Introduction
Over the past 25 years New Zealand’s national league competition has had more makeovers than Joan Rivers, and endured more comebacks than George Best.
That’s worth acknowledging up front because it helps put into context the bizarre composition of our most recently completed national league (the 2014-15 ASB Premiership) in which our flagship football competition featured both a youth team (Wanderers SC) AND a Reserve team (Wellington Phoenix).
That has to be a global first.
And yet, this most curious composition is arguably no stranger than some of the other structural convolutions chronicled here which the code has somehow taken in its stride as part of the ongoing challenge to find a sustainable national league format. (Think of the four points for a win and penalty shootouts for a draw instituted in 1996, or the bonus point for scoring more than three goals of the 2000 season.)
This publication sets out a chronology of the twists, turns and conflicting ideas that the code has grappled with over an extended period of time, with regard to the national league.
Its focus is the politics of the league, the historic ferment over football structures and how our competition should be shaped, as opposed to physical production of the game and the on-field dramas.
For the best part of 15 years to October 2004, when the current New Zealand Football Championship (NZFC) summer framework was settled upon, change and upheaval could almost be considered defining features of our domestic football showpiece.
We then enjoyed a relatively stable national league structure - with an 8-team, relegation-free, franchised-based summer competition puddling along for nine seasons - before the Wanderers SC team of aspiring national U20 players were added to the mix in a bid to assist international youth player development. (Incidentally, the notion of a youth team competing in the national league was first announced in a New Zealand Soccer media release on April 26, 1999.)
Until the arrival of Wanderers SC (Special Club) the NZFC-era tinkering was confined to such things as the name of the competition, play-offs and the number of rounds played. Indeed, after you trawl through the curious U-turns, about faces and revisions of the decade preceding, the NZFC appeared to give us the most settled structure in the history of the national league.
But the subsequent move to throw the Phoenix Reserves into the mix in 2014-15 - and a 2015 competition review - suggests we are now be entering another era of change and upheaval. At least that’s familiar territory for the national league (and its bastard surrogate from 1993-95, the superclub championship) which has been endlessly tweaked and modified since its trailblazing inception in 1970 as the first national club competition in New Zealand.
From 1990-2004 in particular, the national league was a plaything for football politicians. This chronology charts the various circumstances in which they would discard the national league one year, then reintroduce it two or three years on. They would happily increase or decrease the number of teams in it, scrap relegation and make it invitation only (or the reverse) or change the season it was played in at a whim.
Intertwined with this search for the perfect formula, football has dabbled with ideas such as franchises, regional leagues, North and South Island leagues, provincial entries, feeder clubs, federations, even a South Pacific competition, and been to the High Court on more than one occasion.
Eight teams formed the first league in 1970, and it was increased to 10 teams the following year, then 12 teams in 1977.
In 1987, in an effort to combat concentration of teams in the major centres, automatic promotion and relegation was scrapped and an invitation-only entry introduced, together with specific entry requirements. These included a minimum number of covered seats, a charge gate and walk-on changing facilities, with clubs able to combine to form composite teams with feeder arrangements.
Controversy reigned. Auckland side University, despite finishing mid-table, was dumped and replaced by the league’s first composite outfit, Hutt Valley United. Northern and Central league winners Mount Maunganui and Napier City joined them in boosting the league size to 14.
Clubs were required to meet entry criteria and had five years to meet the new regulations or risk being excluded.
The necessity of meeting entry requirements by a mid-1992 date put extra financial pressure on clubs, and the demise of Dunedin City — at the end of 1987 — and the expulsion of Nelson in 1988 and last-minute rescue of Gisborne City in 1989 sparked the first calls for a scrapping of the league and replacement with a regional competition.
But in 1989, following the report of a taskforce, the NZFA reaffirmed its commitment to the club-based national league, passing a resolution saying the council “...remains committed to a national club-based league and the continued upgrading of this competition.’’
Even against such a historical backdrop of “change” and apparent readiness to explore new ideas and structures to make football viable here, the next 15 years was a time of exceptional ferment in “national league politics”.
We moved — often painfully — from a national league to regional leagues and back again, from winter to summer, and juggled with ideas such as franchising with a great deal of debate not just about what was best for football, but also about what was and wasn’t acceptable as methods of work in effecting change.
I’ve attempted to record the essence of the leading ideas of the day, both for and against, on just about everything that affected the national league during this period, from the sobering costs levied on participants to the sometimes surreal administrative hierarchies the league has operated (or occasionally failed to operate) under.
