James Johnson on how the Club Licensing System is critical to progress of Second Division

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On Thursday, Football Australia released their reformed Club Licensing System Regulations that will increase standards at clubs across the top three tiers of Australian football – as a key part of broader structural reform they are engineering to take the game forward.

Reforming the Club Licensing System was an agreed responsibility Football Australia took on during its unbundling of the A-Leagues to the Australian Professional Leagues in December 2020, and is something Football Australia CEO James Johnson sees as critical to unlocking standstill issues facing the game, such as the proposed National Second Division (NSD) and Domestic Transfer System (DTS).

“We have challenges in the sport, namely around player development at the moment, and right at the very heart of the Club Licensing System are standards and requirements that really need to be reviewed on an annual basis. So we’ll continue to lift the standards in club football with a particular focus on youth development,” Johnson, who oversaw the Global Club Licensing Program while at FIFA, told Soccerscene. 

“That’s going to align very well with some of our other initiatives, like a Domestic Transfer System that has player development at its very core. It’s something we need to fix now; it’s something I don’t think is an opinion, it’s a fact.

“These measures – Club Licensing, a transfer system, the second tier competition – are all designed to improve the level of our players, the benefit of which we will see in the years to come.”

Club Licensing has historically been managed by the Asian Football Confederation as a means of ensuring minimum standards for clubs to compete in Asian club competitions. By taking it into their own hands, Football Australia can now raise and specify standards for clubs at not just the professional level, but the levels below it.

The regulations include certain criteria that must be met to compete and continue to compete in certain competitions, broken into five categories: Sporting, infrastructure, personnel and administrative, legal, and financial – with variations in each to reflect multiple levels of the pyramid. 

“First and foremost, this new Club Licensing System will be a set of criteria that needs to be fulfilled in order for all clubs to participate in Asian club competition, but also for all clubs in the A-Leagues to continue their ability to participate in that competition,” Johnson said. 

“The second part, the more strategic football development angle, is that it is designed to become a strategic plan for club development and enhanced governance of clubs throughout the country. It really sits right at the heart of key decisions clubs would take, and how they operate on a day-to-day basis.”

The new system is designed to cater for clubs at the professional (A-Leagues), semi-professional (NSD) and state-league (NPL) levels, providing an overarching set of standards to promote uniformity between clubs and divisions. Theoretically, it could also prepare clubs for movement between divisions if promotion and relegation were to come into effect.

Johnson sees that uniformity as vital to the game moving forward, given the three tiers will be administered by three different organisations: The A-Leagues by the Australian Professional Leagues, the mooted NSD by Football Australia, and the NPL competitions by their respective Member Federations. 

“You have to set different standards for different levels of football. As we roll out the second tier competition in the coming years, Football Australia would licence clubs to participate in that competition because it would be the competition administrator,” he said.

“The next step would be to go down the pyramid. There’d be a continual evolution of the Club Licensing System where we’d set a strategic framework that the competition administrators, the Member Federations, would ultimately work under, in order to create their own criteria for participation and access to the state level competitions.

“That framework that the Member Federations would operate under would give each region across the country a good level of specificity to develop their own criteria to access their own region.”

Concerning the level of football not currently in place – the proposed  second tier – Johnson stated the Federation had the backing of the AAFC, the representative body of the clubs looking to step from the NPL into the second tier of competition, over the new Club Licensing System.

“The AAFC are very much aligned with the direction Football Australia are wanting to go. Their interest in licensing is concerning the NSD, and I don’t think there would be any issues there provided we set the criteria as the right levels,” Johnson said.

“What we’ll get once the system is implemented is the ability to analyse clubs all around the country. We’ll be able to benchmark how clubs in Victoria are performing on and off the pitch, against teams in Brisbane or Hobart or Perth.

“One of the big values of a CLS is it’s a measuring stick that helps us understand which areas clubs around the country are strong in, and which areas they need more focus on. Ultimately, that’s how we grow club football.”

Tasked with overseeing the licensing reform is Natalie Lutz, who Football Australia hired as their Club Licensing Manager in January. Lutz has considerable experience in the field, having previously overseen the rollout of club licensing across the CONCACAF Federation. 

“Natalie knows what she’s doing, she’s very experienced, she was responsible for the roll out of a Club Licensing System in 40-odd countries in the Americas. We have her in the business now, which is why this project is evolving,” Johnson said.

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Football Australia Expands Mental Skills Program for Match Officials Amid Sustained Focus on Referee Retention

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Image Credit: Football NSW

Football Australia has confirmed a second national webinar for match officials, led by sports psychologist Dr Liam Slack, extending a referee development series introduced after strong engagement with an initial session on managing match-day pressure.

