The twin concerns of Jim Gavin’s football review committee and the amateur status committee, chaired by Professor David Hassan, have something in common and one measure could help to address both.
That is the view of Tim Healy, a member of the previous FRC, chaired by the late Eugene McGee. Healy, who has written a book on management in the GAA and completed a PhD on the changing role of English soccer managers, believes that the association needs to take a different approach to dealing with payments to managers.
Accustomed to combining the practical and academic in his business career, he holds an MBA from UCD’s Smurfit Business School and has had a long involvement with the university’s footballers among several other roles with county and club teams.
“All the focus is on the intercounty game,” he says, “but my point is that the intercounty game is probably extracting between one and two million euro – something in that ballpark – from the GAA, money that never comes back in terms of management and management teams. I’m not getting into S+C and all other associated costs.
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“At club level, my view is that €10m is a very conservative estimate of what is being spent. It’s probably more.”
In his opinion, this represents not alone a material loss of resources but because of the priorities of an outside manager, a significant influence on how the game is played.
“If they are getting 25, 30 grand, which a lot of them are, they’ll want to make a second year so they set out to make the team ‘hard to beat’. The high-profile critics are missing a trick here because we are actually paying guys to make football less attractive at club level.
“It’s not just the problem of disappearing resources although I can’t think of any other institution in the country, which would be comfortable with leakage on that scale. We seem to be quite tolerant of it.
“An outside manager has a singular focus: his own position. I have come across a club which paid a manager around €30,000 per year for two years and the only change in their circumstances is that they are down the best part of 60 grand.”
Focus on the outside manager as a Trojan horse breaching the walls of amateurism is nothing new.
Former GAA president Peter Quinn, who chaired the 1997 amateur status committee and also the strategic review committee , which reported five years later, said that a prohibition on managers coming in from the outside had been considered but rejected because it wouldn’t be fair on less successful units, who hadn’t been able to generate such expertise themselves.
Healy says that whereas he accepts such reasoning, he isn’t advocating the termination of outside appointments.
“My solution is not to ban outside managers but to put a levy on their appointment of say, €20,000 per head at intercounty and €3,000, €5,000 or whatever at club level. Make administrators think about such appointments. The money would contribute to a fund to be used for the education of managers – courses run in conjunction with third-level institutions.
“It is noticeable that the GAA has historically done nothing for the preparation of managers. Good ones emerge through good fortune as much as anything else.
“If people are being brought in, let them do it but be well aware of the rules around compliance with revenue. Impose a levy on outsiders but maybe with strictly regulated derogations for weaker counties or clubs, who in the long run would be the most obvious beneficiaries of management education.”
He can see some assistance on the horizon through his research into professional soccer, which has seen a trend away from the appointment of entire management groups.
“Take the Premiership [Premier League] these days. Instead of a guy being hired with a whole entourage, who all need to be paid off when the inevitable termination payments are made, the manager is increasingly being called the ‘head coach’ and coming in alone to work with the structure that’s already there.
“We tend to do things a little behind others and I can see that happening within the GAA. Managers would become an individual appointment even at county level and not head of a conglomerate.”
Healy summarises the paradox at the heart of the difficulties that the two committees have been established to address.
“It’s an industry and we in the GAA, a community-based, amateur organisation are prepared to put up with that and then set up a committee to make football more attractive while completely ignoring a significant influence on how the game has become as unattractive as it is.”
