An open letter to Eddie McGuire

Dear Eddie,

You came to Collingwood when the club was on its knees – just ten years after their historical drought-breaking 1990 flag, the club was now a wooden spooner, struggling financially, and rudderless.

You poached premiership coach Mick Malthouse from his West Coast contract, and rebuilt Collingwood into an off-field powerhouse.

You had to oversee the heartbreak of the 2002–03 grand final losses but, amazingly, after just two years out of the finals, the club was already trending back upwards. Despite losing a swath of experienced champions over 2007–09, Collingwood made the preliminary final in 2009, and won the flag in 2010.

Right about then, Collingwood stood on the pinnacle of the footballing world. They had a list that contained young guns such as Scott Pendlebury, Dale Thomas, Dane Swan, Travis Cloke, Heath Shaw, Steele Sidebottom, and Dayne Beams, as well as a strong supporting cast. We played an attractive brand of football.

In my time following Collingwood, I’ve never seen a Pies list so full of class, x-factor, and dominance.

This could’ve been the golden era we long awaited.

We took on a new coach in Nathan Buckley in 2012 as part of the succession plan. I appreciate when this deal was made in 2009, Mick Malthouse looked shot.

And Buckley would seem to have all the credentials of becoming a great coach. I expected to see Collingwood evolve and play a game that was symbolic of the way Nathan Buckley played.

Nathan Buckley (Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)

I didn’t know anything about what was going on behind the scenes – players unhappy with the succession, or cultural issues, or whether Buckley himself was ill-equipped to deal with disparate personalities. I keep imagining that in time, there’ll be autobiographies from players or coaches who speak about how tumultuous this transition actually was.

Still, we made a preliminary final in 2012, although our brand throughout the year was dour and unconvincing. The following year wasn’t much better, and when we bombed out of the finals in 2013, it wasn’t a surprise.

The 2010–11 teams were irreconcilable with the 2012–13 teams in regard to how they played, despite maintaining the same playing core.

The next four years were as disenfranchising as you can get. The 2010 premiership team was disassembled. I often wonder how reunions will fare, given so many players ended up at other clubs and/or left acrimoniously.

We failed to draft or recruit well. Despite a couple of bright starts to seasons, we collapsed and missed finals.

There were other things going on during this time that were, if not destabilising, then at the very least distracting.

You made a series of gaffes – any one of them might’ve sunk a president with a lesser profile, but you somehow survived. Much of the list rejuvenation had misfired.

There was also talk about the board around you – that you hand-selected them, surrounding yourself with yes-people.

If this is true, it’s worrying. Any good leader needs to be constantly challenged so they can examine the veracity of their decisions, as well as determine if there are better courses.

Something like a football club has to be a collaboration – everybody offering their insight and expertise, rather than kowtowing to one person’s vision.

Eddie McGuire. (Photo by Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)

The rumour is that in 2017, you made a captain’s call to appoint Graeme Allan football manager, which led to the existing football manager, the excellent Neil Balme, displaced, and leaving to go to Richmond.

Allegedly, you gave Allan the mandate to do what he needed to get Collingwood into the finals as an attempt to mollify support unrester. Allan recruited Daniel Wells and Chris Mayne on relatively big dollars, as well as Lynden Dunn.

It didn’t work. That 2017 season was disheartening. Attendances dropped. Did you realise how unhappy supporters were growing? These weren’t knee-jerk reactions, but the culmination of a prolonged period of listlessness. This was not the era we dreamed about.

We surprised everybody in 2018 and surged up the ladder, coming within a kick of winning an improbable flag. As disappointing as the loss was, at least we finally seemed to be entering a window of contention. This this would be our time. It was a payoff for the last seven years.

Or was it?

Several weeks ago on Footy Classified, you grew upset when Sam McClure suggested Collingwood’s list management had been a debacle for the last five years.

You blasted McClure, and defended the list management choices passionately, saying they were validated given we played in the 2018 grand final and the 2019 preliminary final, and we were now rebuilding.

Given what we know now, however, about Collingwood’s salary cap, I can only agree with McClure: the list management has been a debacle for five years. At least.

This back-ending that resulted in Collingwood cutting a swath through the list didn’t happen overnight. It was years in the making.

It staggers me that all these people on the board who are so highly regarded in the business world agreed to this strategy. What about Ned Guy?

If you look at footballing forums, discussion speculates on whether he was a jobs-for-mates-type appointment. What was his input? He claims to have been the fall guy. I would at least agree this design is bigger than one person.

Did nobody see the danger? Did nobody challenge it? Did nobody anticipate how remedial action would hurt the list, the playing group, and the club as a brand? It smacks of a gambler massively into debt still believing he’s just one good win from turning it around.

Again, allegedly, you made the call to recruit Dayne Beams.

While there was a romanticism to bringing him back to Collingwood – just as there was a romanticism to get Nathan Buckley to coach Collingwood – was his recruitment vetted? Was any thought given to the financial repercussion of that decision?

Bringing him in obviously impacted an already bloated salary cap and had a flow-on effect.

