Australian Football Organization Improves Meeting Efficiency & Enables Match Reviews

Established in 2004, Football Federation Australia (FFA) is the governing body of football in Australia and is a member of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the international governing body for football. FFA is a membership organization loosely based on Australia’s federated system of government.

FFA has employees and league ambassadors all over the world who work to promote Australian football. FFA’s long-term vision is for football to be the largest and most popular sport in Australia, and in order to achieve this vision, FFA’s business operations are structured around three core strategic pillars:

• National teams and elite player development
• A-league and competitions
• Football community

The need for video reliability

As the governing body for Australian football, FFA charges the Leagues Compliance Team with administering a Match Review Panel (MRP) every Monday after weekend matches in the elite leagues (ALeague and W-League). This judiciary committee is comprised of former players, legal advisers, and club administrative and coaching staff and reviews flagged incidents from the weekend’s matches using content clips, often from multiple angles, supplied by technical and broadcast partners. But committee members are dispersed across Australia and in Wellington, New Zealand, and often cannot meet in person.

FFA had a corporate video solution in the past, but reliability issues and a non-intuitive user interface diminished the experience. “One of the challenges that we had was walking into a conference room and not being able to easily start a meeting,” said John Howell, IT operations manager for FFA.

The legacy solution also couldn’t easily support streaming video playback for the MRP, a critical component needed to ensure the sport’s integrity. To help achieve its vision for Australian football’s future, it was critical for FFA to find a scalable video communications platform that offers a range of versatile products and features, robust content sharing, and user-friendly video conference rooms.

Smooth, streaming match playback

Simplicity and reliability are the main reasons the FFA team chose Zoom’s unified communications platform. Zoom is easy to use and provides a stable, high-quality video connection, but the ability for FFA team members to instantly join meetings in Zoom Rooms, with the click of a button, saves significant time across the organization. Additionally, Zoom is the only provider that can smoothly stream match playback footage as shared content within an online meeting. MRP members can conveniently join the review process from their existing locations without needing to physically send delegates to the MRP location, a huge time- and cost-saver.

‘A win-win’

Zoom adoption has spread across FFA, providing an easy way for teams to communicate, collaborate, and simplify the match review sessions. A favorite Zoom feature within FFA is the ability to quickly bring additional people into a Zoom meeting. Oftentimes a group already meeting must seek other expertise to make a final decision, and Zoom makes it seamless to invite those additional people. Additionally, FFA’s human resources department uses Zoom to conduct interviews with talent around the world, limiting travel time and expenses for job candidates as well as giving interviewers more flexibility.

But it’s the way the Zoom platform has transformed the organization’s overall work culture that’s really stood out for Howell and FFA.

“When I first came in, 100% of our employees were office-based, but Zoom enabled an option for us to work remotely,” Howell said. “Today, around 30% of the employees work from home once a week, and this is a win-win for both an employee and a business.”