Why the CommBank Emerging Championships is crucial for the future of football

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

So said Warren Buffett, the legendary investor who created an art form out of playing the long game and showing patience when everyone else was looking for immediate results.

It’s a principle that can be applied to virtually any walk of life, but football fans might find that line of thinking particularly resonant, given the extreme examples of expenditure we’ve seen at the most elite levels of the global game.

With clubs in Europe regularly spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on players that, all too often, end up being sold a short time later for far less than that, the idea of planning for success years or even decades into the future can sometimes seem a little antiquated.

That said, in the local scene A-League clubs have reaped the rewards of a future-focused approach, with the likes of Melbourne City and Adelaide United earning significant transfer fees in recent years from young players that came up through their academy systems.

The calculus of those deals is relatively straightforward, thanks to the immediacy of transfer fees.

But how does a sporting organisation invest for the future when it’s hard to see the direct line between that investment and the financial return down the track?

A unified push to develop Australia’s next talent pipeline

It’s a question that Football Australia, like many national sporting bodies across the world, have grappled with for some time, but rarely before has there been such clear alignment across the Australian football ecosystem on the importance of identifying and nurturing young talent.

That much was clear at the recent CommBank Emerging Matildas and CommBank Emerging Socceroos Championships, two events that, in many ways, do as much for shaping the future of football in this country as the biggest tournaments in the world like World Cups and Asian Cups.

CommBank’s support of the tournaments is a significant boost for FA and for the sport in general, not only improving the pathways to our national teams but continuing an emphasis on keeping young people engaged in the sport more broadly, from grassroots to elite levels.

When asked how important it is to keep investing in the CommBank Emerging Championships, Australia Under-20s coach Trevor Morgan was unequivocal.

“You said the word, ‘investment’,” Morgan said. “There is a cost to everybody, whether it’s the families, the Member Feds or Football Australia, and that shows you how important it is.”

Inside the CommBank Emerging Championships: identifying future stars

During the recent Women’s Asian Cup, much was made of the 50-year vision that champions Japan are about halfway through now, having launched it back in 2005.

That country’s youth development programs are now the envy of Asia, if not the entire world, churning out world-class players at a rapid rate over the last five or ten years.

Those players have, in turn, created more revenue-creation opportunities within the sport in Japan, which then allows the national federation to plough more resources into developing even more top young players.

It’s a virtuous cycle that many nations would love to replicate, and it was interesting to note the presence of a Japanese youth team at last week’s CommBank Emerging Socceroos Championships, as well as one from Vietnam at the CommBank Emerging Matildas Championships.

“It’s critical we expose more Australian players to the Asian style of football – that’s the level our top young players need to compete against and beat if we’re going to keep moving the game forward internationally,” said Gary Moretti, Football Australia’s Head of National Teams.

“Rather than taking one national team into Asia, we felt there would be additional benefit for our national teams and Member Federations in bringing Asian opposition here and creating more regular, meaningful exposure that they would face when representing Australia in the future.”

It’s just one example of the long-term thinking that was on show at the Emerging Championships, much of which were geared towards identifying players aged 14, 15 or 16 and nurturing them through their critical development years before throwing them onto the national or international stage.

“This is a great opportunity for us, early on, to skim some talent… but for the players it’s a real learning week and it’s actually then about what happens afterwards,” said Morgan, who was until recently the Technical Director at Football Australia.

“It’s a really special week, but it’s one week in their life. What we need to do is find other ways to connect.

“It’s actually what we do over the next 12 months (or more) to help players develop.”

To that end, Football Australia enlisted the help of several legends from years gone by to identify standout players at the tournaments.

The likes of Nicky Carle and Brett Emerton, who between them played more than 100 games for the Socceroos, were roaming the sidelines at Sydney’s Valentine Sports Park last week.

“It’s really interesting watching some of the young emerging talent here at the tournament,” Emerton said. “At the end of the day, they’re our future of football, so it’s a big interest to me.

“And from what I’ve seen so far, the future of the game is in decent hands.”

They weren’t the only scouts at the tournaments, with several A-League club representatives on hand to keep an eye on players that could be recruited into their academies, if they haven’t been already.

“With A-League clubs investing more in youth development, there’s more A-League presence at these tournaments,” explained Michael Cooper, Head Coach of the CommBank Young Matildas (Australia’s women’s Under-17 side).

“There’s more interest around the players and getting to know them younger.”

And so, the virtuous circle within Australian football expands, and the investment put into the Emerging Championships begins to bear fruit.

Building the next golden generation for the green and gold

But of course, the overarching goal of the tournaments is to create the next golden generation of stars for our national teams, and those charged with doing so are confident that that’s exactly what will happen.

“The reality is we’re going to see some future Matildas, which is exciting,” Cooper said.

His view was backed up by Ian Crook, the former Premier League midfielder who these days is the Elite Programs Manager at FA.

“I’m sure in five years’ time, we’ll be looking and going, ‘I first saw that particular girl at the Home of the Matildas all those years ago, and we’ve been part of her journey’.

“It’s hugely important.”

Ditto for the young boys hoping to one day pull on the green and gold for the Socceroos.

With the Under-17 World Cup now held every year, there’s a chance some of the players on show during the CommBank Emerging Socceroos Championships just last week could be playing on the world stage as soon as this year, with the 2030 men’s World Cup not beyond the realms of possibility.

And it would all stem from a ‘tree planted’ over the past couple of weeks.