THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM.

Queensland is not like other Australian states. It is, by area, the second-largest state in the country and spans a territory vast enough to contain several European nations within its borders. From the Torres Strait to the southern border, from the remote western Channel Country to the dense coastal corridors of the south-east, it is a place where geography itself is a form of governance — where the distribution of anything, from health services to sporting infrastructure, is as much a logistical challenge as a policy one.

Association football, known in this country simply as football, has always grappled with that scale. The game did not arrive in Queensland with the kind of cultural momentum it carried in southern cities. It arrived in immigrant communities, in suburban fields carved from scrubland, in the modest clubhouses of people who had brought the game from Europe, from Latin America, from the Pacific, and who played it in relative obscurity while the dominant codes commanded the airwaves and the ovals. That the game now stands as, by Football Queensland’s own accounting, the state’s largest team and club-based participation sport is not a matter of fortune. It is the result of decades of patient, deliberate work — work that accelerates today through the partnership between Football Queensland and Brisbane Roar, and through the infrastructure of programs, academies, and civic commitments that are reshaping what Australian football means in its largest state.

ROOTS IN THE SUBURBS OF RICHLANDS.

The history of Brisbane Roar is inseparable from the history of migration to Queensland. The origins of Brisbane Roar are traced back to the founding of Hollandia F.C. by Dutch immigrants in 1957. That club was itself a community institution before it was a sporting one — a place where new Australians gathered, played, and built social bonds in a country that did not always make those bonds easy to form. The club competed under that name for almost twenty years until, in the interest of inclusiveness and because perceptions that members of the public saw soccer as a migrants’ game, all clubs were required to adopt non-ethnic names after a ruling by the Queensland Soccer Federation in 1973.

That moment — the shedding of the ethnic name — was a complicated one. It was an act of assimilation performed under administrative pressure, a recognition that the game needed to broaden if it was going to survive in a sporting culture that already had its codes, its loyalties, and its stadiums. After adopting the name Brisbane Lions in the 1970s, the club joined the National Soccer League as one of the founding clubs in the 1977 season and competed until the end of the 1988 season before reverting down to the Brisbane Premier League thereafter. Through decades of name changes, ownership disputes, and structural reinventions, the thread connecting the club at Richlands to the A-League side now playing at Suncorp Stadium remains unbroken.

Formed in 1957 as Hollandia-Inala by Dutch immigrants, the club became Brisbane Lions and then transitioned into Queensland Roar, playing under that name from the inaugural 2005–06 season of the A-League until the 2008–09 season before finally becoming Brisbane Roar. What the club carries from that history is not merely a set of dates or a record of premierships. It carries the memory of what community football actually is: a form of civic life, a place where belonging is practised before it is assumed.

THE GAME AS QUEENSLAND'S GAME.

The numbers now tell a different story from the one that defined football in this state for most of the twentieth century. Football in Queensland is thriving, with 308 clubs and more than 300,000 players in 2023, the game stands as the state’s largest team and club-based participation sport, delivering significant social and community benefits both on and off the field. That figure — which would have seemed improbable to the volunteers running junior clinics at suburban fields two decades ago — reflects the cumulative effect of structural investment in grassroots programs, the demographic transformation of south-east Queensland, and the catalytic impact of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, which brought international football to the state in a way that no previous tournament had managed.

Football, as Queensland’s leading team participation sport, continues to grow annually at a double-digit rate, with a staggering 44% surge in female participation and 29% overall growth in outdoor players alone in the first quarter of 2024 following the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023. Growth at that pace creates its own pressures. The high demand for the game and the strain on statewide greenspaces is forcing community clubs to turn away new members, while Football Queensland is operating its own high-performance programs across three fractured site locations, placing increased stress on resourcing and negatively impacting program delivery for the next generation. Infrastructure has not kept pace with participation, and that gap is now the defining tension in Queensland football’s development agenda.

The governing body has responded with a suite of strategic documents that map the path forward. Throughout 2025, Football Queensland delivered initiatives that expanded access and opportunity for players, coaches, referees, clubs, and communities across the state, ensuring football remained both connected at grassroots level and ambitious in its long-term growth, as the 2023–2026 One Football Strategic Plan and extensive operational strategies continued to provide the detailed policy framework and program implementation to support the ongoing growth of the game.

