As you know, FINA held a massive World Water Polo Conference in Budapest three weeks ago.
In case you didn't have the chance to follow the event, the main conclusion was that water polo has to modernize - rapidly. The game has to become faster and more understandable to the audience. New marketing and communication activities must aim to popularize the sport itself, especially introducing the game to children.
All participants attending the conference commented enthusiastically that the time for change has finally come. But the community's experience of the past ten years (except for Habawaba in regards to bringing water polo closer to children) justifies our doubts whether real change in those areas is going to happen.
We have two fundamental reasons for our skepticism this time around.
Lack of specific timeline and activities
Two excellent professionals from the field of branding and digital communications spoke at the conference. Since this is also our area of expertise, we can claim that their presentations were basically an introduction to branding and social media. We were slightly disappointed at how many key officials were amazed by conclusions that should have been reached back in 2008.
At the moment of publishing this survey’s results, we still haven’t found any answers regarding specific timelines for tangible actions to popularize water polo through means of marketing and communications.
The only specific steps we are aware of at this point are:
From our point of view, many significant questions remain unanswered:
Legitimacy
Milestones
Special Commission
Key figures
Actual degree of community involvement
There was lots of talk about how this time around, the entire water polo community has been included in the process of setting the new direction and making the right choices. That's why we were able to see representatives from different continents, referees association, and the athletes' committee sitting next to well-established experts like Ratko Rudić, Denes Kemeny, and Adam Krikorian at the round table panels. Great, right? Well...
One statment from the FINA World Water Polo Conference, in particular, moved us to launch this survey to make the players' voice heard:

Aaron Feltham
Let's see what some of the participating athletes answered in our survey when asked, if they were involved in the process in any way:

Viktor Nagy
World champion, Total Seven 2017 goalkeeper
No.

Andrija Prlainovic
Olympic gold medalist, World and European Champion, Runner up in Total player 2017.
No.

Luka Loncar
World champion, Olympic games Silver medalist, Total Seven 2017 center forward
No

Keesja Gofers
World championship sliver medalist
No

Danielle Woodhouse
Olympic gold medalist, World Champion
No
In fact, we got 80 active athletes that have won a medal on big international competitions who completed our survey and only one of them was asked for an opinion.
That's ONE (1) deeply involved athlete we were able to find.
If even world championship medalists are not taken into consideration, what is in fact the criteria for involvement? Who are the athletes that were contacted? When we confront these facts with Aaron's statement we face major trust issues regarding all the other promises made at the FINA conference. Add the bad experiences in decision making and implementation of change from the past to the mix and it quickly becomes clear why we don't believe that things are truly going to move forward following the conference in Budapest.
What do the players really think?
These are just a few examples of the 761 players from 58 countries who completed our survey - 468 of them are Active players, and 80 of them won a medal on the Olympic games, World Championship or Continental level competition.
Water Polo Athletes
Countries around the World
Active Water Polo Players
Olympic and International Medalists
The purpose of our survey was to finally make the player's voice heard. We wanted to learn your thoughts about the direction that water polo should be taking and your opinion on the newly suggested rule changes.
In addition to these results, we also gathered 323 written statements about the question “What do you think needs to be changed to make water polo more popular? (Rules, calendar of competitions, marketing and communication efforts, the involvement of new technologies, etc.)”
After compiling the data and analyzing all suggestions, we established three main issues:
You can find an extensive report with the detailed survey results at the end of this article.
Conclusion and Next Steps moving forward
The whole water polo community agrees that marketing and communication efforts are required to popularize the sport on a global scale. The question remains whether the responsible organizations have the will and (more importantly) the skills to make it happen. Luckily, this survey indicated that there is an honest wish within the active water polo community to move things forward, and the digital tools of our time enable every single one of us to contribute.
With no intention of neither obstructing nor diminishing the governing associations' work on this matter, we at Total Waterpolo will be launching a number of actionable steps that every willing supporter of the sport will be able to take. We will all be able to put in some time to make tangible steps forward in the popularization and development of our beautiful sport.
Next Sunday, 20.05.2018, we will publish a specific action plan in the segments of water polo development, on which we can all have an impact.
Don't forget to share these insights with your friends and teammates and to follow us on our social media channels to keep up with the latest developments and become part of the discussion.
Survey Results

Participants' Nationalities