It is perhaps evidence of being a complete football tragic that I first started compiling this chronology in 1995, at the time when the inaugural summer league was on the drawing board.
It is not a “told-you-so” compilation. I have no axe to grind either way with questions of summer v winter, regional v national, clubs v franchises, or any of the myriad of stances adapted by the game’s personalities.
My motivation in cobbling together this chronology has been to add to the fabric of the game. Statistics can usually be tracked down, but so little seems to get recorded in terms of the social history of New Zealand football. I’d hate to see such a turbulent and interesting period, during which we surrendered then reclaimed a national league not once, not twice, but three times, ever be glibly recorded in a one-dimensional good-versus-bad manner.
But some ideas definitely do look worse for wear. The prevailing certainty and complacency of club administrators in 1991 that summer soccer was not what was wanted looks awfully dated against the mad scramble to be accepted into the new league in 1995 (and all over again in 2004 for that matter).
Then again, equally today it is easy to hear mutterings around the traps that in an amateur environment summer is too hard on the joints, the venues and the family holidays.
But that was only half the story. By early 1998, when the national league was stumbling along under a cloud of mounting debt, dwindling crowd support and diminishing media profile, those sentiments had almost swung full circle and the general view was the league hadn’t worked.
Not that any of this stopped a subsequent gut feeling that summer was indeed the answer again in 2001, following on from no national league in 1999, and a winter season in 2000.
At the end of 1992, the national league was ditched in favour of the region-based superclub championships, with national play- offs featuring the top three teams from the northern, and central regions, and two from the south.
Then a national summer league was introduced in 1995 but was scrapped in 1998 because of financial problems.
And even for those of us who lived through the vacillations of this period, it all became a blur.
Ten teams, 11 teams, 12 teams, North and South Island leagues (1999), the dead-in-the-womb South Pacific Cup, winter, summer, the implosion of some clubs, a third re-invention of the summer league... it just seemed to go on and on.
You may note several of the leading characters and clubs in this chronology pop up with vastly changed points of view from year to year. But then “soccer” circumstances fluctuated wildly during this period as well.
Indeed, when I look back at my own opinions as both a fan and a writer over these years, they’ve been every bit as inconsistent as some of the major figures canvassed on these pages.
Likewise, at times the processes employed to try and effect change seemed brutally abrupt. At others it they were tediously protracted.
It’s a frightening thought, but the things people said, the varied arguments and recurrent themes recorded here, will, in all likelihood, be debated all over again one day - and perhaps even amplified by “new-era issues” (such as Reserves and Youth teams).
On football’s track record so far, we’re bound to get a “revamped revamp of the revamped original format” (as Roger Moroney cynically predicted in one of the chronology entries here). Or there will be a think-tank session to find an alternative. There have already been so many of these, both actual and proposed, that it’s hard to keep up without a chronology such as this.
Meanwhile for clubs at least, there has been one element of consistency: a continual battle for survival within whatever the governing structure is. As one chronology entry from Sitter fanzine, May 1997, notes...
It is hard work being a national league club. By its very nature, the national league attacks the onion of a soccer club, removing layer after layer of club life until it gets down to the little sliver of ambition and commitment at the core.
Similarly, the bedrock of addicted national league diehards must drill their ambitions like an oil well, down and sideways, through the muck and thickness until they strike a club layer solid enough to allow them to eke out another year.
Then, when the season begins, the motivations of dedicated club officials are thrown on the pinball machine of the league and bounced around on crazy administration, prima-donna players, dodgy refereeing and bare-faced luck. What an existence!
Or, as one of the final chronology entries from 2004 notes:
“Since its inception in 1970, the National League has been all things to all people. For every champion side there was a team of strugglers; for every boom gate there was a pitiful turnout; for every good import there was an overweight liar getting off a plane. In short, the national league through the years has been hit or miss, with an equal share of each.”
There is a slight “Waikato-Bay of Plenty” slant to my chronology.
But that is not necessarily a bad thing. It is my home region and I know of no other where the football issues were/still are so passionately and equally aired and argued.
This precis of events is far from exhaustive (then again, non-anoraks my find it totally exhausting) but is drawn from a wide range of source documents.
These include my own interviews and personal notes, match programmes, fanzines, minutes from various bodies, and newspaper clippings from a number of major New Zealand newspapers.
It may be construed as a weakness that excerpts are not footnoted, but I didn’t want this exercise to appear too pointy-headed or academic.
However I am indebted to the work of a host of sports reporters acknowledged up front, who have tried to make sense of the ups and downs of national league politics.
We pick up the scent in mid-1990...
