Football Infrastructure Strategy Launched

On Friday 2^nd October 2020, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian launched the NSW State-wide Infrastructure Strategy, designed to address the need for significant investment in facilities over the next 10 years.  The Strategy was the culmination of a number of years work between insideEDGE, Football NSW and Northern NSW Football.

With the numbers of young children taking up football rising by a fifth in just six years, the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup is expected to spark an even greater surge of demand for football facilities – many of which are already bursting at the seams.  insideEDGE’s audit of football facilities (using our own SFA-Football technology) identified that football is played at 1,000 venues on 2,250 playing fields across NSW.  The audit identified that many pitches were struggling to cater for the demands and are suffering reduced capacity as a result of limited drainage infrastructure, as well as surface quality and lighting levels.  Off the pitch, four in five player change rooms were not considered suitable for all gender use.

insideEDGE is also developing a number of other facility audits and strategies for Football, including:

• Facilities auditing and input into strategic facility planning with Football Queensland and Football West
• Revision of the Football South Australia Facilities Strategy following an audit of facilities
• Dashboard analytics with Football Victoria to identify critical facility and participation trends and foster LGA partnerships.

SFA-Football now holds data on more than 2150 of Football facilities across Australia, with a further 14,000 facilities across 8 sports and 490 local government areas also contributing to the database nationally.

*SFA Football Facilities represented as white dots across 6 states and territories.