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It’s Groudhog Day. In the last few weeks, the Parramatta Eels have added another sad, pathetic chapter to their bulging scrap book of sporting and administrative failures.
Fans of one of the biggest NRL clubs in Sydney would be in utter despair if these developments were not so predictable, so familiar. However, this loyal but dwindling army of supporters must be seeing their despair turn to anger in light of the latest debacle.
My biggest take-away from the dramas that have been unfolding at the Parramatta Eels this week is that despite the positive developments occurring in the way rugby league is being administered (the commission, grassroots development, profitable TV deal), the AFL is still miles ahead of the ‘greatest game of all’. Strategically, tactically, and operationally.
What the NRL Commission decide to do with the Parramatta Eels – the shambles that should be a powerhouse – will greatly assist in maintaining and gaining fans in the highly contested Western Suburbs market. At a minimum, the NRL’s response will reveal how much authority, foresight and resilience the new NRL Commission has stored up and how effectively they can deploy it.
The woes faced by the Parramatta Eels are cultural and structural – solving all of the current problems would just see new ones take their place soon afterwards. This has been happening since 1986 (and more regularly in the last 10 years).
The plight of the Parramatta Eels highlights that the NRL has too many clubs with convoluted governance arrangements and boards consisting largely of well meaning, but overmatched, semi-professional administrators. Too many NRL clubs have been run by administrators who operate more on passion, adrenalin and tribal factional motivation than business and management ability.
A comparison with the best managed and administered sport in the country, AFL, offers up a stark and depressing contrast.
In Sydney alone, the Sydney Swans and Greater Western Sydney have boards full of members who are managing directors of investment banks, former CEOs of national retail chains and large construction companies (including chair of GWS, Tony Shepherd AO), senior partners in consultancy firms, and a former managing director of IBM Australia and New Zealand.
The impressive list goes on. A glance at Victorian and South Australian AFL clubs finds former cabinet ministers, captains of industry, and Order of Australia recipients littered among their high calibre boards. They are boards that befit an entity the size of an AFL or NRL club. Effective administration is a result of an effective commission, but also clubs that are well run by capable, qualified and experienced board members.
The Parramatta Leagues Club and football club boards do not come close in terms of high level management and business experience, and has not done so for over 40 years – if ever. Biographies handed out on Leagues Club election leaflets reveal a motley collection of honourable, well meaning small business people, real estate agents and (on past boards), property developers and representatives from local government.
As opposed to Tony Shephard AO at GWS, or Paul Little AO at Essendon, Parramatta has chairman Steve Sharp – a former rugby league player for the Eels and a former middle manager in state government – and deputy chairman Tom Issa – a car salesman and CEO of ‘Supercar d’Elegant’, a company that ran motor events.
On it goes. Boards should have a mix of talents, skills and experiences, but the lack of high-end management and business experience at Parramatta is clear.
The NRL has made a start in putting pressure on the Parramatta Eels to fix their management standards. They have already imposed a $525,000 fine and a suspended penalty of four competition points for badly breaching the salary cap in 2016 (through mismanagement, not cheating I hasten to add). This suspended loss of points is dependent on the club undergoing an independent audit of its operations.
Far from being chastened and then humble and cooperative, the response from the Eels has not been promising. Chairman Steve Sharp has pushed back on the entirely reasonable request for an independent auditor to review the club’s operations and recommend structural changes, and a management team on its knees appears keen to go down fighting.
As of Wednesday night, Sharp has emailed Parramatta members defiantly defending the board and its actions, announcing that the club, against the wishes of the NRL, will be appointing their current auditors PriceWaterhouseCoopers to undertake their ‘independent’ review.
With the Kieran Foran cap scandal tragicomedy playing out on social media and Parramatta fans searching for grief counsellors, the ball is now in the NRL’s court.
Without decisive and swift action, the NRL will soon be left with a stagnating, mismanaged and perennially underperforming club in the heart of the Western Suburbs, completely outclassed in a managerial and marketing sense by its AFL and A-League competitors.
This is unlikely to lead to the Western Suburbs being lost to rugby league, not by a long shot, but until the NRL acts, the seemingly amateurish, mismanaged arrangements at Parramatta will continue – denying the NRL of what should be a powerhouse franchise.
Bill Moss, formerly from Macquarie Bank, is a diehard Eels fan and has had business proposals and a request to sit on the Eels board rejected ignominiously. He is now calling for privatisation to unlock the potential of the Parramatta Eels and the region. The board will naturally reject this, but as the debacle continues and the factions keep eating their own, privatisation or NRL control is looking more and more appealing.
It is a test of leadership for the NRL, a test of their strategic vision for the code. Do they want to maintain a blue and gold bulwark against rival codes in the historical rugby league heartland of Sydney, even if they have to forcefully demand good management practices be implemented? Or will the NRL Commission passively-aggressively half-intervene while the Parramatta Eels haemorrhage?
I have an idea what the AFL Commission would do in a similar situation, assuming an AFL club board would ever be allowed to stoop as low as the once mighty Eels.
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