Where's The History?

Gr8 meeting & lunch with members of @footballvic Historical Commitee. Important our proud history is continuously celebrated & preserved ⚽️ pic.twitter.com/xbO8a1ByrZ

— Anthony Grima (@anthonygrima) December 7, 2016

Well, where do you start with this? Let's go to the last line "Important our proud history is continuously celebrated & preserved". This is from the organisation that removed the history tab from it's website after it was shown to have contained a few lies.

Let's try a few scenarios to see how well history has been preserved by the FFV.

Mack Heath (no relation to the great Eric) has stepped up to run his local club's website. The history section is pretty flimsy, so he's decided to do some research to flesh it out a bit. He's not sure the few pennants on the clubroom walls are everything the club has won, as there's been a ground change and break-ins over the years. So he heads to the FFV website to go through all the previous final tables over the course of the club's history:

The tables only go back to 2012 and the club was founded well before then.

Can Mack find the final tables for the senior team over the course of it's history on the FFV website? NO

Can Mack find, in the absence of tables, a list of champions for all senior, reserves, women's and junior leagues over the years on the FFV website? NO

Mack asks around and finds out the VSF Yearbook which came out until the year 2000 had all the final tables and award winners in it.

Can Mack find a scanned collection of VSF Yearbooks on the FFV website? NO

Does the FFV have a full collection of VSF Yearbooks in it's possession that Mack can come in and have a look at? NO

Mack discovers that in recent years the information he is seeking is usually found in the FFV Annual Report. This is only available online on the FFV website from 2007 onward though.

Can Mack get this information for between 2001-2006 from the FFV? NO

Jenny Diver is doing a school assignment, and would like to write about her grandfather who she's been told (sadly, he is no longer with us) was a top player in his day and even played for the Victorian state team in games against Manchester United and Roma in the 1960's.

Jenny gets on the FFV website to check out the history of the Victorian state soccer team.

Can Jenny find a list of games played by the Victorian state soccer team? NO

Can Jenny find a list of players "capped" for the Victorian state soccer team and how many games they played? NO

Can Jenny find any footage of the glory days of the Victorian state soccer team on the FFV's Youtube channel? NO

The club Louie Miller is involved with has just had it's home ground renovated by the council. The committee has commissioned him to get a flash looking honours board made for the new clubrooms. He's even been given full list of club Best and Fairest winners over the years from one of the old timers. He would like to add the names of those that have won League Best and Fairest Awards, and League Golden Boots over the years to the honours board.

Louie gets on the FFV website looking for the missing information. Can Louie find a complete list of FFV Player Award winners over the years on the website? NO

Can Louie find a list of League Top Goalscorers since they started to be recorded in the early 1980's anywhere on the FFV website? NO

Lotte Lenya writes for a football website. She's doing a piece on a leading club's new coach, who had a long career playing in the VSL and VPL through the 1980's and 1990's.

Can Lotte get on the FFV's results service to find team line-ups from that era? NO

She can't find a line up to click on his name to bring up his history of which clubs he played for and for how many games. Unlike other leagues and other sports, there is no record of who has played the most games in Victoria's top tier. The FFV frequently changes results service providers, and it seems we are lucky if they bother making sure all the information is correctly added in the present. Maintaining a working database of top tier results and line-ups is not a concern to them.

Some of the above information can be found in a partly complete set of VSF Yearbooks at the MCC Library. That the years between 2001-2006 are not online is appalling given it's hardly ancient history.

The FFV loves putting out propaganda, but until a few of the NO's above can become a YES it needs to stop patting itself on the back and maybe achieve something in regards to preserving history that can be easily accessible to everyone.

Don't take this as an attack on the FFV Historical Committee. A lot of the information missing is stuff the FFV should already have. If the FFV thinks the names of people who have won awards, of clubs that have won championships don't deserve to be recorded there's not much we can do. They just shouldn't expect us to swallow their bullshit comments on their token efforts in preserving history.

Final tables/champions, award winners and state representative honours, these should be the cornerstones we build our history on. I'm not seeing any evidence that this is happening to warrant any boasting. If they are so proud of our history, where is it?