THE PARTNERSHIP THAT SPANS THE PYRAMID.

At the heart of Football Queensland’s grassroots strategy is its partnership with Brisbane Roar — a relationship that has become increasingly formalised and structurally significant in recent years. The Roar is not simply a professional club that lends its name to development programs. It is, as its own leadership has acknowledged, the only professional football club in Queensland, and that singular position carries particular obligations.

A Queensland Government grant to the club’s not-for-profit entity Roar Recreation and Welfare Limited helped expand the Football Queensland and Roar Football in the Community Program, with the aim to increase participation and encourage more children to be active. The scale of the commitment is tangible. Through 2025, more than 10,000 young Queenslanders were expected to take part in the program, which involved a range of activities; Brisbane Roar delivered more than 270 clinics, including holiday clinics, community and school outreach programs, training and education, and game day activations.

That figure — 10,000 young Queenslanders — matters in concrete terms. These are children, many in communities where football is not yet the ambient culture it has become in parts of south-east Brisbane, encountering the game for the first time through a program that connects directly to a professional club. The symbolic value of the professional connection is real. A child who attends a clinic run by a coach affiliated with Brisbane Roar is receiving not just instruction in technical skills but an introduction to the idea that football, in Queensland, has an elite tier — that there is somewhere to go, a pathway forward, if the desire is there.

Brisbane Roar recognises its unique position as the only professional football club in Queensland and understands the critical role it plays in promoting sports participation at the grassroots level. The club’s framing of this role is notably civic rather than commercial. It is not articulating a market development strategy. It is articulating an obligation — the obligation that comes with being a singular institution in a vast and diverse state.

ACADEMIES, PATHWAYS, AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF DEVELOPMENT.

The structural relationship between Football Queensland and Brisbane Roar extends well beyond community clinics. At the elite development level, the two organisations have built an increasingly integrated pathway for high-potential players — particularly for women and girls, where the gap between community football and professional competition has historically been hardest to bridge.

Football Queensland announced that the FQ Academy Queensland Academy of Sport (QAS) Youth and Junior programs for 2025 would continue to evolve to elevate high-potential player development and strengthen pathways to professional football by further aligning with A-League side Brisbane Roar FC. The structural logic of this integration is important. Rather than maintaining parallel development systems that occasionally intersect, Football Queensland and Brisbane Roar have moved toward a model in which the pathways are explicitly connected — in which the FQ Academy QAS program feeds directly into the Roar’s women’s squad, and in which Roar players can flow back into NPL Women competition to maintain match fitness.

Football Queensland’s continued commitment to support high-potential player development through the FQ Academy’s strategic alignment with Brisbane Roar and the Queensland Academy of Sport ensures a clear pathway for athletes over 18 to remain within the program whilst also playing up and experiencing the A-League with Brisbane Roar’s Women’s team during the regular season. As the 2024 season reached its conclusion, the FQ Academy QAS program celebrated a year of great success and achievements, with several current and former FQ Academy QAS players earning youth contracts and scholarships with Brisbane Roar and selected in the Junior and Young Matildas squads.

For men’s development, the Roar’s NPL side competes in National Premier Leagues Queensland, serving as the primary competitive bridge between community football and the A-League squad. Roar have affiliations with several local clubs as part of their Academy Preparation Program, with partnerships including Souths United, Gold Coast City, Grange Thistle SC, Sunshine Coast Wanderers, Cairns FC, Logan Lightning FC, and Olympic FC. This network of affiliate clubs extends the Roar’s developmental reach across the south-east and into regional Queensland, creating feeder relationships that identify talent beyond the immediate Brisbane metropolitan area.

The results of this pathway model are visible in the senior squad. Thomas Waddingham, Rylan Brownlie, and Quinn MacNicol all made their A-League Men’s debuts after playing for the Roar’s Academy sides in 2023. Brisbane Roar rewarded seven of Queensland’s most exciting young talents with Youth Development Agreement contracts ahead of the 2024/25 A-League season, with Ivan Ozzi, James Durrington, Ty Cobb, Lennard Atterwell, and George Plusnin all signing after impressing for Young Roar in the NPL that season. These are not abstract metrics. They are names of young Queenslanders who played in local competitions, were identified through an increasingly systematic talent pathway, and are now training and competing at the national professional level.

