Over the next five years, the federation plans to deploy a software suite, developed by U.K.-based First-Sports, to all tiers of football administration in Australia.

The solution will enable the federation to build a national database of its 700,000 registered players, which will then be used as a competition management platform to streamline communication across the sport's state federations, zones, districts, associations and clubs that will manage the administration of participants, fans and volunteers.

"One of the interesting aspects of sport is that it is not a one-to-one relationship in terms of an organization and a customer, which a traditional CRM covers," FFA Online manager, Paul Templeman said.

"[The software] has the traditional CRM elements -contact management and marketing, but it also has sport-specific modules such as player registration, coaching accreditation and referee registration, which makes it perfect for us."

The system will be built from the ground up, because under Australia's previous football governing body (the now-defunct Soccer Australia), there was no national database of registered players; there was also an outdated online system.