Coaches & Jobs

What's it really like to be a professional football coach in Australia? Branko Culina and Ron Smith - dumped from their A-League clubs in the past fortnight - will argue it's a fraught existence. But the truth is, they were the lucky ones.

Lucky enough to be paid a decent living, lucky enough to have decent facilities and resources at hand, lucky enough to enjoy a profile in a competition where 10 cameras are pointed at every game.

Aside from the job as national coach, the A-League is the pinnacle of the coaching pyramid in Australia. It remains the only genuinely professional coaching environment here. Which is a pretty sad indictment. More than 30 years after the first coaching programs were put in place by Eric Worthington, a system which spits out thousands of graduates each year still has a fatal flaw. Where do they go?

Thankfully, hopefully, the governor of the game, Football Federation Australia, has finally recognised the obvious. The coaching "industry" is a charade. At best, there are 30-35 professional jobs, and that includes poorly paid ones in the state academy system. The recent explosion of private academies - some with dubious credentials and dubious practices - is a reaction to a lack of opportunity. Coaches who want to coach have to coach somewhere.

Last week, the FFA released its eagerly awaited national development plan, and in the detail was some exciting news for coaches. For the first time, the national body will provide a career path for those coaches who want to make a living from their trade. Taken in conjunction with the announcement that both a national youth league and women's national league will be put in place next year - competitions which will almost double the professional opportunities - and suddenly things are looking up for the long-suffering clipboard brigade.

Jean Paul de Marigny is a typical example of exactly what that suffering has entailed. A decorated player in the old NSL, and a former Socceroo, de Marigny retired from playing a decade ago, and has managed to eke out a living as coach ever since.

"That's my biggest achievement," he says. "Raising a family [he has three children] while staying in coaching � for me, I'm prepared to do anything to stay in the game. My philosophy has always been the same as when I was a player. Even when the environment is difficult, you never give it away. The passion overrides everything else."

De Marigny these days is head coach of the NSW Academy. He has had stints in the old NSL with Northern Spirit and Marconi Stallions, and a spell as assistant coach at Newcastle Jets in the first season in the A-League. He is suing the Jets for unfair dismissal.

Sometimes he's been well-paid, but mostly he hasn't. There have been times when he's relied heavily on the support of his wife, Donna, a part-time teacher.

When the money was especially tight, he'd wake up at 5am, drive for 40 minutes from his northern suburbs home to a western suburbs food dispatch company, cut carrots and pack tomatoes for eight hours, then continue to Bossley Park, where he coached several Marconi youth teams, before driving home and flopping into bed around 11pm. Long days, for little reward, and even less recognition.

De Marigny is by no means alone. Zlatko Nastevski came to Australia from his native Macedonia two decades ago and was a superstar in the old NSL, but that cachet hasn't translated into a coaching career. There have been brief spells in the state league with Marconi and Rockdale, but early this year he became yet another victim of the cutthroat merry-go-round. Nastevski is willing to work, and work hard, for an opportunity. But so is everyone else.

The reservoir of under-used, or unemployed, coaches in Australia is massive. The talent going to waste is a travesty. Nastevski, for example, works as a baggage handler at Sydney airport. Working alongside him are probably a dozen other would-be coaches with similar footballing pedigrees.

The FFA's new initiatives won't change things overnight. For a lot of people, they won't change anything at all. But they're a start, and - more importantly - recognition that while the world has been changed dramatically for Australian players in the past few decades, it has stood still for those who want to coach them.

Soon, the FFA will select a small group of candidates and "case manage" them through a career path which could begin with placements at well-run state league clubs, courses at overseas coaching institutes and perhaps as observers at major overseas clubs, and then jobs in the national youth league, women's league, A-League before the ultimate recognition of a place on the national team's staff. The end game is to develop a level of excellence in coaching that can take domestic football to a new level, and one day be good enough to take on the world. If Harry Kewell can play for Liverpool, who's to say an Australian can't one day occupy the hot seat at Anfield?

De Marigny, for one, believes the changes represent "a massive breakthrough". "It gives me a lot of heart, and definitely makes it much easier for me to sell it [coaching] to my family," he said.