Melbourne Soccer Yearbook 2018

The best way to record a season, and update historical records, is to produce a Yearbook. So that's what I did.

The Melbourne Soccer Yearbook has two sections, the first covers the season just gone. Final tables for all the seniors and reserves league in the FFV's State League for both men and women. All the award winners and Cup Final details, as well as a round-up of junior league champions. The final tables for all the Victorian regional leagues for men's and women's senior teams are also included.

The second section is the historical content. Honour rolls for the senior men's competitions since 1909. These are presented in a different way from the Statistical History of Victorian Football.

Part of the reason I undertook this project was to improve the access to these records for those covering the game in Victoria. I was particularly disappointed with the way the (then) FFV released the State League Best and Fairest Award winners and Golden Boot Award winners. No fanfare, no historical context, they may as well come out and say "here's the pdf files with some results for awards we don't really give a shit about". Why not state that Caleb Nicholes, in winning the top scorer for State League Division Three South East, had won a top scorers title for the 6th time in his career? And then point out that the record is held by Dave Greening, who just took out the Golden Boot in State League Division Five South to notch his 7th success.

Not enough has been made of the feats of Volkan Kalayci, Thomas Amahdzai and Christophe Durand. Kalayci won a record 7 State League Best and Fairest Awards (1 x SL2NW, 6 x SL3NW) including 5 seasons in a row between 2004-2008. Amahdzai has won 6 State or Provisional League Best and Fairests, including the title in SL1SE for three years in succession from 2015-2017. Durand won 5 State and Provisional League Best and Fairests.

Then we had three time VPL Gold Medallist (1997-1999) still kicking on in 2013 to win the SL5N Best and Fairest. Achievements of note going virtually unnoticed due to indifference and the Federation not maintaining it's own records.

It took me a weekend to type up the tables (the senior men's ones had already been done in a night previously) and the honour rolls. Another weekend to create the layout on Microsoft Publisher then insert, cut and paste the tables and honor rolls and add the club logos and a few clip art pictures and it was done. It should take considerably less time to update the whole thing next year.

The Yearbook can be accessed via clicking on the image below. It's free to download, would probably cost between $20-30 if you want to get it printed out in booklet form by Officeworks.