Australian NPL clubs persevere through COVID restrictions

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The COVID-19 pandemic has put an immense strain on football clubs worldwide, and Australia is no exception. From stop-start seasons, stifled player development, and clubs being put under financial stress, National Premier League (NPL) clubs have faced some of their biggest challenges.

Bentleigh Greens are one of many clubs hit by lockdowns and postponements, as they have seen the second NPL Victoria season in a row disrupted by the pandemic. Bentleigh Greens President Trifon Rellos has seen his team heavily affected by this.

“Financially game takings are gone, canteens are gone. Now with the junior programs, we have with the mini roos and NPL kids we don’t know the parents are going to ask for, whether they want their money back,” he said.

“The impact has been massive, but not just financially.”

Not every club and league has been heavily impacted. Edgeworth Eagles Football Director and Treasurer, Warren Mills, explains that the Further Northern New South Wales region has managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic.

“Newcastle has been a lot less impacted than others. Last year was pretty horrendous obviously, we started later but we managed to get in a competition, playing our competition plus finals,” he said.

“This year we’ve got two rounds to go. To be fair we’ve been much luckier than others.”

In contrast with other clubs in New South Wales and Victoria, Warren believes that the amateur status of the Newcastle clubs has helped weather financial strain.

“Financially it hasn’t been a massive drain on us. We are more amateur than Sydney or Melbourne, in terms of wages paid out. Its smashed those clubs a lot more.” he said.

The season will be completed once restrictions in the Hunter region are eased, with one advantage they have over other areas being that they rarely share grounds with summer sports.

“I don’t think there is anybody who doesn’t have their own ground in Newcastle,” he said.

“We have the potential to host the grand final this year, and we’ve just got a new 1.1 million dollar clubhouse. Newcastle is very lucky that way.”

Football Victoria recently agreed to a ground-sharing agreement with Cricket Victoria, in an attempt to alleviate this issue if the season is restarted.

For regional NPL clubs in Victoria, they have been in and out of lockdown more than anywhere in the country. For the Goulburn Valley Suns, their season has been disrupted by not only state-wide lockdowns, but also a major outbreak within the city of Shepparton.

Goulburn Valley head coach Craig Carley believes that players at the club are uniting together through the hardship.

“We don’t know what’s going on at the moment, but we need to try to tick over. Previously we were able to do that as a team because the metropolitan area was in lockdown, the last couple of weeks it’s been individual training,” he said.

“We’ve got players posting times on runs and activities that they are doing. It’s been good from a team point of view with players pushing each other and staying connected, even though everyone is in lockdown. The longer that goes on the hard that is going to get.”

Rellos fears that these disruptions could cause setbacks for some of the most talented players at Bentleigh Greens.

“It’s a sad situation that we are in for our children, and our young senior soccer players. We need to remember that the boys that are playing under 16s and 18s and talented, and they are just about to break into that senior team,” he said.

“I think this year is worse than last year. Those boys and their careers have been cut short by coronavirus. These kids need to break into the senior team, god knows if they will. Some might lose interest and not come back as football players.”

For others, they can only appreciate that their seasons and clubs have only had minor disruptions.

“In Newcastle, we’ve been so blessed. I don’t know how we’ve hardly had a case while we are so close to Sydney. It hasn’t the impact on us that a lot of areas have.” Warren said.

Every state has had different challenges they have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. For NPL clubs in New South Wales and Victoria, some are facing the biggest in their history. Most are looking forward to next season, hoping for the light at the end of the tunnel following these hard times.

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Arncliffe Aurora’s Riverine Park investment creates a platform for growth

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Image Credits: Arncliffe Aurora

Arncliffe Aurora Football Club has started a new chapter with the launch of Riverine Park, creating a larger platform for football, community engagement and long-term growth in Sydney’s St George region. More than 2,500 people attended the community opening on 8 August, marking the club’s first matches at its new home and showcasing a significant upgrade in its operating capacity.

Riverine Park provides two full-size natural turf football fields, modern player and community amenities, and a new clubhouse. The additional capacity responds to strong growth in Arncliffe Aurora’s football programs, particularly at junior level. The club has also highlighted a $2.5 million investment in facility upgrades. Together with its existing Arncliffe Park base, Riverine Park gives Aurora two homes and a stronger physical platform for its football operations.

More capacity allows the club to accommodate more teams, players and programs, while updated facilities can support stronger member retention and recruitment. They create more opportunities for coaching, development programs, events and community activities. The new site can also strengthen the club’s commercial proposition; a modern facility gives sponsors greater visibility and provides more opportunities to activate partnerships around football and community events. It can also help the club build relationships with schools, community organisations and football bodies. That matters as grassroots clubs increasingly operate as community hubs rather than simply sporting organisations.