The 2019 season was a disappointment for another reason: that fast, exciting, chaotic football that powered Collingwood through 2018 was unravelling. You could see it in so many games: either we’d start well, and then peter out, or we’d play aimless football for the bulk of the game, and then get it together for a fifteen-minute burst.

COVID compromised the 2020 season. Many supporters were bemused why Collingwood didn’t rotate more players – especially younger players – through the senior team.

This would’ve seemed the ideal time: shortened games, overloaded fixturing, and underperforming incumbents who could’ve been substituted without losing too much.

I know many found it difficult to navigate hub life. While some, like Buckley, might eat, live, and breathe football, I’m sure others don’t. I struggle when games are fixtured Thursday – Monday. It’s too much for me. I don’t know how players coped living in a football bubble twenty-four hours of the day every day, every week.

It obviously impacted Brodie Grundy as his form deteriorated. I’m still curious how it affected Jaidyn Stephenson given the club decided a 21-year-old who should’ve been part of our long-term future was instead ditched for virtually nothing. This was more than a salary cap decision.

You yourself were ousted following the fallout from the “Do Better” report. The board you hand-selected had supposedly fractured. Rumour has it that the report was leaked to embarrass you. We then had joint presidents for several months, before finally deciding on Mark Korda.

Eddie McGuire (Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)

You talk often about wanting to Collingwood to be the “stablest” club around. This isn’t stable. This is incestuous. The reality is only tyrannies face coups and uprisings. What’s that tell you about Collingwood today with the Jeff Browne challenge looming ominously?

Now it’s all gone south.

There’s disharmony at board level and on the field. The list profile is terrible – a wealth of inexperienced, unprepared youth, with a smattering of older players in the twilight of their careers, if not on the way out. We now have to also question whether we should retain mid-age players, or if we should trade them out since they’re unlikely to factor into our next flag challenge.

With Collingwood likely needed to go into points deficit to snare Nick Daicos, we’re not exactly loading up for a quick turnaround. People hang onto that. They say it can turn quickly, as it did in 1999 – 2002, or from 2006 – 2010.

But in 1999, Mick Malthouse inherited Nathan Buckley, Scott Burns, Paul Williams, Paul Licuria, Nick Davis, Saverio and Anthony Rocca, Simon Prestigiacomo, Chris Tarrant, Mal Michael, Tarkyn Lockyer, Picks 1 and 3, and Pick 1 in the pre-season draft. That’s a handy foundation.

From 2006 – 2010, as names such as Buckley, James Clement, Licuria, Burns, Shane Wakelin, and Rocca were retiring, we nailed early picks with Scott Pendlebury, Dale Thomas, Ben Reid, Nathan Brown, Steele Sidebottom, and Dayne Beams, to add to Dane Swan, Travis Cloke, Nick Maxwell, and others. We steadily pumped games into them so the transition was seamless.

We have neither the same core now, nor the access to top picks.

We have mortgaged our future to try redeem our past.

This is going to get uglier before it gets better.

Our whole approach doesn’t make sense to me, no matter how passionately you’ve tried to sell it: we spent four years out of the finals building a list to contend, spent three years contending, and will now spend an indefinite period trying to get it right again? That’s not how list builds should be structured.

The last ten years have, in many ways, been a series of missteps taken because the club’s been myopic. It has the same air of stagnancy that beleaguered the club before you took over.

We might be socially philanthropic, but this is a football club whose priority is (or at least should be) football.

Just as occurred in the 1990s: from premiers to wooden spooners; now it’s from premiers in 2010 to this. This is what our shortsightedness, and a culture that’s lacked accountability, has razed.

We have queries at board level, queries on the senior coaching staff, queries on the playing list, and who knows how Collingwood’s finances have been impacted in the wake of Covid, the November trade debacle, and the Do Better report.

I do know a number of supporters who have declined to renew their membership while the club festers obliviously in its current rot.

Some supporters will descry these people as unfaithful, but it’s their right. Nothing’s unconditional in life – not relationships, not jobs, and definitely not support of a football club.

(Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)

If there’s only blind, unquestioning support, clubs would never make any changes, regardless of the circumstances. You never would’ve become president back in 1999.

We have a right to be heard, and to demand change.

If I were to sit down with you over a coffee and have a conversation about the club, I’m sure you’d ride verbal roughshod over me – as you did with Sam McClure – and insist that everything’s great, even though the facts themselves are telling us lots of different horrible stories.

I wonder, I truly wonder, does it seep through your towering self-confidence that this club is broken, and no amount of grandiose proclamations, zealous patriotism, or overwhelming and unfailing self-belief is going to change that?

Do you realise that despite your best intentions in 1999, this is still the Collingwood that has faltered cyclically in all the same ways?

The collection of everything that’s happened could cast the club into the sort of oblivion that Carlton’s endured since the fall of the John Elliott administration, or the purgatory Melbourne’s experienced since the sacking of Norm Smith.

I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t see that quick turnaround on the horizon.

I see the pain.

And lots of it.

Regards,

Les Zig.