After more than a decade working in youth football, I’ve recently stepped away to take a gap year. Part of that decision was personal, especially to travel, and another part was professional. I felt the need to refresh my thinking around high performance sport. On this note, writing was something I did often earlier in my career, as I valued it as a way to make sense of what I was seeing in football.
This ‘return’ article comes out of that pause. It is an attempt to reflect on the current landscape of youth football in NSW. When you’re embedded day to day, as I was at NWS Spirit FC, it’s easy to become consumed by sessions, selections, and seasons. Stepping away has given me the distance to articulate some thoughts, starting with an examination of the youth football landscape in NSW and Australia from a wider lens.
To give an initial, broad brushstroke observation, youth football in Australia has become more structured, more professional, and more ambitious. The launch of youth academies within the A-League can generally be identified as the starting point, or, to go back slightly further, to 2009 and the launch of the national curriculum. The development of young players towards professional environments, including the national teams, is now seen as a genuine enterprise for clubs, coaches and footballing systems. On its own, that has been a positive shift. At the same time, however, the developmental ecosystem around young players has quietly thinned.
To explain further, it is firstly worth remembering that youth sport did not always function this way. For a long time, football existed as a socially dense environment. Young players were surrounded by many adults who knew them in different ways. Coaches, assistants, volunteers, parents, older players, and community figures all shaped their experiences. Development wasn’t something that was “owned”, or attributed to any specific club, coach, or an academy. Rather, development emerged over time, through repetition, shared experiences, and relationships.
As football has professionalised in Australia, that ecosystem around the player has changed shape. Participation in the elite tier of representative football in NSW, the NPL, is now organised around efficiency, progression, and measurable outcomes. Talented players are identified early and placed into structured programs through the Junior Development League (JDL) and Youth League (Girls and Boys) competitions. These systems have created real opportunities, including clearer pathways to national teams. But in my experience, they have also reduced the number of meaningful relationships young players are exposed to through football.
One reason for this is that youth football in many NPL clubs now operates like a service. Players move through programs. Parents purchase access. Coaches are expected to deliver outcomes. As this transactional framing has taken hold, the relationship between clubs, coaches, parents and players have subtly shifted. They have become more conditional and more time-bound. Belonging, which is a major driver of lifelong participation in sport, is no longer assumed. Instead, it can be withdrawn just as quickly as it is given. Specifically in the NPL, where there are annual cycles of player selection and deselection (a process that generally starts around May, despite the season concluding in September), players begin to feel the constant threat of non-retention or release. In this context, the football ecosystem becomes less safe for learning, risk-taking, and genuine growth, which ultimately impacts long-term development.
This shows up most clearly in player movement. Large numbers of players now move between NPL clubs and teams. The same applies to coaches. Squads are reshaped year after year. From the perspective of the young people for whom this system is designed for, the process of selection and deselection continually reorganises their social groups, and their relationships with coaches & staff within each club.
Generally speaking, each individual move usually makes sense. A new club offers a fresh start; a higher level; better team results. But over time, as a consequence of this constant flux, something starts to wear away in the player.
To illustrate the point, the most common “profile” of player that I encountered in the NPL system was someone who had trained in three different clubs over three years; had been coached by three different coaches, each of whom have their own expectations and values. Again, to reiterate, no single decision to move was necessarily wrong, or ill-intended. Rather, they were born out of responding to what the wider ecosystem suggested was the right thing to chase. However, in my experience, for these types of players, nothing lasted long enough to feel stable. Eventually, you would see that player stop fully investing. And not long after, many of them stopped playing altogether.
Adolescence is a period where sport can play a particularly powerful role. Young people are working out who they are, where they belong, and what matters to them. Stable relationships within clubs provide the safety needed for that exploration. They allow players to make mistakes, experience failure, and take risks without fear. Youth football, including the NPL, has the potential to be a strong space for this kind of development, but that only holds when relationships are valued alongside performance. When belonging becomes conditional on selection or ranking, the environment becomes unsafe for identity development.
Furthermore, motivation (crucial for long-term participation in sport), despite how often we treat it as an individual trait, is deeply social. Young people are more likely to commit and persist when they feel connected and valued. Environments that focus heavily on outcomes, such as club championship results, can produce short-term compliance, but often lead to a struggle to sustain long-term commitment.
Strong development ecosystems also help young people make sense of setbacks and understand the value of effort, improvement, and persistence. These lessons do not land automatically. They need to be talked through and placed in context. When a perceived failure to meet expectations regularly resulted in immediate deselection, those conversations rarely happened. Instead, identity became tightly linked to performance. When performance dipped, or deselection inevitably arrived, a player’s sense of self often dipped with it.
This is where the cost of pathway-driven thinking becomes most visible. When development is framed purely as individual progression, setbacks feel personal and exposed. Non-retention, injury, or poor team results become defining moments. In these situations, the most common response was to move the player to a new club. Over time, without relationships that have been built across years, young people are left to carry these experiences alone. In contrast, in healthier ecosystems, disappointment can be absorbed collectively. Strong, consistent adult voices, supported by peer relationships, help players navigate these moments. Without that social buffering, burnout and disengagement become far more likely.
The usual defence of the current NPL/youth football system is that performance requires focus, and that narrowing the ecosystem is simply the cost of ambition. However, research consistently shows that high standards and strong relationships are not opposites (Güllich, A., & Emrich, 2014; Rees et al., 2016). They can, and should, coexist.
Creating a healthier landscape for youth football in NSW doesn’t mean lowering standards or abandoning pathways, but it does mean being more intentional in how environments are designed. That might involve resisting the urge to reshuffle squads every season, and better educating parents on the importance of stability for long-term development. It could mean investing more in coaches to create continuity, and supporting them with assistants, mentors, volunteers, and older players. It might also require clubs to prioritise team gatherings, reflection, and conversations that recognise the person, not just the performer.
At a coaching level, this can be supported through approaches such athlete-centred coaching. More on how clubs can be shaped, and how coaches can operate in this landscape, will be explored in future articles.
More broadly, Australian football needs to reflect on what it chooses to value. In this current landscape, early selection and progression are often treated as markers of success. Retention, re-entry, and long-term connection are rarely celebrated in the same way. To adjust this thinking, there is positive work underway, including efforts to benchmark clubs more holistically, but the impact of these frameworks has yet to be consistently felt at ground level.
The real issue is not whether we want high performers or well-developed people. We should expect both. However, performance works best when it sits on top of strong relationships, not in place of them. This is because when players feel safe, valued, and connected, they are far more willing to stretch themselves and commit fully. When they don’t, performance becomes something they chase out of fear, and the system eventually loses them.
References
Güllich, A., & Emrich, E. (2014). Considering long‐term sustainability in the development of world class success. European journal of sport science, 14, S383-S397.
Rees, T., Hardy, L., Güllich, A., Abernethy, B., Côté, J., Woodman, T., … & Warr, C. (2016). The great British medalists project: a review of current knowledge on the development of the world’s best sporting talent. Sports medicine, 46(8), 1041-1058.
