Fred de Dong High Performance Manager

This seems like as good a time as any to ask why rowing NZ's budget is almost the same as the NZF's?  Is it government funding on the basis of our world class rowers? Surely it can't be sponsorship money? Do they run a people smuggling ring on the side or something?

Just out of curiousity, does anyone know what the NZRU's annual budget is?

I know this isn't directly related to this thread but it all ties into understanding how "high performance sport" is managed

Sorry JD, but you can't just compare headline numbers. Yes, Rowing and Football are comparable in terms of Total Revenue but in 2011 $6.4m of Rowing's $8.4m income came from Sport New Zealand specifically to fund their High Performance Programme!! (which cost $6.7m in total - those 3 gold medals basically cost $2m each*). By comparison NZ Football received $1.3m from Sport New Zealand for the same period.

Let's also not forget that Rowing nearly went bust after they lost $2m hosting the 2010 World Champs and had to bailed out by the Government.

So why can they do it and we can't? Easy, they are a minor world sport being almost completely funded by the government so that they can win medals to make us all feel good. Hardly a good case for comparison.

*and that's just the 2011 funding.

Rowing gets a lot of govt funding from high performance sport NZ - not 100% sure but it seems to be allocated generally on success or liklihood of success in winning elite international comps, incl. world champs, commonwealth games and olympics.  Raises interesting questions about how much we're willing to spend from our taxes to win gold medals.  

Personally I find it pretty intolerable that we can't get funding for kids to play football (or other sports) on a weekend because there aren't enough turfs because there isn't enough money but we fund amateur athletes to go around the world rowing but that's just me.

Anyway, a different discussion for another day.

I have a really simple way of measuring the way that NZF and the Phoenix operate.  What's best practice?  How close are we to best practice?  How close can we realistically get to best practice with the resources available?  

This appointment doesn't measure up to my criteria but that's just me.

TX are those enough "ironic" (air quotes) smileys for you?  Please note I'm being ironic (I'm not) - ooh the irony

JD - have you considered the possibility that this role might have been offered to other candidates who turned it down? If that were the case would it soften your view?

I still don't feel like I have anywhere near enough info about this to have an opinion on whether or not this was 'best practice'.

EDIT: It's a good point about the 'best practice' though because NZF were clearly trying to front foot that potential criticism with the little Q & A in their press release. One thing is for sure, it would not be recruitment best practice to release the names of the other candidates without their permission, or to say whether the job had been offered to other candidates first and their reasons for declining.

It would be good to know who was on the interview panel though (I'll assume the appointment decision was actually made by the Board itself). That would be info they could very easily release. I seem to recall that the interview process for at least one previous NZF Chief Executive involved someone from SPARC. That would have been a very sensible thing to do in this case.

For those interested, some observations about a similar role in English football from The Times:

We can be the best in the world. We can create a culture of excellence. We can be the envy of Germany and Spain and Australia. We can teach the world what it takes to build an elite sporting system, with outstanding coaches and world leaders in sports science and pioneering technical expertise backing up world-class athletes.

And, as the England footballers gathered yesterday, we could wonder just how hard it is to transfer a little of the brilliance of Britain’s Olympic campaign to our national team.

The answer, to be frank, is not promising. Football has as much in common with the Olympic disciplines as John Terry has with Katherine Grainger, though that will not (and should not) stop the FA trying to tap into the expertise.

It makes sense to speak to Dave Brailsford and Jürgen Gröbler about the creation of excellence in cycling and rowing. The FA would be negligent if it failed to dc so.

Now is the time to do it as the FA prepares to open St George’s Park (albeit a decade late) and to install a new technical director and perhaps a high-performance manager at that shiny new HQ. But much as football aches for its very own Brailsford, the man himself would probably run a million miles from such a vacancy.

He would not dream of taking a job which expects so much and yet imposes restrictions and compromises and politics.

Rightly, we laud Brailsford and his predecessor, Peter Keen, for their stunning success with British Cycling, but we need also to consider the circumstances they enjoyed: unprecedented funding flowing into the sport, a blank sheet of paper, the chance to be creative and, perhaps most importantly, autocracy.

When Keen began the cycling revolution, he knew a massive jolt was required. To show he meant business, he had the brainwave of changing the traditional red, white and blue colours of the national team to shocking lime. What better way to announce that nothing would ever be the same again.

Unsurprisingly, the idea caused outrage, but Keen laid down an ultimatum to his board: accept the lime green or he would walk. Green it was. Power had been established, and Keen could use it to overhaul coaching structures, replace staff and raise ambitions.