Go to the "BUY" page to purchase an emailed PDF of the full 276-page book
That’s worth acknowledging up front because it helps put into context the bizarre composition of our most recently completed national league (the 2014-15 ASB Premiership) in which our flagship football competition featured both a youth team (Wanderers SC) AND a Reserve team (Wellington Phoenix).
That has to be a global first.
And yet, this most curious composition is arguably no stranger than some of the other structural convolutions chronicled here which the code has somehow taken in its stride as part of the ongoing challenge to find a sustainable national league format. (Think of the four points for a win and penalty shootouts for a draw instituted in 1996, or the bonus point for scoring more than three goals of the 2000 season.)
This publication sets out a chronology of the twists, turns and conflicting ideas that the code has grappled with over an extended period of time, with regard to the national league.
Its focus is the politics of the league, the historic ferment over football structures and how our competition should be shaped, as opposed to physical production of the game and the on-field dramas.
For the best part of 15 years to October 2004, when the current New Zealand Football Championship (NZFC) summer framework was settled upon, change and upheaval could almost be considered defining features of our domestic football showpiece.
We then enjoyed a relatively stable national league structure - with an 8-team, relegation-free, franchised-based summer competition puddling along for nine seasons - before the Wanderers SC team of aspiring national U20 players were added to the mix in a bid to assist international youth player development. (Incidentally, the notion of a youth team competing in the national league was first announced in a New Zealand Soccer media release on April 26, 1999.)
Until the arrival of Wanderers SC (Special Club) the NZFC-era tinkering was confined to such things as the name of the competition, play-offs and the number of rounds played. Indeed, after you trawl through the curious U-turns, about faces and revisions of the decade preceding, the NZFC appeared to give us the most settled structure in the history of the national league.
But the subsequent move to throw the Phoenix Reserves into the mix in 2014-15 - and a 2015 competition review - suggests we are now be entering another era of change and upheaval. At least that’s familiar territory for the national league (and its bastard surrogate from 1993-95, the superclub championship) which has been endlessly tweaked and modified since its trailblazing inception in 1970 as the first national club competition in New Zealand.
From 1990-2004 in particular, the national league was a plaything for football politicians. This chronology charts the various circumstances in which they would discard the national league one year, then reintroduce it two or three years on. They would happily increase or decrease the number of teams in it, scrap relegation and make it invitation only (or the reverse) or change the season it was played in at a whim.
Intertwined with this search for the perfect formula, football has dabbled with ideas such as franchises, regional leagues, North and South Island leagues, provincial entries, feeder clubs, federations, even a South Pacific competition, and been to the High Court on more than one occasion.
Eight teams formed the first league in 1970, and it was increased to 10 teams the following year, then 12 teams in 1977.
In 1987, in an effort to combat concentration of teams in the major centres, automatic promotion and relegation was scrapped and an invitation-only entry introduced, together with specific entry requirements. These included a minimum number of covered seats, a charge gate and walk-on changing facilities, with clubs able to combine to form composite teams with feeder arrangements.
Controversy reigned. Auckland side University, despite finishing mid-table, was dumped and replaced by the league’s first composite outfit, Hutt Valley United. Northern and Central league winners Mount Maunganui and Napier City joined them in boosting the league size to 14.
Clubs were required to meet entry criteria and had five years to meet the new regulations or risk being excluded.
The necessity of meeting entry requirements by a mid-1992 date put extra financial pressure on clubs, and the demise of Dunedin City — at the end of 1987 — and the expulsion of Nelson in 1988 and last-minute rescue of Gisborne City in 1989 sparked the first calls for a scrapping of the league and replacement with a regional competition.
But in 1989, following the report of a taskforce, the NZFA reaffirmed its commitment to the club-based national league, passing a resolution saying the council “...remains committed to a national club-based league and the continued upgrading of this competition.’’
Even against such a historical backdrop of “change” and apparent readiness to explore new ideas and structures to make football viable here, the next 15 years was a time of exceptional ferment in “national league politics”.
We moved — often painfully — from a national league to regional leagues and back again, from winter to summer, and juggled with ideas such as franchising with a great deal of debate not just about what was best for football, but also about what was and wasn’t acceptable as methods of work in effecting change.
I’ve attempted to record the essence of the leading ideas of the day, both for and against, on just about everything that affected the national league during this period, from the sobering costs levied on participants to the sometimes surreal administrative hierarchies the league has operated (or occasionally failed to operate) under.
It is perhaps evidence of being a complete football tragic that I first started compiling this chronology in 1995, at the time when the inaugural summer league was on the drawing board.
