@coopy said:
So….we have two protagonists.
A Coach
Football GM
Coach says he wants players a, b and c and I can get results. Football GM says you can have players x, y and z because a,b and c will be better long term.
Coach says I can't deliver results. GM says it is the only way he can get the club to develop.
You think there won't be the odd colourful discussion?
IMHO the coach is responsible for player personnel and performance. It's pretty much been that way for over 100 years and I am worried we will be a laughing stock in the years to cone.
Thing is about the last 100 years, though, is rugby league was NOT a big business for most of that time.
You are talking about a transformation from club staff of 10 to now multiples of 10\. Teams used to include part-time workers and tradies, who have become elite-level full-time professional athletes. Rosters of even $3-4M total 10 years ago are now pushing $8M, media revenues gone from 10s to 100s of millions per season, rise of internet and social media, broadcasting technologies, fan engagement.
In my opinion, you can give a head coach full reins if they are a proven long-term performer. Likes of Bennett, Hasler, Bellamy… even Sheens, could fully manage a club with years or decades of proven performance.
Does WT have the money to afford such a head coach? No. We are currently stuck with the more speculative options - emerging rookies, modestly experienced support coaches, fallen former heads looking for another gig. We have people who are absolutely not assured of seeing out their contract, and you want to give them 100% club control to achieve results.
Well maybe that works, maybe the coach gets it right and the whole organisation flourishes. Or maybe the totally mess up and the club plummets backwards, you go back to square 1 with the nuffy coaches and modest roster.
Do we really put all our eggs in one basket? It's quite neat and nice to say "he's the head coach, given him full control... and if he fails it's 100% his own fault". Makes that person easy to cut loose. But that person is going to be absorbed with short-term success, to ensure their own continuing employment. Sure they have longer-term aspirations, but the plans for Years 5 and 6 matter for naught if the knives are out within your first 6 months.
Also look at our own history: we have done quite poorly with 4 x less experienced coaches. Pearce, Lamb, Potter and Taylor did not achieve much success in their 1-3 year tenures. The only time we got anywhere was with an extremely experienced operator who was given a long term to build the club up. And for all Sheens' detractions, he is still comfortably the best operator we've ever had, managing to balance all the financial and political woes that have befallen us before and since.
It might have been nice, for example, to have a GM in 2000 to put some moderation into the early buying spree / money wasting. Or to get involved when Sheens decided to cull a chunk of the side in 2012.
In many ways it raises the question, why does a coach have to have 100% control? Is it just ego? Why can he not get performance out of a roster put together and cooperatively managed with someone else? Most big businesses operate this way, they carve up the work (and stress burden) to be shared amongst talented peers. The CEO of a company sets broader strategy, usually financially-based, and leaves the details to specialists. Similarly, the operations lead does not always have to take on the burden of staff management, which of itself is already a huge time investment (career development, performance mgmt, leave clashes, morale etc.). It also means that one single person cannot overextend or easily mismanage, because there checks and balances from other departments.
Footy has become big business, and most head coaches cannot oversee everything. That is why NFL clubs go with this approach, because they are far far bigger business than we are.
This is actually how my own management-level job operates. I am responsible for getting performance out of structures set by someone else, with a team hired by someone else. There are negatives with this approach because I do not have complete authority, but I also don't bear the stress of project success by myself. My business is just too big to have one person to be responsible for every component of a project, and the bigger it gets, the more and more we split up the work amongst a peer group of managers, each with their own area of expertise, strengths, unique ideas.
Sometimes it sucks, yes, but rugby league SHOULD be moving away from old-school models of operations.
