Football Queensland CEO Robert Cavallucci is steadfast in capitalising on the World Cup hype, as lofty goals are at the heart of his success metrics within the member federation.
His ambition of football becoming the number one sport of choice in Queensland is backed by strategic objectives that focus on all facets of the game, all released within the last few months.
In a wide-ranging chat with Soccerscene, Cavallucci discusses the 2024-2026 Game Development Strategy, 2024-2026 Referee Strategy, 2023-2026 One Football Strategic Plan and his perspective on the National Second Tier situation in Queensland.
How was the 2024-2026 Game Development Strategy developed with forming objectives?
Robert Cavallucci: Our strategic plan mirrors Football Australia’s, but translates directly into a Queensland context; the KPIs, planning structure, priorities and pillars are the same, but we break it down into what the Queensland contribution to the national objectives are.
My role as CEO is to operationalise that plan. If you look at it and see a whole bunch of things in here – such as gender parity, referees, fans, coaches and pathways that should be in a plan – my job is to see what tasks are needed and what organisational design is required to deliver these objectives.
We’ve constructed 11 operational plans which includes the game development plan, futsal, referees, coach education, women & girls, elite pathway government relations and stadium strategy.
Within each of those 11 plans, it’s got all that we need to do over the next four years across each of the 10 regions of Queensland to realise these goals.
How we do it is working with our game development team, GMs and stakeholders across the state.
All KPIs are broken down across each of the 10 regions – each of our region managers understand what to do for their area: including Far North, Wide Bay, South Coast or Darling Downs.
Knowing what we’re meant to do in a region means that it can translate to successful outcomes which delivered over the last four years. Without those frameworks in place, you really are just a rudderless ship and you’re very unlikely to achieve anything.
We’ve got a good framework behind us with our budgets around it and therefore across all those strategic objectives, we’re absolutely making material differences which is good.
When you’re out there working with stakeholders such as schools, community groups, or clubs to drive interest in the game, we must translate that in through several different channels and mechanisms.
We then translate that into decisions to move them into clubs within their community and then we can bring them through the different programs at a club level – which includes social engagement, social interaction and social participation.
Whether it’s multicultural, women & girls, school or indoor, there’s dozens of different programs that we have that make it possible – and we’ve expanded that even more with the Brisbane Roar in new community programs that we’re doing under their brand.
How is the general interest in the game across the regions?
Robert Cavallucci: I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as extensive as it is now in Queensland, the interest is off the charts.
It’s easy to have interest but you must have the programs to match that interest. Events will come and go such as World Cups, but if you don’t have the mechanisms in place to keep that interest thriving and to transition it into active participation, then the interest is not relevant and it’s wasted.
One of the primary jobs of a member federation is to do that, it’s one of our key obligations to generate interest and bring active participation.
The 2024-2026 Referee Strategy has been created, what are some of the differences to support officials?
Robert Cavallucci: The Referee Strategy is one of the most important ones, but one of the more complex as well.
You can put on a thousand courses, and you can drive interest, but there’s so many other factors outside of our control that severely impact referee numbers.
We have broader issues in our society that has nothing to do with football, but relates with interpersonal relationships – how do people treat and talk to each other?
What’s acceptable in levels of aggression or abuse? There is none, but people might have differing opinions about what that is. What are the factors that people believe that, in a sporting context, they’re allowed to drop societal rules from general discourse with someone and abuse someone in the middle of the field?
To support referees, we have the three strikes policy and it’s probably the hardest in Australia, but they’re built on collective responsibility. Everyone at a club is responsible for the actions of every participant and player at the club.
You can’t just disassociate yourself and go, he or she is a bad egg, everyone else is fine. No, if you see abuse, you are obligated to say that behaviour is not welcome here.
Until we have collective responsibility over these issues where they are some positive outcomes, I don’t think we’re going to be able to reset the behavioural norms at a football field.
That’s what it will take to see a meaningful change in the number and quality of referees.
If the churn rate is so high, how do you have someone in a system developing for 3, 5 or 10 years when they’re barely lasting just a few years? It’s a broader issue, but ultimately, we can only solve societal issues to a certain point within the context of a football club.
Social media is a significant issue and challenge for us. That’s another mechanism by which people can aggregate in groups, large or otherwise, and disassociate themselves from societal norms, and treat people appallingly.
Who wants to be a referee when you see people behaving like that and criticising or diminishing referees in a cruel way, particularly under 18 referees? It’s just unacceptable.
We can have whatever strategies we like around referees and numbers, but they’re always going to be constrained by our ability to address social issues.