Now imagine the new technical director of the FA announcing that the England football team will play in pink polka dots to mark a shift from generations of penalty-missing, quarter-final peaking underachievers. Imagine the ease of ousting Stuart Pearce as under-21 manager, or other coaches of junior national sides, and finding top-quality replacements.

The technical director may have all sorts of clever ideas about tactical strategies, innovations in sports science and the technical development of Jack Wilshere and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. But, of course, they are not the FA’s players except for a few weeks of the year.

It has taken talented men to lift cycling and rowing and triathlon and gymnastics to a point where Britain takes on the world, but the circumstances are so different to football as to be incomparable.

There is no lack of money in English football but the idea of transforming a culture, as Keen achieved in cycling, or Gröbler in British rowing, is to bring up analogies of oil tankers. Football is not for turning. If it is, change is not about to be dictated by the man who is, nominally, at the top of the game.

The FA’s new technical director should be appointed within the next few weeks and we wait to see if, and how, he can set a new course.

But the scale of the job seems terrifying. At its simplest, the new man must “help raise the standards of both the elite and grassroots game in England” according to the FA’s job spec.

Responsibilities include all levels of coach education, the standard of junior football, the strategy of all England national teams, advancement of the women’s game and managing relationships with the professional clubs whose ability to bring through enough elite players will dictate his success.

It was probably best for everyone that Gareth Southgate walked away. The job requires someone of vision, political wiles, leadership and demonic single-mindedness if he is not to be side-tracked, and Southgate seems to have sensed that it was too big for him.

It is hard to think of too many Englishmen who could wrestle with the challenges, though Dan Ashworth’s work at West Bromwich Albion as director of football has made him an interesting contender.

Whoever takes the job, you can argue that there is no more critical task across all English sport than raising the standard of coaching in football. There is no greater national yearning than for England to develop enough players to form a world-class team.

Help can be found from our Olympic experts. The RFU has already taken the plunge by asking Keen to help with a review. But when Brailsford, Gröbler and Keen and Dave Reddin, another of the BOA’s performance team, are inevitably called by the FA to offer advice about how our footballers can succeed like the Olympians, they are likely to be as sympathetic as they are helpful.

It wasn’t the lime green shirt that made the difference to British cycling, it was the power to transform and influence. It will take a lot for English football to truly change its colours.

Great article JD - English football has been hamstrung for years by a lack of coaching talent and poor national structures. Need to completely overhaul the FA for a start and bring in people interested in innovation, not in just maintaining the status quo. Appointing a string of ineffectual local national team coaches - Keegan, Hoddle, McLaren (surely one of the most unqualified and inept in England football history - at least Graham Taylor had an impressive club CV) and relying mostly on foreigners over the last decade, points to the lack of English talent available.

Being of English and Dutch (working class) parentage, I'd point to the English class system as a real handicap compared to the greater social mobility on the continent. You don't find intelligent middleclass lads playing professional football or involved in coaching much in England, (or lads of working class origin who get an education) hence no equivalents of Arsene Wenger (economics degree, son of a businessman) or Oliver Bierhoff (Current German national team operations manager and PR man and former international who is the son of a millionaire industrial CEO and completed university business qualifications whilst playing). The Netherlands have a wealth of smart coaches and technical directors who are often middleclass figures like Louis van Gaal (former high school teacher) and the late Rinus Michels (FIFA Coach of the Twentieth Century and a former teacher).

"At first, I thought: What does this Frenchman know about football? He wears glasses and looks more like a schoolteacher. He's not going to be as good as George Graham. Does he even speak English properly?" -Arsenal captain Tony Adams. 

The Dutch have always taken the theoretical and organizational side of football seriously and have good coach-education structures. Not too many top English coaches could write a football coaching and team-building book like this, which I recommend. Have a browse of the contents of Rinus Michels' book here at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1890946737/ref=sib_dp_ptu#reader-link

Maybe Fred de Jong can tap into that a little.

By the way, Fred's family, who I know a little about, are another example of that continental social mobility, his younger brother Alex being a footballer - a NZ Universities rep - and top journalist. For those wondering what has happened to Alex after his entertaining stint on Nightline on TV 3 in the 90's, he's been living in London since 2000 and is a presenter on CNBC Europe "known for his love of crunchy peanut butter and sarcastic wit." He presents, amongst others, the show "Healthy Horizons" about business and health:

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=952003491&play=1

Maybe Sky TV have the wrong de Jong as a football commentator?

On the set of Businessweek Asia