Italian Serie A stalls amidst Coronavirus fears, Australian football must be prepared

Staff Writer

The Italian government’s decision to introduce a curfew and restrict the movements of its citizens in an attempt to control the spread of Coronavirus will seriously impact the short term future of the Serie A.

With matches already being played without fans permitted inside stadiums and ‘closed door’ play to become the norm until at least April 3, the long term ramifications of the international health scare that is Coronavirus will be significant for the Italian game.

As the number of postponed matches continues to grow, Coppa Italia, Europa and Champions League play have now been seriously affected. The chances of a brisk resolution to the outbreak that allows the schedule to be caught up on over the next few months appears highly unlikely.

Italy now accounts for the second highest number of confirmed cases of Coronavirus, with over 7,350 people affected from a global total that now exceeds 110,000.

French football has also reacted decisively, with hand to hand contact between players and mascots eliminated in the short term. It also seems likely that further steps will need to be taken across mainland Europe in the near future, with the virus now detected in over 95 countries worldwide.

With football potentially the most notable and common European activity when it comes to gathering people of all walks of life en masse, it is a sad reality that the actions taken in Italy and France are probably just the beginning.

Other countries, governments and footballing authorities will be forced to make similarly firm decisions in an attempt to protect people from an illness that continues to escalate on a day to day basis.

With football as such a fundamental and integral part of the daily lives of most Europeans, it is important that the powers at be are committed to controlling the spread of Coronavirus via the encouragement of responsible, sensible and hygienic behaviour.

Whilst the long term effects of the decisions currently being made are uncertain, there will undoubtedly be significant financial and scheduling impacts for a season of European football that was approaching its crescendo.

Alarmingly, the ramifications also extend well beyond European domestic competitions. After negotiations, FIFA and the AFC have made the monumental decision to postpone the Asian World Cup Qualifying matches slated for the international windows of 23-31st March and 1-9 of June.

The knock on effects of such a move will potentially throw the campaigns of the Socceroos and many other nations into disarray. The logistical nightmare that the rescheduling will cause, could well see many countries unable to access players in July, August and September, when major European Leagues are moving from pre-season to competitive play.

However, the notion of pushing the postponed qualifiers back just a few short months is a best case scenario for the game, with any play at all in 2020 still questionable.

Should players around the globe become infected, the complication of the situation will be taken to an entirely new level. The potential cancellation of entire competitions before their completion is real and FIFA’s reality could well become trying to squeeze two years of World Cup qualifying into one.

With the already stacked and hectic domestic schedules in place around the globe, that may well be a bridge too far for the governing body.

In the short term, Tokyo 2020, an Olympics where Australia’s men’s and women’s football teams are set to compete, could well be in jeopardy.

Veteran IOC member Dick Pound recently conceded that a final decision on whether or not the biggest sporting event on the planet would go ahead could be made as late as May, just weeks before competition is due to begin on the 24th July.

Contractually, the IOC can “withdraw the games from the city” for essentially any reason they see fit. Clause 66 has been enacted on three previous occasions due to war, 1916, 1940 and 1944 respectively, yet never for health fears or the outbreak of a global virus that threatens to kill hundreds of thousands of people.

Already, torch ceremonies transporting the Olympic flame have been considerably minimised and all J-League play has been postponed until March 15, when a reassessment of the situation will undoubtedly take place.

IOC President Thomas Bach has taken a “full steam ahead” approach in his oratory around the issue, consistently stating that the games will go ahead, despite many calls for fans to be excluded from the events to minimise risk and the potential spread of the virus.

At the time of writing, Olyroo and Matilda preparations for the Olympics are in a clear holding pattern, the Socceroos four upcoming and vital qualifiers are in limbo and the European football season could well be about to enter an indefinite break in Italian, Europa and Champions League play.

The health concerns of the virus are unquestionably the most important, however, Australian football had best prepare for similar measures to be taken domestically. What that means for the A and W League finals, NPL play and the junior seasons that loom across the country is uncertain.

However, considering the events currently taking place in Italy, the reality is that Australian football will be seriously impacted in the short term. Hopefully, that impact is effectively minimised and after an inevitable interruption, pitches are again buzzing with action, sooner rather than later.

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Football West’s NAIDOC ball competition turns Indigenous art into a road safety message, and a rare form of representation

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Image Credit: Football West

Football West has opened its 2027 NAIDOC Ball Design competition, inviting members of Western Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to submit artwork that will end up printed on 500 footballs and distributed to schools, clubs and communities across the state. It is a small competition with a modest prize, a $1,000 voucher and a set of ten footballs for the winner. But what it is actually doing sits somewhere more significant than a design contest.

The 2027 edition is a joint initiative between Football West, the Insurance Commission of Western Australia and, for the first time, Football Futures Foundation. The winning design will carry the Insurance Commission’s Belt Up road safety message alongside the artwork, with the footballs distributed during NAIDOC Week, which runs from 4 to 11 July next year.

Football Futures Foundation CEO Michael Kerr framed the partnership as an extension of work the Foundation already runs across the state.

“Through programs such as Dreamtime Spirit and Yilkari, supported by former Matildas goalkeeper Lydia Williams, we are working alongside Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to create football opportunities that are culturally safe, community-led and built around genuine belonging,” Kerr said.

A message that travels further in a football

Road trauma in Australia isn’t evenly distributed. Indigenous Australians are consistently found in national research to be two to three times more likely to be killed in a road transport crash than non-Indigenous Australians, a disparity driven in part by higher rates of pedestrian and passenger injury and compounded by the realities of remote and regional life, longer travel distances, older vehicles, and limited access to emergency care when something goes wrong. Seatbelt non-use remains one of the most consistent contributing factors in that gap.