WOMEN, GIRLS, AND THE DEMOGRAPHIC REORIENTATION.

Perhaps the most significant dimension of football’s current development in Queensland is the pace and ambition of its reorientation toward women and girls. This is not merely a participation trend. It is a structural reshaping of who the game belongs to, and Football Queensland has made it the centrepiece of its strategic framework.

Football Queensland fundamentally believes that women and girls are the future, with female participation a central pillar of the organisation’s planning. The 2023–2026 One Football Strategic Plan and the accompanying 2024–2026 Women and Girls Strategy both carry the same core target: 50/50 gender parity in participants, referees, committees, and club officials by 2027. That target was not selected arbitrarily. It reflects the momentum evident in participation data and the recognition that the post-World Cup surge in female registrations represents an opportunity that, if not captured through infrastructure and programming, will dissipate.

Football Queensland’s developmental initiatives, including MiniRoos, Girls United, and Female Football Week, have yielded results, with a 34.4% increase in girl-specific programs and a 26.9% increase in participation for all abilities. The Girls United program, specifically, has operated at both the participation and leadership levels — not just bringing more girls into the game but creating the coaches and referees who will sustain that growth. The Girls United Program has ensured that more than 50 young women from across Queensland are now qualified to coach MiniRoos teams or referee junior matches.

In the Far North — the region stretching from Cairns toward the Gulf — the transformation has been particularly striking. Football Queensland’s Far North and Gulf region recorded unprecedented development figures throughout 2024, transforming the regional football landscape, with coaching participation soaring by 800% and available courses increasing to 400%. The introduction of female-only coaching courses proved pivotal, with 29 participants marking a significant advancement towards Football Queensland’s 2027 gender parity target. These numbers describe not a flourishing metropolitan scene but a deliberate effort to reach communities that have historically been geographically and economically marginalised from the sport’s development infrastructure.

INFRASTRUCTURE AS CIVIC FOUNDATION.

Behind all of this lies an infrastructure challenge that Football Queensland has confronted with unusual candour. Football Queensland unveiled its 2024–2026 Infrastructure Strategy, outlining its strategic plan to advance football infrastructure and support the ongoing growth of the game across Queensland — a continuation of the governing body’s deliberate and ongoing commitment to collaborating with governments to secure investment and support to address the critical shortage of facilities statewide.

The scale of the deficit is significant. Community clubs in areas of high growth are physically unable to accommodate the demand they face. Fields are oversubscribed. Lights are inadequate. Changeroom facilities that might encourage greater female participation are absent. These are not abstract planning concerns. They are the daily experience of club administrators and coaches across the state’s 308 affiliated clubs.

Football Queensland secured record investment in football infrastructure in 2025, with funding for 37 projects across the state totalling more than $33 million, as clubs reaped the benefits of football’s strengthening relationship with government through the ongoing implementation of the 2024–2026 Infrastructure Strategy. That figure — 37 projects, $33 million — represents meaningful progress, but Football Queensland has been clear that it is insufficient relative to the gap. The relationship with government must continue to deepen if the infrastructure is to keep pace with participation.

The proximity of Brisbane 2032 gives this work a particular urgency. As Australia and Queensland prepare to host the AFC Women’s Asian Cup in 2026 and the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games, the infrastructure strategy emphasises the importance of improving facilities now to support young grassroots players in community clubs, nurturing their development and fostering their dreams of representing their country on the global stage. The Olympics are not, in this framing, a goal in themselves. They are a deadline — a civic forcing function that makes the argument for investment concrete and time-bound in a way that abstract growth projections cannot.

While the Olympic and Paralympic Games will take over the venues for two weeks each, the community-first mindset of Brisbane 2032 is designed to ensure all have the opportunity to enjoy the world-class facilities before and long after the Games, helping to foster a love and participation in sport for future generations of Queenslanders. Football, as the sport that claims the largest community participation base in the state, is well positioned to be one of the primary beneficiaries of that legacy infrastructure. But the benefit will only materialise if the governing body and the professional club continue to align their development frameworks with the communities most in need of access.

