Football New Zealand Built Street Football Into Their Curriculum

No Cost, no coaching, just play! This is the motto of New Zealand's 2023 launched Street Football initiative. In honestly one of the most surprising updates to the Street Football landscape, and in one of the most surprising places, New Zealand of all countries has taken a truly epic and exciting step to develop their young footballers through 3v3 Street Football. The benefit, it helps Street Football as well, as since it's launch there has already been up and coming crews around New Zealand popping up on social media trying to build a name for themselves.

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"Street Football provides a fun, free to play environment for young people to enjoy a different format of the game".

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The Opportunities

This project to date has been in operation a full year, meaning that it wasn't a simple one off event, it's a fully fledged incorporation into the system, which can be proven through the Street Football page on the New Zealand Mainland Football Governing Website. The opportunities that arise are particularly great for the Oceanic region. This helps Australia almost more than it helps NZ, it gives Australian East Coast based crews a chance to travel and compete almost "locally" against a whole new batch of exciting talent in the coming years, while also developing the overall scene and professionalising it. The best decision from Football NZ was to build this project for the distinct age groups of 14-16 in both male and female categories, as these are extremely formative years which will lead to at least some new fundamentalist Street Footballers being birthed.

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Our Outlook

Seeing that this is now "Term 4" of the project in New Zealand, that they've hosted an event in November, and have a December event already scheduled, you can see that this is a truly well thought out initiative, and it's great to see. While Mainland Football New Zealand have done an awesome job so far, I'd love to see how it develops further before taking a definitive position on it's future, I'd love to see the growth trajectory over the next few years, and at Contraband we'll be watching closely. As for right now, New Zealand Football governing body has done some exciting work that we are fully behind.