The Insurance Commission has invested more than 2 million dollars in the Belt Up campaign over its seven years, and its Chief Investment Officer, Steve McKenna, has been explicit about who the message is aimed at.

“About 170 people die on the road each year in Western Australia,” McKenna said. “About 60 per cent of those are male. Of that total, 17 per cent aren’t wearing seatbelts when they die.”

Generic road safety advertising struggles to reach communities where trust in government messaging is not automatic and where the delivery channel matters as much as the message itself. A football, carrying artwork made by a member of the community it is meant to reach, distributed through a sport that already has deep informal roots in many Aboriginal communities, moves in a way a billboard cannot. That is not incidental to the campaign. It is the entire design logic.

Whose stories get told

Jarnda Councillor-Barns, the Ellenbrook artist who won the 2026 competition, used the colours of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags in her design, with circular patterns representing gatherings and connecting pathways representing the journeys, knowledge and skills each player carries.

“I really wanted to amplify the stories that are in the Football West community, whether you’re based metro or rural like I was, and how everyone in a team comes with their own stories,” Councillor-Barns said.

Her own football story reflects exactly the kind of informal, community-rooted participation the competition is built to recognise. She grew up in Broome playing social games whenever she could, and has family connections to the Jambinu team, a regional Indigenous women’s side based in Geraldton, despite never being formally registered with a club herself.

“Soccer is a sport that brings people from all walks of life together, creating a larger family built on respect, teamwork and shared passion,” she said.

Football West’s David Williams, a former Socceroo who now heads the National Indigenous Boys Under-16s program, said initiatives like this had value beyond the artwork itself.

“For the creativity of artists to be involved with sport goes a long way,” Williams said. “The more initiatives we have with this kind of stuff, the better.”

That is a modest way of describing what is, functionally, a form of representation that Indigenous communities in Australian sport have not always had. Governing bodies commission Indigenous rounds, jerseys and acknowledgements regularly. Fewer hand the creative authorship, and a public platform for it, directly to community members with no requirement that they already hold a formal position within the sport.

Insurance Commission Chief Investment Officer Steve McKenna, reflecting on the 2026 winning design at its unveiling, saw something in it that spoke to the broader purpose of the exercise.

“You see the Socceroos playing, and look across the team, and a ball like this, the designs, it reflects what Australia’s all about,” McKenna said.

In the meantime, five hundred footballs carrying a community-made design and a road safety message will reach further into regional and remote Western Australia than most government campaigns manage on their own. Whether that message changes behaviour on the roads that data suggests still needs the most attention is the harder, longer question the competition cannot answer by itself.

Northern NSW Football’s Leadership Program Reaches 98 Graduates as Sport Moves Toward 2027 Gender Parity Targets

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Image Credit: Football Northern NSW

Northern NSW Football has concluded its 2026 Women’s Leadership Program, with 13 participants taking the total number of graduates to 98 women across the region since the program launched in 2023. The five-week program combined online modules with a two-day conference at Rydges Resort in the Hunter Valley, bringing together club volunteers, committee members, administrators and NNSWF staff from Newcastle, Macquarie, Northern Inland and Football Mid North Coast zones.

The program’s growth has been uneven year to year. It launched with two intakes in 2023, drew 25 scholarship recipients in 2024,then settled to 12 in 2025, which brought the cumulative total to 85 before this year’s cohort of 13.

The program was facilitated by Ann Odong, who founded The Women’s Game, Australia’s first dedicated women’s football website, in 2008,and later spent six years as Football Australia’s Media and PR Manager steering the Matildas’ program through multiple World Cups and Olympic Games,before moving into independent consulting work.

A pipeline built against a 2027 deadline

The program fits within a wider set of national targets football and the broader sport sector have committed to reaching within the next twelve months. Football Australia’s Our Game initiative, launched in 2021, set a goal of 50:50 gender parity across players, coaches, administrators and referees by 2027.Separately, the federally backed National Gender Equity in Sport Governance Policy requires all funded national and state sporting bodies to reach 50 per cent women or gender-diverse board directors by 1 July 2027, with funding to be withheld from organisations that fall short.As of the most recent Australian Sports Commission data, 22 per cent of chief executives and 25 per cent of board chairs across 65 federally funded national sporting organisations were women.

Programs built around confidence, networking and committee-level skills, the model NNSWF has run since 2023, are the mechanism most sporting bodies are relying on to close that gap, since board and executive vacancies typically draw from an organisation’s existing pool of committee members, volunteers and administrators rather than external recruitment.

This year’s cohort

University of Newcastle FC’s Charlotte Carey, one of this year’s participants, said the program had given her the confidence to pursue a career in football while developing skills applicable across other areas of her life. Fellow participants included representatives from Cooks Hill United, Westlakes Wildcats, Newcastle Olympic, Lake Macquarie City FC, Western Wolves, Gunnedah and District Soccer Association, Wauchope FC and Stockton Sharks, alongside three NNSWF staff members.

NNSWF Participation and Women’s Football Officer Jamie Bressan said the program had continued to provide women across the game with an opportunity to connect and build leadership skills, with topics covering effective communication, personality styles and team dynamics. Bressan pointed to the network the program builds among participants, drawn from clubs and committees across the region, as one of its central functions rather than the training content alone.

The 2026 cohort’s spread across four zones, Newcastle, Macquarie, Northern Inland and Football Mid North Coast, continues a pattern of the program drawing participants from outside the Hunter region’s largest population centres, consistent with its original design to make the conference and online components accessible to women in regional and remote parts of northern NSW through funded travel and accommodation.

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