How do we produce better international quality players?

I am looking at Iceland, they have beaten the Dutch (who only a year ago were semi finalists at the world cup) twice in the current European Champs qualifiers and will most likely qualify. 

Iceland has a population of just 330,000 with roughly 20,000 adults playing football (including women). Whats even more impressive is that they have just 16,500 adult males who are registered to play.

We have more players, a bigger population, weather conditions that are more football friendly than Iceland so why cant we be a better team on the world stage?

Whole of Football Plan. Boom! *drops mic*

You are missing something important, NZ doesn't have a professional league, and the ASBP doesn't quite help to develop young kiwis

Would Iceland like him?

Being in UEFA and not having its young players counted as foreigners in EU leagues are two obvious advantages Iceland has over us.

• Compulsory hours on FIFA / PES (and Football Manager for NZF).
• More immigrants (but check their eligibility).
• Someone in NZF who can actually read the f**king rules.
• Shouting.  You can never have too much shouting.
• Korean Managers (worked for Guangzhou Hengda and now HK). 

But they have a population of less than the Wellington region. By those stats the Phoenix should be a better team than Iceland. The team that won the icelandic premier league last year plays in a stadium which holds 1000. Surely it's ASB Premiership level at best?

I think the question I should have asked is "what can we do to be a better football  nation"?.

The problem is that for the most part all we do is come up with excuses as to why we arent.

What we need to be doing is finding solutions.

Icelands top divisions season runs for just 12 weeks because of their long winters meaning its dark by 3pm and doesnt get light till 9am.

It is also just like our main divisions in that it is essentially amateur but the best players do get paid some money. Even here in NZ in the Northern 1st division (2 tiers off the top league) players are getting paid some money.

So what do we need to do to produce higher quality players.? No excuses, just solutions.

Think this is key if you are just looking to compare us to Iceland.  Only two of their national squad currently play in their national league.  Without doing any research I imagine the most promising youngsters get exported out to various academy's throughout Europe.  Still mightily impressive given their population - golden generation perhaps.

As to the question of how to improve the All Whites - that's tougher.  Getting a better national league would help - but sending them overseas when they are 13 might be better?

Yes but football is the number 1 game.

I personally think when people find out the quality of our bacon, then there will be no end of immigrants wanting to come here. That and fresh tomatoes.

It would be interesting to know the player numbers, and also what the quality of their league is. Perhaps its only Cap Prem level, who knows.

As far as beating the dutch goes, with determination and decent tactics you can punch above your weight on the odd occassion, look at us in the world cup or ACFC in the club world cup. If we had enough games against the netherlands we would beat them. 

What's interesting is that iceland is rated at 23 by FIFA, I know those rankings are not that accurate but thats a huge difference between us.

Double post

Only the shouting is Labour policy (and being racist tossers).

Yep - our bacon is worthy of being a flag for the nation.

Also the veggies in Germany are shark so we really should be getting a few Klinsmanns and Kuntzes to come over.

Well the same question would apply if we were talking about the US and rugby. We are talking about NZ football not US rugby.  The important thing is what can we do better or what should we be doing with respect to football?.

The answer to the problem is probably illustrated by this little thread. the truth is football fans and the football community here in NZ hasnt got a clue. its more interested in excuses why we cant be better or in diverting attention away from the issue towards things that arent relevant.

Maybe NZF needs to design a new flag?

Or change its name again, that would be a help.

Excellent question ... many of the posts may reflect obstacles that exists in NZ...

In Australia we kinda went through a revolution hhhmmmm evolution hhhmmmm somewhere in between these two ...when almost everyone involved in Football in Australia be they media, players [all levels], coaches [all levels] believed we needed to improve the technical level of our players and teams... my guess the event that caused such a group think was moving into Asia which meant the easy qualifying via Oceania was gone and our clubs needed to compete with top Asian clubs.

TBH we are still searching and asking and looking for how to do it .... many things have been done by tens of thousands of people  .... FFA setting coaching standards has helped ...  simple pick up park games and kids junior games have a different feel about them today with someone whacking the ball up-field or out is a poor player and the player should have looked to play out ... ten years ago the safety first and big hard running forward was all the go ... a big nay huge nay massive hhhhmmm wrong words people today look and access Football differently than 10 years ago and that has come about by as I said almost everyone involved coming to the same conclusion about the same time and be willing to change and try many things. 

To change essentially most must agree with the need, the urgency. have the will ... which often means having support ... which often means most already agreed and want something done. 

Some have argued SBS lead the charge but I think they were part of a general mood that we need to improve... However the media is important in getting people on board. 

I'd say its because every country only has a very limited supply of top level sports people - and all of ours play other sports. People with the natural ability, reflexes, vision and freakish athleticism of say Carter, the Smiths, McCullum or Shaun Johnson could have been our international football stars. Instead they (and most other high-level NZ sports people) chose other sports. Mainly because all their top level sporting friends did the same, but it is also that they are better pathways to professionalism. 