Riverine Park also creates opportunities for the wider football ecosystem. Football St George has identified the facility as a platform to grow participation and provide opportunities for players of different ages, abilities and backgrounds. Bayside Council’s project includes upgraded change rooms, toilets, canteen facilities, lighting, seating and solar panels, adding further functionality to the precinct.

For Arncliffe Aurora, the investment is therefore about more than adding fields. It creates infrastructure that can support participation, player development, community programs and commercial activity over the long term. The challenge now shifts from construction to utilisation. The club must maximise the new capacity, maintain the assets and convert greater participation into a sustainable operating model to benefit the community long-term.

The Spreadsheet Is Dead: Majestri’s Fix for How Clubs Actually Assess Players

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If you’ve ever sat through a club’s end-of-season review, you’ll know the drill. A coach pulls out a folder of notes, someone half-remembers what a player was like back in Round 3 and a parent quietly wonders what they actually got for their rego fees beyond a team photo. Football club platform Majestri says it has a fix for that, and it’s built directly into its Player Assessment module.

Why clubs bother assessing players in the first place

According to Majestri, clubs run player assessments for one of three reasons – usually more than one at once. Some are chasing genuine development, using the data to lift the level across their high-performance squads. Others are after a fairer way to pick teams, putting every player on the same measurable scale so selection is based on evidence rather than a coach’s gut feel about who “looks the part.” And for clubs operating under a Football Australia or state federation licence, assessments at set intervals often aren’t optional – they’re a compliance requirement, with the paperwork to prove it when asked.

Whatever the motivation, Majestri’s pitch is the same: don’t let that assessment data die in a spreadsheet on someone’s laptop.

Build your own assessment, your way

There’s no one-size-fits-all template here. The Assessment Designer lets technical directors set their own criteria, sort them into whatever categories their coaching staff already use – think core skills, possession, defending, attacking – and decide what each point on the rating scale actually means. Crucially, every criterion also gets a comment field, because a bare number rarely tells the full story of a player’s development.

The Assessment Module Builder for an NPL Juniors assessment
The Assessment Module Builder, showing an NPL Juniors assessment with a 1-10 rating scale banded from under performing through to excelling and role-specific criteria grouped into core skills, possession, defending and attacking. Source: Majestri.

Build it once and it’s reusable every time that assessment cycle comes around, so every player and every coach – is working off the same yardstick.

Something for the parents to actually take home

One of the more relatable pain points Majestri is targeting: most families never see much tangible return from a season of fees beyond a team photo. Player Assessment addresses that with report cards – colour-coded against the same scale coaches used, grouped by category with averages calculated automatically, and delivered as a PDF or an interactive web page a parent can read without needing a coaching badge themselves.

A player report card for an under-15 player
A report card for an under-15 player, colour-coded from under performing to excelling, with a score for every criterion and a group average across core skills, possession, defending and attacking. Source: Majestri.

 

Turning the numbers into something useful

The real value, though, sits in what Majestri calls the Player Analysis Lab. This is where clubs can plot a player against their team-mates or an entire age group across two categories at once, spotting clusters and outliers at a glance. Every score gets read against the group average – so a “7” actually means something in context – and clubs can report at the broad category level or drill into individual fields underneath. The results can be filtered down and exported for selection meetings or grading purposes.

The Player Analysis Lab comparing players in an under-15 and under-16 squad
The Player Analysis Lab comparing seven players across under-15 and under-16 squads, with a scatter plot, a sortable table of scores against the player average, and controls for choosing which categories and fields to report on. Source: Majestri.

The admin side nobody enjoys, made easier

Beyond the flashy analytics, there’s a practical layer built for the volunteers actually running the process:

  • Sweep monitoring – a quick view of which assessments are done and which are still outstanding, organised into defined assessment periods so progress can be tracked against peers.
  • Individual development plans – every player gets a personalised plan, and clubs can group common improvement areas to run cross-team training sessions that lift the whole club rather than just one squad.
  • Access control – coaches and technical staff can only see assessments for the teams they’re responsible for, and completed assessments are only visible to people linked to that player’s registration.
“Hard numbers to draw on when you review coaching staff and curriculum – and something tangible for the players and parents who pay the fees.” – Majestri

 

The bigger picture

Majestri frames all of this as sitting on top of the club’s own data – assessment results live on each player’s profile inside the platform rather than in a spreadsheet that walks out the door when a technical director moves on. For committees, it also means hard numbers to lean on when reviewing coaching staff or curriculum, rather than relying on anecdote.

It’s a fairly clear read on where club administration software is heading: less about digitising paperwork for its own sake, and more about making the data clubs already collect actually work for player development, team selection and compliance  without adding to the workload of the volunteers who run the show.

For more information on Majestri’s Player Assessment module, visit majestri.com.au/player-assessment.

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