On Thursday night — at the end of his deflated post-match media conference — Socceroos head coach Graham Arnold was asked the golden question that has shaped Australian football's discourse for the past few years.
After a lifeless 2-0 defeat to Japan in a must-win World Cup qualifier in Sydney, in which he fielded a number of inexperienced youngsters due to the cavernous absence of more senior stars, Arnold was asked about Australia's player development pipeline.
"What does it say about Australia's standing in relation to the rest of Asia when we're bringing on youngsters like [Ben] Folami and [Marco] Tilio and they're bringing on [Genki] Haraguchi and [Kaoru] Mitoma?" a journalist rightly asked.
Arnold paused.
"Well," he said flatly, "If you notice that, write what you think.
"At the end of the day, I've been saying this for probably 10 years."
And that was it. Media conference over.
As often happens, the shortest, sharpest answer turned out to be the most revealing — not just of Arnold, whose job is now likely on the line, but about the world of Australian football he is both a product and producer of.
The Socceroos' World Cup qualifying failure is the latest variation on a theme that has been the driving anxiety of the Australian game for the past decade.
Two months after the Matildas' quarter-final exit from the Asian Cup earlier this year, the game has finally arrived at the existential crisis it has been keeping at bay: how it is identifying, producing and showcasing the next generations of Australian footballers.
In both the men's and the women's game, the past two decades' worth of structural neglect — in the form of administrative and governance discord, federation disunity, hiked grassroots participation fees, an over-reliance on volunteerism (particularly coaches), a disconnected pyramid, and insular, under-funded, commercially-driven professional competitions — have culminated in a flat-lining of Australia's senior national teams.
Arnold's own career, both as a player and a coach, traces (and contributes to) this tumultuous history.
He rose to playing prominence in the heyday of the old National Soccer League (NSL), where he became one of the country's deadliest strikers with Sydney United in his early 20s.
This led to stints across Europe before returning home in the late 1990s, becoming player/manager of the Northern Spirit on his way to retiring in 2000.
He immediately moved into coaching, and was recruited as a Socceroos assistant under Frank Farina and then Dutchman Guus Hiddink as Australia navigated the 2006 World Cup.
Two years later, he got his first taste of youth national team coaching when he helped the Olyroos (Australia's under-23s side) qualify for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, before assisting Pim Verbeek at the senior level as Australia qualified for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
Following that campaign, he moved back to club level, heading up the Central Coast Mariners — leading the club to two trophies in the process – before moving across to Sydney FC, where he cemented himself as one of the most successful coaches in the A-League.
Arnold has played a key role in the direction Australian football has taken over the course of this storied 40-year career — for better and for worse.
Relating to the former, he was part of a cohort of NSL players who created the culture and environment for the emergence of the "Golden Generation" of the 2005/06 period.
On both sides of the white line, Arnold helped define not just the players themselves but an identity for them as a collective; he was part of writing the mythology around this team and this time that, to this day, Australian football fans continue to romanticise.
But he was also part of a group of coaches whose priorities began to shift as the professional game changed rapidly around them, forcing him to narrow the very same pathway and reshape the same culture he had been part of building earlier in his career.
The consequences of success
A telling snapshot is his all-conquering Sydney FC team in the period from 2016 to his exit in 2018 to take over the Socceroos.
Of the 10 players signed before the start of the 2016/17 season, just three were under the age of 23. Only two – Josh Brillante and Bernie Ibini – managed to see regular minutes during their time with the club, while the various youth graduates promoted to the senior team saw next to none.
That Sky Blues team was spearheaded by new Brazilian striker Bobô, creative midfielder Miloš Ninković, and winger Filip Hološko, all of whom were already in their 30s when first signed.
Other signings ahead of that pivotal season included 28-year old Jordy Buijs, 31-year-olds Alex Wilkinson and Danny Vukovic, and 27-year-olds Michael Zullo and Andrew Redmayne, complementing the signings of 30-year-old Matt Simon and 32-year-old David Carney the season before.
