Show Us Your Medals Blog

My piece on sport’s administration as published in last month’s Magill magazine…

Going down in a blaze of glory: why the cult of the administrator is ruining Irish sport

Night after night they sit in non-descript old rooms.  It’s a midweek night and while most people are at home watching the tv and relaxing, for these men and women it’s a thankless task that they approach with gusto and glee.  They attend committee meetings and pass motions following arcane procedures.  For some, they have to travel half way across their country and back again.  For others, the badge of honour is in the blazer they wear carrying a big and bold crest stating what organisation they are from.  These are our sports’ administrators.  A unique bunch of people who stay in the background, happy to spend their time taking minutes and pushing through agendas.  These are the power brokers running Irish sport but are they running it into the ground?

“You have well intentioned administrators” explains one Irish athlete on condition of annonymity, “but they are only there because of their enthusiasm and ability to attend enough meetings.  The culture of the volunteer is all pervasive and while it can be a strength to have that kind of commitment, it is a weakness too.”

Speaking to those involved in Irish sport at a high level, all insisted on condition of annonymity.  To publicly criticise is to put your grants cheque, or place on the team, in jeopardy.

The problem, as many see it, is that those in charge are not there because of skill, degrees, or training.  They are there simply by dint of perseverance, persistance or plain old nepotism.  Irish politics has nothing on Irish sport’s ability to appoint to high places those who have stuck around.  The cult of the blazer is alive and well.  For a glimpse into the old Ireland culture of who-you-know-not-what-you-know, then just peer through the windows of many Irish sporting organisations.

The problem, of course, is an age-old one.  That of officials v players, the owner v the workers and it is not just one that was confined to these shores.  The NFL Dallas Cownboys President, Tex Schramm, once infamously declared at a players meeting in the 1980s,
“If we tell you to play on concrete, you’ll play on it!  Your’re the cattle, we’re the ranchers.  And we can always get new cattle!”

In America, though, they have at least moved on from that mindset.  Player organisations have a determining say now in contract and rights negotiations and all but one (the NFL) of the player organisations are headed up by hired professional expertise.

All of that however, is a long way from Ireland’s situation which still maintains a cattle v rancher outlook in many places.

One Irish athlete remembers coldly when a new coach was being appointed to their elite squad and the athletes asked to be involved in the process to determine the capabilities of the man who would be their future coach.  The blazers were shocked at this notion crying out ‘you can’t have the students picking the teachers’.

“And yet,” continued the athlete “these people who were doing the interviewing had absolutely no experience of international sport!  The dogs on the street knew the man they were picking would be no good, and that is how it has turned out to be.”

When writing my first book on the demise of the League of Ireland- Who Stole Our Game? – I interviewed countless people who told me of their experiences and stories of dealing with the ‘administrators’. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Eamon Dunphy, who was involved in the League of Ireland in the 1970s and has observed those in charge of the game in this country for most of his life was most scathing of those in the  soccer corridors of power,

“There is a breed of person in it that is small town, county councillor, freebie, who contribute nothing and take as much as they can…They have never contributed to anything and don’t like big ideas and they don’t like independent minded people around because they upset the little cosy apple cart…They don’t like talented people.  They hate talented people.  They are repelled by talented people.”

Soccer, though, is not the only one to have a benign culture of the administrator v the player.  It transcends all sport.  In the GAA, the Gaelic Players’ Association (GPA) has only, in recent times, been recognised and accepted as the players’ voice by the GAA and even the furore surrounding the allocation of grants of just €2,500 to players has shown just how entrenched old style values are.

The recent Cork players strike was a very public example of the lack of respect and trust that exists between those playing on the pitch and those in the county board committee rooms.  Cork hurling captain, Sean Og O’hAilpin summed it up for Tom Humphries in an Irish Times interview in January when he made it clear who was to blame for the impasse,
“It would help a lot in the long term if Frank (Murphy) [Cork County Board Secretary] just stepped down and a new guy and a new regime stepped in because I don’t think he can get the trust of players back.

Why in Cork is it always the county board up here and the players down there? Why is it we can’t strike up a relationship with these people and move on? Since I came in as a young fella there has been distrust.”

Distrust and distance between athletes and their administrators is of course nothing new but as players dedicate more and more of their time and their life in pursuit of sporting excellence, they do not feel the same standards are being applied by the blazers.

“Ireland needs to look internationally” says one athlete “and base itself on the success of the UK and Australian models.”

When one points out that we now have an Irish Institute of Sport, the reaction is derisory and scornful,
“If the Irish Sports Council was doing its job properly there wouldn’t be a need for another sports body.  The Irish Sports Council has failed.   It hasn’t been able to gain control from the sporting bodies on the ground.  And now at the Institute they have handed over control to a former GAA man?

“Look, nothing against Sean Kelly, who is a decent guy, but what does he know about developing life systems for elite athletes?  Fair enough GAA players dedicate a lot of their time to their training but for international elite athletes at Olympic level you are talking about giving your whole life over.  Family, job, everything goes into your training.  What experience of that does he have?”

The problems within Irish sport do not just run between administrators and athletes however.  The recent and public row between the Irish Sports Council and the Olympic Council of Ireland brought inter-organisation politicking to the fore.  If they’re not rowing with their athletes, the blazers, it seems, are rowing amongst themselves.

The OCI’s President, Pat Hickey, recently criticised the ISC over preparation, funding and input,
“We think the programmes that the Sports Council has implemented are not what was required for Olympic preparation. We were not involved in it as we should have been. We are on good terms with the Sports Council and have gone to the meetings but we have had no say in the funding of the athletes or how the programmes were drawn up.”

John Treacey, OCI CEO, countered by saying,
“We’re not going off making unilateral decisions on our own, we’re working with the governing bodies of the sports and if Pat Hickey is criticising us, he’s also criticising the NGBs.”

Throw into the mix the Irish Institute of Sport, the multitude of individual sporting bodies and the government itself, and it’s apparent that, for the athletes, getting past the finishing the line is a world removed from the committee rooms that make the key decisions on athlete funding and coaching.

But it’s an Olympic year and everyone starts to get tetchy.  The government points to millions being invested in athletes every year but all the public sees every four years are honourable defeats.  Sonia O’Sullivans are aberrations of the system, not products of them, it seems.  For once though, instead the post-Olympic focus on the athletes, the analysis and critiques need to go higher up the food chain.

The blazers and committee men would do well to remember Theodore Roosevelt famous Citizenship in a Republic address at the University of Sorbonne in 1910,
“Woe to the empty phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him as he does the work!

“Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how sorry and contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the damage that he will do, if he does not himself, in his own life, strive measurably to realize the ideals that he preaches for others.”

“We have a duty of care to our athletes who are giving so much” says one observer intimate with the machinations of Irish sport “but we are not expecting enough and getting enough from our sports administrators.”

“These people are politicians first and administrators second.  It’s time to kill the sacred cows.  The time for diplomacy is gone.”

But with so many self interested parties at stake and with the athletes focused on their own training, who will come in and pick apart the unseemingly mess that now exists?  Where is the true man in the arena?