About vicfootball

Introduction - Sources - Match Anomalies - Missing Referees

The summary records for clubs, players and referees found in vicfootball have been sourced from the unofficial records contained in the Victorian League Achive on OzFootball. The individual season records you will find there have been compiled by John Punshon. When you consider the neglect of the Victorian Soccer Federation in documenting the early years of the Premier League, John’s meticulous work is, in effect, the official record, given the time and care taken to produce them each and every year. John began his quest to compile a complete list of match records for Victoria’s top competition in 1996 and the process has varied depending on the seasons researched and the media and digital landscape of the time. 1991-1993 No official records exist for this period, likely destroyed when the Federation moved from its premises in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda. Not to be deterred, John compiled the records from these seasons via articles in the Australian British Soccer Weekly, which at the time did a reasonably good job of covering the game at a detailed level. Further sources include Il Globo and Neos Kosmos, as well as the amazing work of Peter Desira, who kept fantastic records for Green Gully at this time. 1994-2004 John eventually gained access to the official match records at VSF HQ and not only is there an unprecedented level of completeness for each season from this era, there is also a level of confidence in the records provided as they represent, for the most part, the official records of the time. There is the odd team sheet here and there which, for whatever reason, never made it to head office. Media sources are used to supplement any gaps, but ABSW began to condense their coverage of the VPL at this time and the ethnic press didn't always cover every match. While the Federation released its first commercial website via Sportal in 2001, the competition management system was a bare bones affair, listing the fixtures, results and ladders and not much else. 2005-2011 The digital landscape changed significantly in 2005. I had been employed with the Victorian Soccer Federation for a few months as Results Coordinator before I was eventually promoted to a full-time role heading up the IT department. As the only member of that department, I soon realised that the company the VSF had initially partnered with to replace Sportal lacked the football knowledge or development capacity to deliver a product that was useful for staff and stakeholders alike. Enter InteractSport, who redeveloped their existing cricket product at no cost to FFV throughout a Premier League trial in 2005. By the following season, ResultsVault became the organisation’s sole competition management platform, incorporating a complex referee appointment module to match its already mature competition management system. What this all means is that the records from this period are essentially complete. Once I was promoted to the executive and took the reins of the Football department, John more or less had unfettered access to FFV records, isolating any data entry errors which were missed throughout the season. FFA opted for the no-cost alternative provided by SportingPulse in 2011 but FFV persevered with ResultsVault for another season. 2012-2018 The move to SportingPulse and what ultimately became SportsTG has been a step back for the statisticians among us. The system allows scorecards to be uploaded without nominating substitutes, so it is sometimes impossible to determine which players actually took the pitch in many matches. John still had access to the match records for much of this time, but eventually FFV replaced them altogether and placed the onus of responsibility for adding match day records onto the clubs, who had been spared this process when the digital age dawned. Call it a lack of training, or a refusal to acknowledge the attention to detail required from a club volunteer, but the records from this period are something of a dog’s breakfast. My audit of the 2018 season found well over 90 errors across 187 matches, that’s almost half the records for the season. Fortunately, many of these matches have been filmed and packaged highlights on YouTube have added another worthwhile resource to the mix.