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There are just too many chiefs at Sydney FC

10th February, 2014
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Frank Farina - a graduate of the Brisbane Strikers NSL team. (AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts)
Expert
10th February, 2014
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Sydney FC’s problem is a long-standing one, to do with leadership. It’s essentially about a lack of leadership, or too much leadership, depending on which way you view things.

What Sydney FC lack above all else is an identifiable leader.

Instead they appear to be a mish-mash of egos who believe they’re leaders, each working to a different agenda.   

Indeed, cast an eye over the club and it’s hard to work out if the boss is David Traktevenko, Scott Barlow, Tony Pignata, Frank Farina, Alessandro Del Piero, Zeljko Kalac, Terry McFlynn, the gear steward or the kid who leads out the team alongside the bloke with the armband.

One of the quintessential formulas to the success of the Central Coast Mariners, Brisbane Roar and Western Sydney Wanderers in recent years is that it’s been clear who ruled the roost at each club.

Whether it was Graham Arnold, Ange Postecoglou or Tony Popovic, the common thread is that each club have or had a man who’s the face of the club, making the football decisions.

Postecoglou famously insisted on autonomy when he took the Roar gig, asking to be judged in 12 months or more.  Even after his move to the Melbourne Victory there was hardly any doubt who was the boss.  

Yet, at Sydney, there’s rarely been such an authoritative figure.

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It looks like a place where people without much of a clue about football are making football decisions, influenced by people with even less of a clue.

For example, even after his successful first season at the helm, there was much undermining of Vitezslav Lavicka.

A lesser man would have walked after he was denied his want to re-sign the influential Karol Kisel after winning a championship in his first season.

The club’s chief delayed, and by the time they made up their mind, Kisel had committed to a return to the Czech league.

The club eventually decided to re-sign Kisel, but by the time he returned, a season later, the horse had bolted.

Kisel was a year older, on the way down, Lavicka had been undermined and it had all gone pear shaped.

What Lavicka had brought to the club was a professionalism it had not seen. He turned around a club that had been in crisis prior to his arrival and shifted the culture to one based on hard-work and respect, with the club’s fans at the core of everything they did.

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While Lavicka ultimately couldn’t build on his first year’s success, I was never convinced he was given much control.

Look at the club culture now, less than two years after his departure.

It is a club built on short term thinking.

Recruitment and retention are not things Sydney FC do well.

Everything is about survival, as if finishing in the top-four of the A-League is some sort of a grand achievement.

Incentivising as such is always a recipe for disaster.

There is no technical plan, and worse, little understanding of what a good technical plan looks like.

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Chopping and changing managers at will, hiring the wrong ones, recruiting and retaining players because they are available rather than because they fit a plan, the mistakes are constantly repeated.

The reality is the culture starts at the top, and while many might rightly criticise Frank Farina for much of his average technical work, the real questions rest around the thought process for bringing in a manager of Farina’s ilk in the first place.

Farina himself has never made any secret of the fact he’s only interested in short-term results, not that he’s had any great success in recent times.  

Yet Farina has only been in the chair for 14 months. The problems run deeper.

For example, who’s responsible for the decisions to renew McFlynn’s contract for the past three or four seasons?

For all his stellar service to the club since day dot, the reality is that the most recent championship winning season should have been his last, yet he survives, and fans wonder why the club has problems.

On the other hand Dimi Petratos, a reserved kid taking time to blossom, frustrated by his environment, snaps, and is released, only to eventually find a place where he’s nurtured, putting egg on face of his former employer and the goalkeeping coach he had a bust-up with.

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It’s a club seemingly forever in crisis, or  a millimetre away.

A couple of poor results and the chiefs start fishing around. The only solution appears to be buying success, yet it never works.

Not helping the club is the poor media advise that surrounds it. Too often it’s the blind leading the blind.

Every solution comes down to waving a magic wand, only to eventually sack the manager and give his replacement the job of working with a squad lacking balance.

That manager is then either unable to demand autonomy, or get it, and the vicious short-term cycle repeats.

It’s a study in how not run a club.

Even if Pep Guardiola was in charge, you’d sense there’d be some larrikin or 20 telling Pep how to do his job. Or worse, they wouldn’t know who he is.

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Farina will eventually get the chop, but until the club’s heads realise the problems are about a lack of leadership, and they’re part of the issue, little will change.

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