good enough and more importantly undermining the integrity of the competition by putting priorities in place that don’t necessarily mesh with trying your best to win football games. After all this is supposed to be the peak standard of footy in Aotearoa, we’re trying to find the strongest club in the land. That should be the priority. And that competitive environment is what’ll get the best out of young players anyway.

I just think that while it’s an undeniably good thing if teenagers are getting these minutes, making it a strict rule is going too far. You want them to be playing for the right reasons. Maybe a system where you need three in the match-day squad works. Or like the A-League did last season with bonus bench spots for the kids. There are better ways to do this than shoehorning them in.

S’pose We’ll See The Richest Clubs Going Hundies For Power And Players Now?

Affirmative. Central United for example, a lot of their best ACFC dudes don’t necessarily take the winter stuff too seriously but they’ll have to now if they wanna make the big league. And those that don’t play for Central might soon find themselves on the books as youth and community coaches (imagine thinking you can stamp player payments out of the game, lol). That’s all cool though, that’s clubs trying to be the best that they can which is what we wanna see. It’s no different anywhere else in the world.

It will presumably be harder to attract imports now. You’re not selling dudes on a few months over the kiwi summer, you’re selling them on an entire year. But that’s no loss. We’re already watching a Prem season without those mercenary types and it’s none the weaker. Instead the imports who are hanging around are the ones who are committed residents, guys who in many cases are doing legit work as coaches in the community and giving back to kiwi football. The types of imports that we love and wanna keep seeing. Not sure how long they have to stay here to get localised but even when it’s only three imports in 2022 that’s not really gonna make a huge difference. Another one of those NZF hammer-points is sustainability and ensuring clubs aren’t spending beyond their means (so naturally there’s a $10k entry fee to the end-of-year championship stage). Shrinking import payments sure helps that.

The prospect of an integrated national league and winter season has been on the cards for a little while though so the going hundies idea goes well beyond maximising existing winter team squads. There’s also been a huge rush of combo clubs in recent years, pooling resources either with complete mergers or first-team mergers. For example...

• Manukau City + Mangere Utd = Manukau United

• Onehunga Sports + Three Kings Utd = Auckland United

• Glenfield Rovers + Forrest Hill Millford = Northern Rovers

• Norwest United + Waitakere City = Westcoast Rangers

Probably a couple more I can’t think of immediately too. This ain’t a new thing - heaps of clubs around the country are the product of mergers. But there’s definitely been a rush in recent years to consolidate power (and keep the power in the clubrooms running) with these super club entities.

Wait, Wasn’t There A Different League Structure Announced Like A Year Ago? What Happened There?

Oh you meant the one where there was gonna be promotion and relegation based over three years’ worth of results with some franchise clubs protected from the drop thanks to regional representation? Yeah that was stupid. The Armin Tamzarian of competition proposals and we shall never talk of it again.

You Mentioned NZF’s Main Objectives Before...

Indeed. In NZF’s own words these are the “guiding principles” that informed the competition review:

1. Keep things financially viable and sustainable

2. Embrace youth development

3. Be an open competition (with aligned pathways)

4. Provide top players with 30-odd games per year in a single training/playing environment

Speaks for itself. The financial part of this has to be highlighted because the way that some clubs spend money ain’t right. Propped up by benefactor donations and grants and all that. That’ll all still happen but at least NZF are making a point of bringing the financial yarns out into the open. The main reason so many clubs are unsustainable is because they get away with it. Plus I guess while having that structural alignment fulfils one of those wholesome football ideals of everybody trying to climb the same ladder... it also just makes things way simpler for New Zealand Football.

What Was Wrong With The Franchise Model?

The main problem is that it’s way too compromised in its current format. Once you allow two winter clubs into the comp then others wanna know why they can’t be there too. Kinda unfair for Hamilton Wanderers to be representing the Waikato region while local rivals Melville United spend their summer at the beach. Especially when, for this competition to be successful, it needed these teams to be getting full regional support but Melville fans aren’t gonna want to support their winter rivals like that. There was once a unified WaiBOP team... but it didn’t last. Just as Tasman United didn’t last. See the issue there?

I still think the ideal version of a national league is a franchise based model where every region is represented and the squads are picked from the best local players in those areas. Like a Super Rugby thing. Except that would require everybody to work together and that’s never been a given in kiwi football. Too many people with loud opinions (which generally benefit their own agendas, what a coincidence) unwilling to put the hatchets away for the sake of the sport and the wider community. This Premiership season is case and point. Many of the better players aren’t playing, the teams get bugger all support from fans compared to what they should be getting, everybody’s losing money, the competition doesn’t make any sense because of how some teams have folded and others have been embraced, there’s resentment in places where there should be encouragement. Not gonna go so far as to say this version of the Premiership was sabotaged by people who should’ve been supporting it... just gonna say that I hope everyone genuinely bands together around the next incarnation and tries to make it successful. Because if we don’t then it won’t be.

Wait A Sec... What About The Ladies?

I was waiting for you to finally ask that. The Women’s Premiership (which only this year finally got name + sponsor equality with the Men’s) currently exists as a much more honest version of that franchise thing. Seven teams from seven regions: Northern, Auckland, WaiBOP, Central, Capital, Canterbury & Southern. The two Auckland teams are sorta being run through clubs (Northern Rovers & Eastern Suburbs) but on the face of it they’re still regional rep teams. But not for long.

The caveat here is that it’s apparently gonna take longer to get the women’s clubs the right support or whatever to implement a similar thing to the fellas. And also for “regional competitions [to] reach a critical mass and appropriate talent pool to support the NLS” ... which in plain English means they don’t think there are enough strong female players to go fully club-based yet. Bit rude but okay.

Thus next year will be a hybrid competition in which Central, Capital, Canterbury & Southern will continue to compete but the competition (which will return to a double round robin format in 2021) will include an extra team as the Northern Conference is instead represented by the four top qualifying clubs. Going back to our previous hypothetical, the 2019 standards would serve up these four clubs: Eastern Suburbs, Glenfield Rovers, Forrest Hill Milford and Three Kings. Except that second and third there have since merged while fourth has merged with sixth. Which would launch fifth-placed Hamilton Wanderers into the national league as well. Which is nice. Don’t wanna see the Waikato left out.

And This All Happens From Next Year?

That it does. Sorta casts a shadow over the current Premiership season, doesn’t it?

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