Football Queensland has also addressed affordability as a dimension of access. Ensuring Queensland remains the most affordable state to play football in the country, Football Queensland confirmed that player registration fees would remain unchanged in 2026, marking the sixth year in a row without a governing body fee increase, further demonstrating the organisation’s commitment to keeping the game accessible for players and families. In a state where the cost of living has increased sharply across the post-pandemic years, this decision — to absorb inflationary pressure rather than pass it to families — is a form of grassroots policy. The game that cannot be afforded cannot be played.

COACHES, REFEREES, AND THE INVISIBLE WORKFORCE.

No grassroots strategy succeeds without the people who deliver it on the ground. Football Queensland’s investment in coach and referee development is as much a part of its development framework as its player pathway work — and in some respects more foundational, because a deficit of qualified coaches is a ceiling on how many children can meaningfully play.

Football Queensland provided more than 2,800 coach education sessions and increased referee development under its 2024–2026 Referee Strategy. 2025 was an important year for coach development, with Queenslanders from across the state undertaking professional development as learning opportunities grew, from entry-level courses to advanced qualifications; the recent all-female B-Diploma course delivered by Football Queensland marked a significant milestone, adding to a growing cohort of women leading on the pitch and strengthening the future coaching landscape in Queensland.

The 2024–2026 Referee Strategy has brought structural rigour to a dimension of the game that is perpetually vulnerable to attrition. The strategy continued to be a key focus as Football Queensland further strengthened referee pathways, supported by improved recruitment and education structures, including the signing of a landmark Memorandum of Understanding with three of Queensland’s leading school sport associations; Queensland referees and those from the FQ Referee Academy also continued to shine on the national stage, including 11 Queensland referees appointed to Hahn Australia Cup Round of 32 matches.

These are not headline achievements. They do not generate the coverage that a championship final or an international call-up generates. But they are the mechanisms through which a grassroots system becomes self-sustaining — through which the next generation of coaches produces the generation of players after that, and the cycle turns.

"Football's impact extends far beyond athletic benefits — it builds social connections, improves health outcomes, and drives economic benefits."

That observation, drawn from Football Queensland’s Infrastructure Strategy documentation, captures something important about what is actually being built across this state. The football program is not a football program in the narrow sense. It is a social infrastructure project that happens to use a ball and a pitch as its instruments.

A PERMANENT ADDRESS FOR A PERMANENT MISSION.

The work described across these pages — the clinics in far-north Queensland, the FQ Academy QAS pathways, the community programs reaching 10,000 young people a year, the strategic alignment between Football Queensland and Brisbane Roar — is work that needs a durable identity. Institutions that carry this kind of civic weight deserve a form of civic permanence that matches their function.

The Queensland Foundation project approaches this question through the lens of onchain identity: the idea that institutions, places, and civic entities ought to have a permanent, legible address in the digital public sphere, independent of the commercial platforms that host them today and that may not host them tomorrow. In this framing, roar.queensland is not a marketing asset or a commercial product. It is the natural civic address for Brisbane Roar’s presence within Queensland’s digital identity layer — a permanent anchor point for an institution whose roots in this state go back nearly seven decades and whose developmental obligations extend indefinitely forward.

The grassroots work is where that permanence matters most. Community programs, school outreach, coaching education, referee development — these are not activities that exist in the news cycle. They are slow, cumulative, generational. They require the kind of institutional continuity that does not depend on a board composition or a sponsorship arrangement or the priorities of a particular season. They require the kind of permanence that football, in Queensland, is now mature enough to claim.

2025 marked a year of meaningful progress for Football Queensland, with investment in pathways and development, infrastructure and governance strengthening the foundations of the game through the ongoing delivery of the organisation’s key operational strategies. The foundation is the right word for it. Not a peak, not a moment, not a campaign — a foundation. Something laid carefully, knowing that the structure built on top of it will outlast the people doing the laying.

That is what the relationship between Football Queensland and Brisbane Roar represents at its most considered: a civic foundation for the most participated team sport in Australia’s largest state. A game that arrived in immigrant communities in the suburbs of Richlands, that was pressed to shed its ethnic names, that endured marginal status for decades while other codes dominated, and that now reaches more Queenslanders through community clubs than any other team sport. roar.queensland — as a concept, as an address, as a form of civic record — is where that story deserves to be held: permanently, legibly, and without expiry.