It was a team built on experience; a team built to win. And win they did.
After a seventh-placed finish in 2015/16, Sydney FC claimed the premiership-championship double and were runners-up in the FFA Cup, with Ninković winning the Johnny Warren Medal for best player in the A-League.
They carried that momentum into their 2017/18 campaign, this time replacing Hološko with 31-year-old attacking midfielder Adrian Miezejewski.
Bobô won the Golden Boot, Miezejewski claimed the Johnny Warren Medal, and Sydney FC claimed the premiership and the FFA Cup that year.
It was a dazzling two-year period for the club and the clearest example of the fault-lines now coming to the surface of the Australian game.
Sydney's success at this time largely came at the expense of giving serious minutes to emerging home-grown players, especially attackers and creative midfielders coming through their fabled academy, which was beginning to see its first cohort emerge into senior football.
Instead, many of those young players — Marco Tilio, Cameron Devlin, Max Burgess, George Timotheou, Bai Antoniou, Charles Lokolingoy, George Blackwood, Jacob Tratt, Hagi Gligor, Nick Kuleski and Luke Ivanovic — were given a glimpse for a season or two under Arnold, and to a lesser extent his predecessor Steve Corica, before either leaving or being released, having realised they stood little chance of cracking into the first team.
But that is not entirely on Arnold — nor is he the only A-League head coach to go down this road.
He is, after all, a product of the system in which he works, and the A-League's raison d'être has evolved over the years to become almost entirely focused on footballing and commercial success: something that, to many of the league's decision-makers, has been mutually exclusive from the development of Australian players.
Arnold's tenure at club level, then, is illustrative of the larger problem he is now trying to solve: how to align Australia's highest-profile development platform, the A-Leagues, with the increasingly urgent need to produce current and future national team players.
Australian football's challenges
There is also the evolving nature of Australian football fandom and the consequence of the game's globalisation. While it is undoubtedly football's strength, its worldwide reach is also Australia's weakness.
Unlike the AFL, NRL, or Super Netball, Australian football will never be the best in its field; it will not be home to superstars at the peak of their powers or names who even casual punters can recognise at a pub trivia nights.
While some marquees like Alessandro Del Piero, Thomas Broich, Emile Hesky, Robbie Fowler, Dwight Yorke, and Shinji Ono provided shots in the arm of the A-League, our easy access to the world's best football leagues arguably leaves many younger and fringe fans wondering why they should bother paying attention to the Australian game's sprinkling of stars when a whole galaxy of them are just a click away.
In the middle of it all has been the slow decline of the Socceroos on the international stage; a revolving-door team scrambling to adapt to a rapidly evolving future while also struggling to carry the expectations, emotions, and symbolic weight of the past.
The shadow of the 'Golden Generation' continues to stretch over the current team, be it in the form of players-turned-coaches, pundits, or rusted-on fans who lament the good old days.
And so we end up here: in a half-empty, eerily quiet Stadium Australia on Thursday night, with an unidentifiable Socceroos team forced to suffer the aftershocks of the longer, slower cracks that had been developing beneath the surface of the game over the past decade.
Its squad — ravaged by injury and illness — was a desperate stitching-together of two generations of players: one which benefited from the earlier energy of the A-League in order to springboard to better opportunities overseas, and one which has only just begun to be handed regular minutes in that same league.
The performance itself – directionless, uninspiring, filled mostly with overwhelmed young players and fatiguing older ones – was befitting the crisis the Australian game is currently experiencing, highlighted most sharply by its senior national teams and laid out plainly in Football Australia's men's Performance Gap report.
Indeed, Arnold's own coaching career for club and country – where he has been tasked with fixing the problems he himself perpetuated in club-land, famously describing the A-League as "not a development league" in 2018 – points to this same tension: the struggle the modern Australian game has with defining its purpose and agreeing on solutions to move towards it together.
His final answer on Thursday may have been the shortest of the lot, but Arnold's departing observation – said with a kind of exhausted resignation – was a reminder of just how much deeper and further all this goes.