The strategy itself was constructed with the same methodology as all the other 11, but it’s what do we need to do within our control as a member federation to get more referees interested, support them and keep them in the game longer.
You mention churn being a key issue, what measures have you implemented so far?
Robert Cavallucci: We’re trialling video cameras on the chest with Football Australia, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes.
The intent for doing it is to develop better solutions to some of those issues in a game setting. It’s also to support transitioning to a single point of accountability in a team, such as a captain.
It’s done in other codes, and it always seems to work well. When it comes to officiating, there’s some lessons to be learned.
Rugby Union has extraordinary levels of respect being commanded by referees. I don’t think there’s any code that does it as well as they do in terms of senior, national and international levels. It’s just incredible and that’s where we want to get to as a sport.
All it takes is a small minority to ruin any progress we’ve made from an investment or participation point of view. Everyone, whether it be A-League or NPL level, needs to understand what good behaviour looks like.
Gender parity is the theme of the 2023-2026 One Football Strategic Plan, how is that tracking?
Robert Cavallucci: Gender parity is everyone getting involved; including referees, coaches, players, boards, club boards, club committees and FQ committees. It’s parity across the board, so it’s not exclusive to participation on the field.
We’ve seen some significant success in participation – we’re 44% higher this year in female growth.
We’re well on track to hit gender parity in 2027-2028 and we’ve pushed that out slightly only because we’ve had a lot more growth in the boys than we thought we would. Whilst we hit our targets with the girls, we got more boys than we thought.
Ultimately that brings the curve back together slightly. It’s making a lot of progress, as we’re about 69% for boys now. Only a couple of years ago, we were at ratios of 80:20 and now it’s moved to 69:31.
We’re pulling it back by 4-5 percent each year, so over the next three or four years we absolutely want to be as close to 50:50 as we can and that meets our participation targets as well; particularly in Queensland we’ll be in a good spot as a as a code.
We’ll not only be the largest male code, but the largest women’s sporting code in Queensland. We’re not far off it now and in turn netball but we’re hunting them down at a great rate of knots.
Our objective is ambitious, but we’ve absolutely been tracking there the last three years at incredible speed so it’s staggering what can be achieved when you do have extremely well thought out documented plans. It’s been very carefully constructed over the last three or four years and it presents one of our greatest challenges which is infrastructure, but at the same time it’s a challenge that we want and we are solving with government – that was a challenge of our own doing as a sport.
For 20 previous years we did a poor job of working with government of all persuasions and didn’t articulate the needs of football. We never had the confidence to tell the football story in Queensland or Australia for that matter and we always pushed ourselves down the ranks, and I don’t know why. Maybe because we were embarrassed about the disarray of the governance that the game was in, or the administration, and didn’t think we had the right to stand up and be counted in years gone by.
We are a massive global sport and the biggest in Queensland & Australia. We’re the fastest growing and have global events such as World Cups and Olympics. Which part of any of that story should we not be overwhelmingly proud and feel like we’ve got every right to take our place as the most dominant code in Australia?
It’s just unbelievable that we haven’t had the leaders who felt that way and absolutely by design say football’s not ready to do that yet.
If you don’t tell people who you are, everyone else will say who you are and that’s the football story over the last 20 years.
My aim is to reposition that which has occurred over the last three or four years, as we have an excellent relationship with government and communicate with them weekly; we’ve had some massive outcomes in a funding shift, but we’ve still got a long way to. From where we started, the difference is staggering.
What has been observed in participation rates post men’s and women’s World Cups?
Robert Cavallucci: The important thing to recognise is football doesn’t want anything that it doesn’t deserve based on its representation in the community. Any government funding, no matter what it is, should be based on community need.
If there’s a community need from a football perspective, then that needs to be addressed; it’s not like we want something that is over and above, it’s just meeting some minimum basic standards of what the community needs to be active and healthy.
What I think often gets lost is the way that some within the game put that argument forward that they give the impression that they’re entitled to things over and above what other sports have been getting.
Other sports have just done a better job historically at demonstrating their needs, whereas we’ve done a bad job and we’re not patient enough to know the turnaround will take time and no one wants to wait.
As a sport, we shouldn’t be asking for the world, but there is a need and its data-driven need for the community. Other sports have gotten away with socialising their costs and privatising their profits for the last 20 years, which has allowed them to be in a very strong position of their professional game, and that has never been afforded to football.
I see the football community being annoyed that other massive codes with billion-dollar incomes have had the bulk of their cost base for infrastructure paid by the public taxpayer, which has allowed them to be in a position of strength at a professional level.
No one plays those sports at a community level, but at a professional level where it’s privately owned, they’ve done a very good job of socialising their costs. And that provides a huge advantage at that level of the game that we see the A-League suffering the consequences from because of the absence of relevant infrastructure.
