This article is a really important one, especially since it’s coming from a very well connected Street Football team, and the biggest team in Australia at that. Street Football is not a professional sport, and it is so far away from being considered a team or franchise based profession that it would take decades to reach the initial sparks of a professional scene.
I’ll make this clear from that start: TikTok or Instagram influencers that do Street Football videos and have a very large following I do not consider to be any form of professionalisation of the sport. These very talented people are influencers, which is a great profession to have if you do it right, but one thing they certainly are not is professional Street Footballers.
When you think of Street Football you think of local kids or adults playing football on their local concrete court or cage, and I believe that’s a great base level understanding of the sport, but once you get into it, it gets a lot deeper. Like any sport there are levels to it, there are high end teams, well known athletes, and exclusive invitation only tournaments, which all sounds very professional if you ask me. Where Street Football falls off is in organisation and splintering. This is Street Football’s problem.
Let me ask you a question….. Who governs 11-a-side tradition football?..... FIFA right? Yeah that one is easy. What about Futsal, who are the 2 main governing bodies for Futsal?..... FIFA and AMF would be the correct answer. Now what about Street Football?..... I’ll give you a minute…… Believe me you’re in the same boat as most when you have to google it or ask Chat GPT, and even then you didn’t get the answer did you? Do you want to know why you didn’t get the answer?...... Because there isn’t a governing body. That’s Street Football's massive and completely self destructive issue!
I’ve been in the sport of Street Football since 2017, and I’ve dewalt with those at the top when it comes to who has sway in the sport, and I have seen the idea of a federation floating around year after year, and attempts have been made to be fair, but these attempts have always excluded the hard workers and people with ideas. They’ve been exclusive to the popular and most followed influencers in the space. To save you any more google searches and to save you from asking GPT-4 I’ll give you the only 2 actual federations that were attempted.
First we have WSFF, World Street Football Federation. Pitched by the traditional custodians of the sport, numerous large meetings were held between Street Football representatives from most European countries, and a few from outside of Europe. The idea was great, let's make a federation….. But that was seriously it. Absolutely nothing came from it. It died in a matter of weeks. No roadmap was made, no emerging nations were given a seat at the table, just the older fatherheads who had already had their chances to build a framework for the next generation and failed.
The second attempt is still in motion, but not in the way you would expect. That is Ghetto Football. Based in Latvia, Ghetto football has a thriving 3v3 Street Football scene, and has run a European league circuit. They have made large strides in the sport. BUT, what they have built is not a federation, and to their credit I believe that they haven’t set out to make a fully fledged federation either, but they have tried to make something very close. Where Ghetto falls flat is that they don’t invite representatives to have a say in the growth of the sport. It’s all centralised and whatever Ghetto says, that is what is done. They have a compelling product, and a great base for international teams to get involved in for tournaments, but they are not a federation or even close.
I hope you see the issue here. How can a sport be professioanlised if there is no roadmap to follow, no ground rules that are globally accepted for the sport, no international rankings, no resources for club and player management, and so on….. I mean the most obvious description of the sport can’t even be agreed upon. Is it 3v3, 4v4, 5v5? Is 1v1 (Panna) considered a sub-genre or a fully fledged part of the sport? Are keepers involved?..... I think you can see where I’m going with all of this. Don’t get me wrong either, I’m not one to complain while sitting here doing nothing. I have begged to be a part of these closed circles as I had the contacts within them, but I was never invited. I have mentioned and started creating the circles to build a federation, but no one was interested, and I have been in contact with Ghetto Football for 5 years, but what they are building isn’t at the point that a global federation is needed for it yet.
You can’t professionalise a sport that has an identity issue, no one wants a piece of that, no sponsors would spend money to get involved, because even I couldn’t tell you where that sponsorship money would go. There is a huge amount of work that needs to be done in order to build Street Football into a professional sport. I'm here to help do it, but i can’t do that alone.