You can coach the shark out of the next tier of sports people all you like, but they aren't ever going to be as good as the best of the best.

How do you change that?

Maybe the backs, but our attackers (excluding Wood) are too small to play rugby.

Unless it is a pure fluke and a lucky generation I would imagine that Iceland are doing something correct in their youth development and have some nice structured programmes in place that are now bearing fruit.

I seem to recall they almost made the World Cup last time around as well

Rather then sending 10 support staff to a friendly in the wops, maybe we should send 8 and send one person to Iceland to check it out.

Look, the issues are many and massive. For a start, we're not comparable to Iceland in several ways. Better comparisons would be with Australia, the USA, and Canada, because they all share the fact that football is not the main sport, and their confederations are not as strong as UEFA or CONMEBOL. Yeah Iceland has a smaller population than us and they're better than us but our population is 0.3% of India's and we're ranked above them. 

But anyway, if you want to ask what can be done to make our players/national team better, then there's a few barriers:

- Geography. We struggle to get teams to play us at home during international windows, partly because we are so far away from where most international footballers from decent footballing nations play (Europe). We have to play against Oceania opposition in Oceania conditions for any qualifying for international tournaments, and that limits us. We often lose several top players from those games because of the travel and potential impact on their club careers. Because of these factors we don't get a chance to either field a full strength side very often, or to play quality opposition.

- Culture. Football might be played by a lot of people here but it's not a part of the culture. Not many kids in NZ grow up wanting to be pro footballers and not many regularly watch top level football, so we struggle to  get that general sense of understanding of the game which is instinctual in other parts of the world. Kiwi kids grow up watching rugby and playing rugby at school at lunch time, and they absorb those skills and tactical understanding. I think this is slowly changing as the NZ population gets more cosmopolitan, but it's a long slow process. Rugby is still so dominant in kiwi culture that the All Blacks World Cup team announcement was done at the Beehive.

- Mismanagement. Shambles like the Wynne eligibility situation or the failure to appeal Moss's suspension before the 2010 WC show that NZF  is adept at shooting itself in the foot. This should be easier to change but somehow it isn't...

Look I'm all for thinking about ways to develop NZ football and I think we could do better, but as I've said before on this site, relative to similar countries we actually do about as well as you might expect. Canada, for instance has a bigger population (about 8 or 9 times ours), is a rich Western country like us, and does not have football as its national sport. They've got 5 pro teams, we've got 1. They've only been to one WC, we've been to 2. They're only about 30 places above us in the FIFA rankings currently too (as BS as those rankings are).

In the medium to long term there are a few things I think could help us improve: 

- Another pro team or 2 playing in the A League (requires sustainable business models and/or people willing to invest, and FFA/AFC signoff)

- A competitive, sustainable national comp (not sure how or what it would look like).

- OFC's World Cup qualifying path to merge with the final stage of the AFC qualifying so we can get competitive games against decent opposition (requires FIFA/AFC/OFC signoff).

- Better football coverage in mainstream media, including games or highlights on free-to-air tv at a reasonable time (to get people interested in and talking about football)

One thing I do think is a good step forwards and should help us in the long run is the growth in academies like Ole and Wyners and that one in Chch (Asia/Pacific something?) and so on. Ideally these would be better integrated into NZF's planning, but even as they are they are a good way to develop our young talent that we didn't previously provide.

Yeah heaps of kids grow up playing football and amount to nothing. Heaps of kids also grow up playing rugby and amount to nothing. That's irrelevant. The point is that in countries where football is the dominant sport most of the kids who are naturally freakishly athletic with great balance, hand-eye coordination, reflexes etc are going to play football. Here most of those kids aren't playing football because football isn't the dominant sport. For instance, at my school there was a guy who was a national sprint champ, and he played on the wing in a rugby team, not on the wing in a football team. His equivalent in say, Iceland, would be on a football team. Flat out sprint speed can't really be coached in the same way technical ball skills can be,

Martial arts is not the dominant sport in NZ but it has a lot of kids doing it. And you would find as many of these kids turning out to play football on the weekends then to play rugby.

Talking about Island in another thread, they bet Netherlands 1:0 today. The coach said:

They have indoor places to play we had not 10 years ago. Current team is tight knitted and played a few years together. Better coaches on all levels and they just train more than the others.

Means for NZ, better coaches on all levels, play football all year and no NZF shambles do this for the next 10 years and you slowly climb up the ladder.

I agree with these things but they all fundamentally come down to: money.

As a side note, some of those Icelandic players actually have kiwi ancestry but have either been ignored by the AWs or they have ignored us and turned down kiwi overtures.

I think you'll find being 2/3 hour flight from UK, Scandinavia and the Netherlands helps them and so does regular, gaurenteed internationals against decent oposition ...ahem.. Mayanma...

so we have missed some gun Iceland players who actually were eligible to play for us but chose players who were not?

Well, not from Israel or from Muslim countries.

On the other hand, who knows but there aren't some football prodigies currently fleeing from Syria? Syria's loss may be the gain of all those countries wise enough to let the refugees in.