It’s going to be a very volatile next 10 years as we work through that. I’m not saying that football should be funded by the taxpayer at all, but there’s got to be a better share of reasonable outcomes from governments of all persuasions at all levels.
Tell us about the Equaliser campaign and what you’ve seen to date?
Robert Cavallucci: The #EQUALISER State Election campaign is an initiative driven by the need of our Queensland football community. Data gathered by Football Queensland shows that 71% of greenspaces and football fields across the state suffer from inadequate drainage and only 42% of fields with lighting meet minimum playing and safety standards. These statistics highlight just a few key areas of infrastructure that have suffered from lack of investment and are now holding football in Queensland back from thriving.
With the state election approaching in October, the timing of the #EQUALISER initiative couldn’t be more crucial. We’ve gathered survey responses from more than 6,000 members of the Queensland football community and over 76% of respondents indicated that their voting preferences could be swayed by political candidates’ commitments to investing in football clubs.
It is with this information that FQ is driving the #EQUALISER campaign, engaging in conversations with government officials to advocate for greater investment that will ensure safe and accessible green spaces for the more than 300,000 football participants across the state, both now and into the future.
You’ve been working closely with Brisbane Roar; do they relay some of their challenges?
Robert Cavallucci: We’ve got a great working relationship now with the Roar and it’s how it should be. About 10-15 years ago it was there but not really and then it just descended quite badly in recent years. Since I’ve been at Football Queensland and since Kaz Patafta and Zac Anderson have been at the Roar, we’re all had a similar mindset about uniting the game and coming up with the best way of making that happen. That means not everyone has to do everything and we’d look at each other’s strengths and what we’re investing in.
We address what we want out of it and figure out strategies. For example, supporting academies which makes sense for Football Queensland to do.
Instead of the Roar having to deliver something not as optimally as they should, we can do it because we’re already doing it 10 times bigger.
Together, it means integrated staff, integrated systems and good technical outcomes. We’ve already got 11 offices across the state, 100 casual staff and thousands of programs. The Roar trying to do similar is disjointed and doesn’t deliver outcomes for them or us. It’s getting together and saying, how can we do this better together?
We just want to make things simple and streamline it, so the Roar get the outcomes they want – such as more kids at games, more memberships, and greater interest in the A-League.
Those things are all essentially what we want and it’s what the Roar wants as well. If there’s good governance and oversight, the game wins.
Ultimately that’s a best practice scenario with how we should be looking at this right across the country to change the delivery model of many parts of the game.
Can you shed some light on the National Second Tier (NST) situation in Queensland?
Rob Cavallucci: I love how people view Football Queensland negatively because clubs in Queensland have common sense; there seems to be this rationale that if a club chooses not to participate in the NST, then there must be something wrong with Football Queensland.
The logic escapes me, it’s an egotistical perspective; surely your ego as a club is so extravagant that you can’t help but want to be in the NST competition.
There are massive clubs such as the Queensland Lions that say they are not interested.
The reality of the decision-making process for Queensland clubs is how they view success – do they want to sacrifice 100+ teams for one men’s team?
It’s a simple, rational decision made by logical people that whilst in principle they would they think it’s great to have a NST and compete at a higher level, the reality is none of them are willing to sacrifice 100 teams and their success just on the basis of one.
There are 10 possible models and there’s two or three logical models that could be used to start the league with different permutations from there.
I don’t think that the clubs have an interest in the current design based on the risk and the barriers to entry and that’s a risk that none of them can process in a way that doesn’t expose the club to any form of harm or detriment whether it be financial or otherwise.
Had it been another model or format, then it’s quite likely that they would participate for sure. It might appeal to Victorian or New South Wales clubs, but it certainly doesn’t appeal to the broader Queensland environment.
You can’t understate the experience of the Queensland clubs; we’ve been doing planes and travel weekly for NPL and otherwise for nearly 10 years.
They know what it’s like and they’re doing it now. We’ve got flights every weekend, with clubs going all over the state for Champions League, the Kappa Pro Series, and the Queensland Cup. They’re doing that and have done so for a decade.
Therefore, it’s not a foreign concept to them and they know what the travel’s like. It’s not the same as Sydney or Melbourne where everyone’s within a few kilometres or an hour’s travel time.
It’s a conscious decision from Queensland clubs who would rather not, and we shouldn’t be throwing criticism at them, but rather accept the fact that not all clubs want to take this kind of risk.
They aren’t ruling out ever being part of the NST, but when the time is right; Presidents and GMs absolutely love the concept.
