A few weeks ago, New Zealand Football unveiled their new plans for growing the playing base of the Football Ferns beneath the professional ranks. The Football Ferns Development Programme, it was aptly named. The main aspect of the FFDP was implementing an invitational 25-player squad of locally based amateurs which would train centrally and compete in an Auckland boy’s league for matches.

Chucking them in what’s not even the top division of the boy’s under-17 league there caused a little controversy. Part of that frustration is that it’s kinda driving on the wrong side of the road for all those stereotypes that certain types of people (namely: idiots) use to justify the women’s side of the game being left behind. Oh but they’re nowhere near as good as the men, why should I care? It ain’t about that. You’ve gotta look at men’s and women’s football like two separate sports – nobody would be arguing quantifiers if the Footy Ferns had come back from Rio with an Olympic medal, they damn sure don’t complaint that Val Adams puts a lighter shot than Tom Walsh. The Ferns don’t play against the All Whites, they play against other international women’s teams. No need to compare.

But playing against the fellas in this FFDP thing opens up that argument again. There was that story a couple years ago when the Australian women’s team got thrashed in a friendly by a local U-15 team and that publicity was obviously a bit embarrassing. However the FFDP is handcuffed for options here. The idea is to create the closest thing to a professional system as possible and combining the best young players into this team is a fair enough concept. Who then are they gonna play? Well they’re already the best women so it’s gotta be some blokes, there simply ain’t another choice there. Plus it’s under-17s, so if you’ve played at that level coming up (or coached or been a parent, etc.) then you already know that it’s not unusual for teams to have a girl or two in their grades there. And the squad picked is full of players not that far removed from that age either (16-26 year olds).

As for the level of play, that would have been a specific decision based on a whole bunch of factors. Not only the speed and skill-level of the opposition but also the size and physicality. Trust that the research was done. A 7-0 win against an Albany side the other week suggests they aren’t swimming beyond their depth… although it might’ve been nice to let the clubs know they were taking their best players a little further away from the start of the new season. You know, for next time or whatever.

Mostly it was cool just to see the governing body in Aotearoa actually doing something proactive to try and help the national team after a tough few months of press. Ferns captain Abby Erceg retired amidst what she insisted were widely held frustrations with what the top women’s players were expected to sacrifice in order to stay at that level. As a pro herself, Erceg was better off than most and she still reached that breaking point. There are plenty of compounding reasons for that but putting specific financial, emotional, physical, employment and residential issues all aside… what it came down to in essence was a lack of respect for female football in New Zealand.

And then, the other day, Jasmine Pereira retired. A 20 year old footballer deciding that she’d had enough of the international stuff and that was that. Pereira wasn’t a crucial player like Erceg but she was a regular squad member and one of the first options manager Tony Readings would turn to off the bench (two appearances off the bench at the Rio Games last year), plus she had scored her first international goal against Hungary at the Cyprus Cup – what’ll now be her final of 24 caps for the Ferns.

Pereira therefore didn’t have the platform to make a statement like Erceg, but what she did have to say was even more pertinent because this is some ground-level hustle. A kiwi-based player, an emerging talent who made her debut for the Ferns as a teenager in 2014. The kind of player you’d hope would develop into a crucial one in the future but instead she’s had enough already.

Hopefully the FFDP does what it’s supposed to do and improves the level of top domestic players, allowing them to pursue actual careers in football overseas where you can get real currency for your ability. In New Zealand that’s not a possibility yet, though talks of a Wellington Phoenix Ladies is promising. We slammed Andy Martin, NZF CEO, pretty hard around the Erceg stuff for his dismissive comments on the matter and he relied heavily on that idea: it isn’t possible to be a pro in NZ. Well, sure, but can you at least make it easier for the ones who are trying?

The thing is, overseas clubs aren’t gonna sign a player because they scored a couple goals against Glenfield Rovers’ U17 boys side. But if that helps a player get better then they might make more of an impact with the national team where scouts genuinely will be watching (especially now that NZF are gonna take more responsibility for that under the new system). The number of kiwi women now playing professionally must be a record so you know the pathways are there… just maybe not at the Development Programme level yet. Some players will rise from here, others won’t.

Jaz Pereira wasn’t in the FFDP squad. Her retirement has slid under the radar. Why has she retired? Pretty much for the exact reasons Abby Erceg said players were struggling a couple months back. She’s expected to play and train like a professional but is recompensed like an amateur. She juggles two jobs and has to live at home, it’s an unsustainable lifestyle. Even if you can get through the trenches of the emotional strain then, what, you do that for fifteen years then you retire in your 30s with no money and no career path to fall back on?

Yeah, there are sacrifices that you need to make if you’re gonna get the top but the more you ask of players then the more you can’t expect every player to make those sacrifices. It’s an endless cycle of frustration that we’re stuck in here: the Ferns need to perform to their best in order to be sustainable, to get their funding and provide a pathway to pro contracts and all that. But to get to that level they have to put demands on their players which have the exact opposite impact. Losing players when quality players are already hard enough to produce, for example.

NZF’s attitude to Erceg’s retirement was pretty firmly indifferent – sad to see a great player retire but oh well, that’s her decision. Not really fighting to keep her, no desperate phone calls to clear the air that we know about (communication isn’t really this NZF’s strong point. They’re more like: just trust us and do things our way, we know best and no criticism, please).

It’s a shame because the FFDP had to have been in development way before Erceg’s decision and NZF chose not to stress the steps they were taking at all. Even if you don’t have details yet, at least make sure we all know you’re working on stuff. Make that the headline.

Thankfully now we can say that New Zealand Football are actively doing something, one way or another. The FFDP doesn’t really address the problems that led Pereira to walk away but it should do well in terms of developing the next tier of footballers within a faux-pro environment. Unfortunately for Pereira, it’s probably come a couple years too late and she’s a victim of what is a compromised vision for the future. Without some billionaire benefactor walking in and funding everything they didn’t have a choice but to compromise on some things, and not everyone was gonna thrive from it, thus Jaz Pereira is one who has fallen by the wayside and she won’t be the last as the FFDP, for all its benefits, still asks a lot from players in terms of time and money. Meaning there’s only so long a player can keep at that dream before having to give it up – which is the same in every sport but usually that class of players doesn’t encompass national team regulars. Usually those types are making enough of a living to, you know… live.

Obviously it’s too much to expect NZF to get creative with their funding or else it would have happened by now. Which means the best thing we can do is to keep acknowledging when players like Jasmine Pereira retire unnecessarily (or from her point of view: completely necessarily) and make sure that the reasons for these decisions keep getting talked about. Maybe one day somebody with a little influence will take notice.

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