THE Capital Football Thread

Have you got a suggestion (other than you)...?

Is that one you started?

Take another angle. Keith has done a fantastic job building up equity and therefore creating a buffer for that inevitable day when the trusts decide to really cut back. And, maybe all these things Smithy mentioned are just Keith implementing policies, targets and budgets set by the Board, which is what any good CEO does. So should the boney finger be pointed higher up?  

Rightystr � can your first action be to reduce yellow/red card fines please. thanking you

I know a man who knows a man..

OK, here goes!

First of all, fair play to you all. You are absolutely entitled to share your opinions and it�s obvious that most people posting here actually do care about what�s happening in Wellington football.

I have no intention of just blindly defending the CF Board but I do think there�s a certain amount of mis-understanding and/or mis-information being thrown about here.

I got myself elected to the Board in April 2005 because I had a level of frustration about the way I perceived Capital Soccer (as it was then) to be run, but I didn�t want to just sit on the sidelines and keep sniping away (and yes, that is a hint!).

It was an interesting three and a half years and I�m glad I did it, but I also came to realise just how tough it really is to run an organisation like that, both strategically and operationally. Until you�ve actually sat there and tried to work through a lot of these issues it�s hard to understand just how difficult they are to resolve.

It is a very complex environment with multiple competing demands from stakeholders at all levels. You are dealing with clubs, players, coaches, referees, NZF, other federations, community trusts, city councils (CF deals with 4 big ones � Wellington, Hutt, Porirua, Kapiti plus another bunch over the hill in the Wairarapa), SPARC, other government agencies, sponsors, service providers, Team Wellington, the Phoenix, the list just goes on. A lot of the stakeholders are also unpaid volunteers, which means a lack of formality around a lot of the interaction plus often dealing with a high degree of emotion. Put another way, there is an awful lot of �churn� to deal with. People forget that something out of left-field like the near-financial collapse of NZF last year took a huge amount of effort from right across the country to put right, including a lot of time from CF�s own CEO and several of CF�s Board members.

There is a huge gap between the expectations of CF�s members and what can realistically be achieved with the resources available. This is exacerbated by the fact that although the clubs love to refer to themselves as a single entity when criticising CF in some way, in actual fact the clubs themselves don�t agree on very much. As soon as you pick below the surface on a range of issues you find very little consensus exists � which is OK but it means that often the best the Board can often hope for is to please some of the people some of the time. When you think about it that�s exactly what the Board is there to do but nobody thinks like that when the Board makes a decision they personally don�t agree with.

We also tend to think of the Board as some remote �Big Brother� type entity, squirreled away in some secret inner-sanctum making decisions. In actual fact it�s a bunch of well-meaning people like yourselves meeting once a month in a room above the Backbencher trying to do their best for the good of the game. Most Board members are still involved with their own clubs to some degree, also have full-time jobs and families, and somehow fit it all in. I liked all the Board members I dealt with and can genuinely say they were all there with the best of intentions.

The Board has also been set up as a consensus decision making model with 4 appointed members and 3 elected (plus some co-opted if required). The majority rules but for the most part the Board actually tries to make unanimous decisions and then take collective responsibility for them. Compromise is the key word and anybody coming in with a very specific personal agenda that they are not prepared to compromise around would probably get frustrated.

I'm not trying to make apologies on behalf of the Board or anything but just offer some insight into what it's actually like. In short, it is just bloody hard work. You go in with high expectations but they get re-set pretty quickly and if you come out having contributed to even a few concrete improvements you should probably feel satisfied. Despite that I would really encourage anybody on here who feels strongly about the issues facing CF and thinks they can make a difference to give it a go. It�s certainly a lot better that bitching from the sidelines.

By the way, I�ve deliberately focused on the role of Board because they really are the ones who are calling the shots. Discussion about the role of the CEO gets personal very quickly because it�s obvious who you�re talking about. Despite that I can honestly say that I think Keith Palmer has been great for football in Wellington. He is one of the hardest-working, most committed people I�ve ever met and the worst thing I can say about him is that he probably spread himself too thin and burnt himself out too quickly. I think it�s a real shame he�s moving on but he really has left the game here in better shape than it would have been without him.

Cheers,

Regan.

 PS. Sorry I have no idea why the font's so small and I don't seem able to fix it!