The upcoming session, themed “parking with purpose,” will focus on decision-making strategies designed to help referees process on-field calls and reset attention quickly across a match that can present hundreds of individual decisions. Dr Slack, who also consults with The Football Association and the AFC Referee Academy and previously spent over a decade as a performance psychologist with the Professional Game Match Officials Limited in England, brings substantial elite-level experience to a program open to officials at every level, from grassroots to professional.

The theme builds on work Dr Slack has already delivered within Australian officiating. He recently led a session with Football Australia’s National Referee Academy on the same concept, framing the ability to consciously park a decision and refocus on the next phase of play as a trainable skill rather than an innate trait, one that separates officials who reset quickly under pressure from those who don’t. He has also addressed more than 100 Football Australia elite match officials and staff on developing a stronger match-day mentality, an indication of how embedded this psychological framework has become across the officiating pathway rather than remaining a one-off intervention.

The expansion of the webinar series reflects a broader shift in how football administrators are approaching referee attrition. Rather than treating retention purely as a recruitment or pay problem, the program signals an institutional acknowledgment that the psychological demands of officiating, particularly the compounding pressure of split-second decisions under public scrutiny, are a material factor in whether officials remain in the game.

It rests alongside other measures adopted across Australian football in recent years, including visible identification programs for junior referees and structural reviews of referee departments at state federation level, all aimed at the same underlying issue: a shrinking pool of match officials relative to demand.

Football Australia has not detailed metrics for assessing the program’s impact on referee numbers, though the recurring engagement of an internationally credentialed specialist across multiple tiers of the officiating pathway suggests sustained institutional investment in the approach.

How Australian Support for the World Cup Has Changed Since 2022

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Federation Square 2022; Image Credit: AFR

Sodden, rowdy and 7,000-strong, the crowd that gathered at Federation Square before dawn on Saturday for Australia’s clash with the United States offered a vivid illustration of how much, and how little, has changed in Australian football support since Qatar 2022.

The scenes themselves were familiar: fans queuing from 2am, flares lit during the anthem, a barrier breach as the precinct hit capacity within minutes of opening. But the fact the screening happened at all says something about the shifting institutional weight football now carries in Australia.

Just this May, the Melbourne’s Arts Precinct had decided not to screen Socceroos matches at Fed Square this tournament, citing crowd damage and arrests during a 2022 World Cup screening. Football Australia publicly pushed back, and the Victorian Government ultimately overturned the decision, with security and police presence increased to manage the risk. That a state government intervened to guarantee a public screening reflects how central these gatherings have become to football’s standing in Australia, not just as a peripheral fan event but a piece of cultural infrastructure worth a premier’s political capital.

A Tournament Inherited, Not Just Attended

The scale of public interest now sits on a different foundation than it did in 2022. Football Australia’s most recent National Participation Report recorded an 11% increase in total participation to 1,911,539 people, with women and girls’ participation rising 16% to 221,436. Industry analysis attributes much of that growth to the “Matildas effect” following the home Women’s World Cup in 2023, projecting 407,000 new junior participants by 2027 on the back of that tournament and Football Australia’s broader infrastructure strategy. Whatever happens to the Socceroos in the United States, the crowd at Fed Square this year is drawn from a participation base substantially larger than the one watching from lounge rooms and pubs in Qatar.

That shift shows up in how fans say they’ll engage with this tournament regardless of results. New industry research found 79% of intended Australian viewers plan to keep watching the World Cup even if the Socceroos are eliminated, an 11-point increase on 2022, suggesting interest is becoming less tied to the national team’s results than it once was. The same research found television remains dominant, with 88% of viewers planning to watch on TV, rising above 90 per cent for evening and weekend matches, even as audiences increasingly split their attention across streaming and second screens.

Crowd Behaviour as the Unresolved Question

What hasn’t shifted is the tension over crowd conduct at public screenings, and what it costs football’s civic standing when things go wrong. The Melbourne Arts Precinct’s chief executive was explicit in 2026 that damage and behaviour during 2022 screenings were the basis for initially declining to host watch parties this time, despite trouble-free crowds during the 2023 Women’s World Cup.

Saturday’s flares and barrier breach will likely feed that same debate going into the knockout stages, even as the broader numbers tell a story of a sport with a far deeper public footing than it had four years ago. The Fed Square images from 2022 prompted other Australian cities to scramble together live sites once the Socceroos reached the knockout rounds, reflecting a pattern likely to repeat if Australia progresses from Group D, with Friday’s match against Paraguay now carrying outsized weight for a campaign that began with what fans, by their own description, considered horrible refereeing and a result short of expectations.

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