It is not a “told-you-so” compilation. I have no axe to grind either way with questions of summer v winter, regional v national, clubs v franchises, or any of the myriad of stances adapted by the game’s personalities.
My motivation in cobbling together this chronology has been to add to the fabric of the game. Statistics can usually be tracked down, but so little seems to get recorded in terms of the social history of New Zealand football. I’d hate to see such a turbulent and interesting period, during which we surrendered then reclaimed a national league not once, not twice, but three times, ever be glibly recorded in a one-dimensional good-versus-bad manner.
But some ideas definitely do look worse for wear. The prevailing certainty and complacency of club administrators in 1991 that summer soccer was not what was wanted looks awfully dated against the mad scramble to be accepted into the new league in 1995 (and all over again in 2004 for that matter).
Then again, equally today it is easy to hear mutterings around the traps that in an amateur environment summer is too hard on the joints, the venues and the family holidays.
But that was only half the story. By early 1998, when the national league was stumbling along under a cloud of mounting debt, dwindling crowd support and diminishing media profile, those sentiments had almost swung full circle and the general view was the league hadn’t worked.
Not that any of this stopped a subsequent gut feeling that summer was indeed the answer again in 2001, following on from no national league in 1999, and a winter season in 2000.
At the end of 1992, the national league was ditched in favour of the region-based superclub championships, with national play- offs featuring the top three teams from the northern, and central regions, and two from the south.
Then a national summer league was introduced in 1995 but was scrapped in 1998 because of financial problems.
And even for those of us who lived through the vacillations of this period, it all became a blur.
Ten teams, 11 teams, 12 teams, North and South Island leagues (1999), the dead-in-the-womb South Pacific Cup, winter, summer, the implosion of some clubs, a third re-invention of the summer league... it just seemed to go on and on.
You may note several of the leading characters and clubs in this chronology pop up with vastly changed points of view from year to year. But then “soccer” circumstances fluctuated wildly during this period as well.
Indeed, when I look back at my own opinions as both a fan and a writer over these years, they’ve been every bit as inconsistent as some of the major figures canvassed on these pages.
Likewise, at times the processes employed to try and effect change seemed brutally abrupt. At others it they were tediously protracted.
It’s a frightening thought, but the things people said, the varied arguments and recurrent themes recorded here, will, in all likelihood, be debated all over again one day - and perhaps even amplified by “new-era issues” (such as Reserves and Youth teams).
On football’s track record so far, we’re bound to get a “revamped revamp of the revamped original format” (as Roger Moroney cynically predicted in one of the chronology entries here). Or there will be a think-tank session to find an alternative. There have already been so many of these, both actual and proposed, that it’s hard to keep up without a chronology such as this.
Meanwhile for clubs at least, there has been one element of consistency: a continual battle for survival within whatever the governing structure is. As one chronology entry from Sitter fanzine, May 1997, notes...
It is hard work being a national league club. By its very nature, the national league attacks the onion of a soccer club, removing layer after layer of club life until it gets down to the little sliver of ambition and commitment at the core.
Similarly, the bedrock of addicted national league diehards must drill their ambitions like an oil well, down and sideways, through the muck and thickness until they strike a club layer solid enough to allow them to eke out another year.
Then, when the season begins, the motivations of dedicated club officials are thrown on the pinball machine of the league and bounced around on crazy administration, prima-donna players, dodgy refereeing and bare-faced luck. What an existence!
Or, as one of the final chronology entries from 2004 notes:
“Since its inception in 1970, the National League has been all things to all people. For every champion side there was a team of strugglers; for every boom gate there was a pitiful turnout; for every good import there was an overweight liar getting off a plane. In short, the national league through the years has been hit or miss, with an equal share of each.”
There is a slight “Waikato-Bay of Plenty” slant to my chronology.
But that is not necessarily a bad thing. It is my home region and I know of no other where the football issues were/still are so passionately and equally aired and argued.
This precis of events is far from exhaustive (then again, non-anoraks my find it totally exhausting) but is drawn from a wide range of source documents.
These include my own interviews and personal notes, match programmes, fanzines, minutes from various bodies, and newspaper clippings from a number of major New Zealand newspapers.
It may be construed as a weakness that excerpts are not footnoted, but I didn’t want this exercise to appear too pointy-headed or academic.
However I am indebted to the work of a host of sports reporters acknowledged up front, who have tried to make sense of the ups and downs of national league politics.
We pick up the scent in mid-1990...
Go to the "BUY" page to purchase an emailed PDF of the full 276-page book