KEY POINTS:
New Zealand Football chairman John Morris is set to join the exodus at his sport's headquarters.
Morris said yesterday that he was unlikely to stand for re-election.
His decision comes a couple of days after the national association's high performance manager, Rob Sherman, announced he was leaving and would return to Britain.
Already gone, in the wake of revelations late last year that the association was struggling financially - a situation Morris says has been turned around - are chief executive Graham Seatter, who finishes on Tuesday, his former deputy Mike Kernaghan (now boss of Badminton NZ), accounts clerk Paul Smith (now with Auckland Football), media/communications manager Kent Gray (now editor of Boating NZ), marketing manager Laurie McColl (now fulltime with the Under-17 Women's World Cup organisers) and business manager Peter Elderkin (resigned).
Former United Soccer 1 board member Paula Kearns has been employed part-time as chief executive.
Morris says he and deputy-chairman Frank van Hattum have taken a closer working relationship in the interim with van Hattum meeting remaining staff members one-on-one in an effort to put a proposed restructure in place. We are looking to turn things around. To do this we need an input from all those involved," said Morris. "We don't have a mortgage on wisdom."
Of suggestions a call had already been made on a new chief executive, Morris said they were negotiating with two recruitment agencies.
"We are determined there is absolute transparency in the process," said Morris, who will meet one of the proposed agencies this morning. "We will then have our regular Sunday night conference call with board members and put something in place. We will also be advertising for someone to take charge of football - along the lines of what Rob Sherman was doing."
Morris said he hoped Sherman's departure would be the last.
"We are not panicking but we all know we now have one chance to get it right. We know exactly what we have to do."
But he did say they would take a close look at the future staff makeup.
"Personnel is one of the major costs in any organisation," he said. "It wasn't that we weren't, as some have suggested, not taking a close interest in what was going on. We had a governance role to support the chief executive.
"If you ask me personally, as a pure model, it was not ideal."
The much-vaunted levy on senior players as proposed by Seatter will come into play next year.
"At the moment, the national body gets only $6 from each senior player. Simply by doubling that, through federation affiliation fees, we will double our income from that source to $1.2 million," said Morris, who speaks enthusiastically of the support from Sparc and its role in securing his sport's future.
Of his own role, Morris, who is also headmaster at Auckland Grammar School, said: "I have the inclination [to continue] but not the time. In the past four months we have set the organisation up to ensure the future of the game."
All but one board member is up for re-election/reappointment at the June 26 annual meeting.
