What is the professional soccer landscape in New Zealand?
Soccer 101
TSS
4.9 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We're continuing our series profiling the domestic leagues of countries that have qualified for the 2026 World Cup, and this week we're heading to the land of marmite and rugby... to talk about soccer. It's New Zealand! What is the league structure? Which New Zealand clubs play outside the country? What does the future of the New Zealand National League hold? Those questions and many more answered on this week's show!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, everybody to Soccer one-on. |
| 0:15.0 | My name is Taylor Rofflin, as always. |
| 0:19.0 | I'm joined by my friend and yours, Mr. Kiwi himself. It's |
| 0:22.0 | Graham Ruffin. Graham. Congratulations. You are from New Zealand for this episode. Oh, I'm quite happy with that. I've never been to New Zealand, but it looks like a beautiful country. Do you think the athletic know that part of the deal of us doing this series was that they have to pay for us to visit every single country that they were doing. I mean, Iran last time, that might not work out |
| 0:20.6 | too well for us, but as I say, New Zealand looks like a great country. So when are we going? Dives on not being the one to go to Iran. Between Scotland and the United States, I feel like you're going to have the better of the times there. But I do look forward to our eventual invoice and the athletic being basically broken and financially |
| 0:55.8 | destitute because of this journey. But it was worth it, Graham, because we are continuing our series |
| 1:00.4 | discussing the leagues of national teams that have qualified for the 2026 World Cup. I will say |
| 1:06.5 | this. We're quickly running out of teams that have qualified for the World Cup. We need some more |
| 1:11.2 | to get through. We have talked about Japan and Iran. It's time to get into New Zealand, |
| 1:16.5 | a nation with its own intricacies and confusions when it comes to league soccer, Graham. |
| 1:20.7 | Yeah, absolutely. This league system is kind of nuts. |
| 1:24.0 | A little bit. I also like it at the same time. |
| 1:27.6 | Once you get your head round it, it makes some sense. |
| 1:30.4 | But I have to admit, it took me about 15 to 20 minutes to truly understand. |
| 1:34.1 | And I've written a little bit about football in New Zealand this season because Auckland |
| 1:39.0 | FC and we'll come on to this in this episode. |
| 1:41.7 | Auckland FC are an expansion team in the Australian A-League and they are top of the table |
| 1:47.6 | after 24 games. |
| 1:48.7 | So I've written a little bit about them this season, but New Zealand has its own domestic |
| 1:53.4 | league ecosystem, which is where things get a little bit more complicated. |
| 1:57.8 | When we discussed doing this in the first place, Graham, I think your analogy was Canada, basically, where you have probably the top professional teams playing in |
| 2:06.0 | the US League, the North American League, obviously, but Major League Soccer is primarily an American |
... |
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