Sport-business balancing act

Sports CEOs are a new breed born out of professionalism - and armchair experts can apply, reports JULIE MIDDLETON.

You know what really rankled Auckland Rugby Union chief David White after his top team crashed to fourth in the NPC?

Not so much that once-mighty Auckland were beaten by a bunch of gloating Cantabrians. It was that the loss was labelled by some as a sign that the whole organisation, which caters for about 18,000 registered rugby players, was failing.

Wrong, says White, a former New Zealand test cricketer with physical education and accounting qualifications who previously led a spectacular turnaround as head of the Wellington union.

"One of the biggest challenges," he says of his job, "is the perception that when the top team's losing, the organisation's not very successful".

White, reputedly a hard-nosed, hard worker, and in the Auckland hot seat since January, isn't the sighing - or snorting - type.

But his words sketch the special conundrum of the sports boss: democratic balance of grassroots effort from an army of volunteers with the profit demands of a sport which is more than the national religion. It has become very big money since rugby went professional in 1996.

White's Auckland provincial and Blues sides turn over about $13 million annually, and got a cash grant from the NZ union of $965,000 last year. Committees have given way to boards; rugby is, says White, "a commercial entity."

Professional sport has introduced us to player transfer fees, expensive season tickets, million-dollar broadcast rights stoushes to determine which Kiwis get to see big games live, stratospheric sponsorship deals and a whole lot of controversy over the amount stars are paid - and whether such money is any good for them or their game.

Kitchen table administration will always be the backbone of sports all over the country, but in those touched by professionalism - netball, cricket, rugby league and hockey among them - contracts rule and accountability is the new watchword, requiring increasingly sophisticated leadership and management skills.

Of course, sports administrators love the "instant credibility", proof of passion and understanding automatically conferred by having a fomer national darling in charge, says Auckland headhunter Robyn Redford, of Sheffield.

White was an opening batsman - he says, wryly, that the knockbacks incurred in such a role teaches the necessary resilience to be a CEO - and the new head of New Zealand Cricket is former international Martin Snedden.

Ramesh Patel has headed the New Zealand Hockey Federation for 12 years, and with Barry Maister, the secretary-general of our Olympic committee, was a member of New Zealand's gold medal-winning hockey team at the 1976 games.

Former under-21 international Shelley McMeeken leads Netball New Zealand.

They belong to the era, says Redford, when being a national rep was an amateur occupation - career training had to go alongside.

"Now a lot of the people who represent the country have great difficulty doing anything beyond the sport, because it is so demanding."

What does this mean? "There is still hope for the armchair sports expert - provided they are highly successful in general management."

Examples: Nick Hill, a former Fletcher Energy manager, has just taken over the body created by the amalgamation of the Hillary Commission and the Sports Foundation.

There's also Steve Tew, the recently appointed general manager of the New Zealand Rugby Union, who retired from club rugby with a broken back many moons ago.



In anticipation of the demand for top managers, courses in recreation management have burgeoned since the early 1990s.

Most are delivered by recreation or sports departments. Interestingly, only one of them - Massey University's sport business management degree - is part of a management faculty.

Tew was ahead of the game in the early 1980s when he followed a BA in geography and sociology with a masters degree in recreation administration at Victoria University.

Making business out of sport - he describes the game, incidentally, as "a product, a series of brands" - hasn't drained his motivation: "I have an in-bred passion for rugby."

But both he and White identify rapid waves of change in professional sport as major challenges for its leaders.

White: "You're dealing in a high-pressure environment.

"There are a lot of demands, you've got to be continually innovative and quite aggressive to stay at the top of the pack. Not a lot is left to luck, and there are high media and public expectations."

And public executions, if things run badly - everyone's a rugby expert, remarks White. A thick skin is a must - he and Tew both claim never to listen to talkback radio - as is media savvy.

White had been in his previous job as the Wellington Rugby Union's chief executive only three months when Roger Randle was accused of rape in Durban during a rugby tour four years ago.

"As a CEO, I'm mostly in the media when things go wrong. But you've got to deal with major issues.

"Because of my sport background I was not intimidated by it [the media barrage]. It doesn't worry me if I get bagged."

It's a constant balancing act."

Says Tew: "One of the things we've wrestled with at the board level is how do we define profitability?

"Making money, or do we define it by the number of people playing, an improvement in refereeing, having a team for other players to aspire to?"

White: "You've got to handle the whole sphere of people from volunteers at club level, who you've got to give the time of day to, through to irate fans, through to coaches who need a lot of support if things are not going well".

Needless to say, the hours can be long.

A certain sort of surrogate parenthood also comes with the job as player pay starts running in inverse proportion to age.

Both White and Tew oversee life skills training for their increasingly young professional players - employee assistance programmes writ very large indeed.

And the pace of change in sport will increasingly test bosses.

Overseas, sports clubs have floated on the stock market - English soccer club Tottenham Hotspur started the trend in 1983 - and France has recently passed legislation giving its professional sports clubs greater business freedom.

White, who reckons that the lifespan of a sports CEO is five to seven years, foresees a "global provincial rugby competition".

Players are increasingly challenging their own organisations, most recently in New Zealand last month when rugby player Paul Steinmetz accused his employer, the Wellington union, of breach of contract.

It's no surprise then, that encroachment of commerce and law - and greed? - into sport has been debated at the highest levels.

More than 200 people involved with European Olympic committees banded together in Brussels in February for the first European conference on sports governance.

In New Zealand, informal gatherings of sports body heads in the last few years have been fashioned into the information-sharing CEO Forum.

Its meeting in Palmerston North last month, says chair Ramesh Patel, attracted 37 heads of national sports bodies.

"We chew the fat over all sorts of things. Rather than react when things have happened, we want to make sure we anticipate them".