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The sacking of legendary coach Rodney ‘Rocket’ Eade has plunged the AFL’s most problematic expansion project into a fresh new crisis, but perhaps this is just what the Gold Coast Suns need?
The Suns now must make a decision about their future so crucial that it should be taken out of the hands of the board, and handed to the people with the most at stake – the club’s members.
I’m not having a shot at the board. Indeed, they appear to be made up of eminently well-qualified people.
But if there’s one common mistake that boards of professional sporting clubs make, it’s that they fall into the trap of thinking they have to behave like corporations.
They reduce the breadth of their mission to profit and loss, wins and losses. They treat their members as the shareholders of a company, driven only by a desire for trophies.
But sporting clubs – at least ones that are not privately-owned by mining magnates or oil barons – are not corporations. They are member-based organisations, and they have just as much in common with community groups, trade unions and political parties as they do with the businesses that board members are recruited from.
The psychology of member-based organisations is profoundly different to the psychology of companies.
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This is a lesson that the Cricket Australia board has just learnt the hard way, after trying, and failing, to run its industrial relations strategy like Rio Tinto.
Of course, everyone likes winning. Winning is fun. But members do not join sporting clubs just to win, or because they want to get a financial return on their investment. They join so they can belong to a collective – something bigger than themselves. They want to be part of a shared identity.
This is why the values of a sporting club are more than marketing spin: they actually matter.
Which gets me back to the Gold Coast Suns, a club that is now seven years old, but one that has consistently struggled to find a reason for its own existence.
Perhaps this is understandable. After all, why do the Gold Coast Suns exist?
But exist they do, and the AFL is committed to making it work. This means finding a way to build a loyal and engaged supporter base.
History has shown that Gold Coast sports fans are not, by nature, the most loyal and engaged in the business. The roll call of failed professional sporting teams on the glitter strip is long, if not illustrious.
Which means that sporting administrators can’t simply rely on business as usual. Administrators need to find new ways of bringing potential supporters into the fold, and keeping them there.
They need to be bold.
In a happy coincidence, ‘boldness’ is one of the Gold Coast Suns’ official ‘brand values’ – it says so on the Suns’ website:
“Bold, fresh, community, relentless, and dependable are the pillars of our brand, the guiding principles for decisions, and the way we do our work.”
Well, a truly bold club, faced with the huge challenge of trying to grow from scratch in the arid, sandy soils of the Gold Coast, would be prepared to look for inspiration from outside the corporate sphere.
It would look to other member-based organisations, and see how they have tackled the challenge of recruitment. It would consider the benefits of empowering it members, not just treating them as potential purchasers of merchandise.
A truly bold club would give its members a say.
Which is why the time has come for the Suns to lead the way in member engagement in the AFL by handing at least some of the responsibility for appointing a new coach to its members.
There are several ways it could do this: from the relatively benign step of allowing a member representative on the selection committee considering the coaching applicants, to the more outlandish approach of conducting a member ballot.
However it is done, it would break new ground, and it would create significant interest on the Gold Coast and in the broader football world.
It would probably encourage more causal supporters of the club to take out membership. And it would bring the Gold Coast Suns closer to its community.
What an opportunity! Let’s hope the Suns grasp it.
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