Walter Pless on Football

By Walter Pless

Tim Goddard has become the new director on the Board of Football Federation Tasmania (FFT) following the resignation of Chris MacGeorge.

Goddard, who once played for Rapid and was most recently the CEO of Moorilla, is self employed as a consultant in the wine, events, tourism and hospitality industries.

“Tim’s general experience and, in particular, his marketing, media and sponsorship skills, will augment the Board nicely,” said FFT president, Steve Gasparinatos.

Sponsorship is an area that needs to be looked at closely by FFT if the game is to achieve its potential.

I wonder if anyone has thought of approaching a large international company based in southern Tasmania which is expanding into China and which was a major sponsor of Tasmanian soccer for many years in the past?

China represents an enormous market and, with Australia now a part of Asia in the football world, there must be opportunities for sponsorship.

It would be wonderful, for example, if arrangements could be made for several Chinese guest players to play in Tasmania and to be sponsored by this company.

This would create great interest about Tasmania in China and would benefit the company and Tasmanian football, thus creating a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Perhaps the company just needs to be approached with a proposal that would surely benefit their expansion into China and which would, at the same time, benefit the local game.

Flicking through the archives of The Mercury, it’s amazing to see the initiatives that were associated with the local game back in the 1950s.

The Tasmanian governor was actually a patron of the Tasmanian Soccer Association and he was at South Hobart to physically kick-off the first match of the season. His picture is there in the pages of The Mercury doing just that.

The federal defence minister of that era, who was a Tasmanian, was also a patron.

Have people of such high profile nowadays even been asked to be patrons?

The ABC used to telecast matches live from South Hobart in the 1960s, but they rarely, if ever, even mention the local game nowadays and they should be approached for coverage.

These are all areas that the FFT Board should examine as football has raised its profile enormously in this country since last year’s trifecta - qualification for the World Cup, entry into Asia, and the success of the A-League.

FFT is, by the way, examining the possibility of entering a team in the V-League in Victoria.

This is now the preferred strategy for growing the game rather than the formation of a summer State League competition, which had been mooted last year.

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There must be many people out there who have spent countless hours playing table soccer in pubs and clubs around the country.

Alejandro Finisterre, a Spanish editor and poet who died at the age of 86 in Spain this week, invented the game in 1936 but was not given manufacturing rights until 1952.

In France, the game is known as baby-foot, while in Argentian it is metegol, in Italy calcetto, in Chile taca-taca, in Germany Kicker and in the Balkan countries karambol.