Dismissing Meritocracy

 Dismissing Meritocracy

I recently needed to spend a protracted length of time in Ireland and those damn algorithms got me - my social media feeds were hijacked and consequently, any number Irish related content screamed at me from my social media accounts. Although annoying, one highlighted film did catch my eye. It was a panel discussion from a Soccer match where a famous Irish player was asked about his experiences with various Irish managers in his time playing for the nation. He said that his first manager was a world cup winner, the second was an Irish international and the final one was a guy who was appointed due to his success as a coach at national level. When asked about the last manager, he said that when he spoke to the team for the first time, this player said to himself, ‘Who are you to be telling me anything? What have you ever done in the game?’.

Now, if you were a reader of my last article on diverse thinking, this comment should come as no surprise to you. In fact, it lays the ground for the recent managerial appointments of England’s ‘Golden Generation’ of football players Frank Lampard, Wayne Rooney and Stephen Gerrard. All of whom had massive name recognition and were appointed to clubs where owners felt their players needed the inspiration of a former high profile player as their new manager – in truth that’s what those clubs may have wanted but it was not what they needed. With various degrees of success (or not) each fell dramatically at their first hurdle as being famous just isn’t enough.

I remember a question asked of comedian Paddy McGuiness who was once only known for acting in a comedy TV show but was just about to embark on stand-up comedy tour. He was asked how long would an audience give him before they realised whether he was funny or not? His answer ‘Five Minutes? If I cannot show them that I have a grip of this job, they will boo my ass out the building as being famous isn’t enough’

Fame only buys you five minutes then….so explain Pep Guardiola?

That’s a very good shout. Guardiola is a world class manager with huge success as a player and now as a coach. But let’s dig a little deeper here. He didn’t just retire and then become a huge superstar manager. He learned his craft at the Barcelona Academy and showed enough potential in that role that he was given the senior head coach position at the club because he was also an icon at the club from his playing days. Would he have been given the big gig if he was just a brilliant academy coach? Possibly not but Guardiola took his chanced superbly and has grown into the significant figure he is today. However, there is something else to consider about Guardiola….

If you watch the streaming series about Manchester City’s triple winning season, you see the carefully crafted ‘behind-the-scenes’ experiences of the players and its entertaining enough but in many ways, it is not really that revealing about what they do. What stood out for me upon reflection was how much we see of Pep coaching in the series but little of the other six or seven coaches that are his assistants. At no stage do we see what they do, but a little research would show you that his closest aides are all former managers themselves with huge experience of coaching but not necessarily carrying the high-profile successes that Pep has had. These coaches are trusted confidants and hugely talented in their own right and I would suggest that Pep doesn’t do ALL of the coaching himself. So maybe his greatest strength is really as a leader who knows when to delegate and he does so to some very fine people indeed.

Similarly, if you look at Jurgen Klopp’s coaching team. Once he had decided he was leaving Liverpool, what happened to a lot of his coaching staff? Many were offered managerial roles, and some may well be very successful but you would be hard pushed to name them right now off the top of your head …. maybe Pep Ljinders would be well known thanks to his recent book but otherwise, fairly anonymous really. Do differing voices behind the scenes reveal a template for future success? Not guaranteed ……but maybe….

Now of course, Rugby wouldn’t be involved in this nonsense as the players would want to be successful and wouldn’t be so venal as to simply want to be coached by someone who used to be a famous player, would they? Well, a few years ago, I had a chance meeting with two Premiership players and I asked how the season was going. They said they liked the ex-pro player that as part of the coaching team but the lead guy they didn’t like so much as he was old and didn’t really think he offered anything. I will stop there as I don’t want to reveal the club or the coach as it would be unfair to all but I assure you, if I did name the coach they were talking about, rugby coaches reading this would go ‘WHAT!!!”.

Rugby is beginning to buy into the football world view and as I referred to in my last article, there is a separate ‘professionals only’ coaching course from which future coaching appointments at high level clubs are being made or endorsed. You can see the problem for Governing Body’s as they have to maintain a balance between the needs of the game as a whole and the demands of the elite few whose efforts fund the entire game through international ticket sales.

So, the question to ask is how did we get to this point ?

It’s because we never really embraced real merit as a true path to finding out who our elite coaches are.

(For reference – World Rugby supports 4 Levels of coaching qualification but each country has different names for them. I just refer to them as ‘Levels’ to encourage relatability across nations)

Since I became a coach in 1991 (yeah, I know) it was always clear that there were issues and hurdles for those who didn’t fit a certain mould. I did my very first coaching course in the RAF and right from the off, I found it strange that some people were already part of coaching RAF sides without a qualification and were asked to do the course by some anonymous hierarchal figure. That being highlighted, we were all there for the very best of reasons - we wanted to learn how to complete the role of coach. You could tell it was a military course as the first lesson of Day 1 was everyone had to ten laps of the field as a warmup. Why we were asked do those ten laps is a insightful story for another day but the course itself was a week-long, ten-hour days with homework and a one-hour assessment at the end of the week. The rigour of that course was extraordinary – it was a basic level 1 course – but the thing I remember from it was regardless of rank (I was the lowest rank by a mile) only our rugby knowledge and how that was expressed determined whether you passed or not. Your past playing career only helped you if you could remember a session you took part in. Other than that, it was your coaching demeanour and flow of your session that decided whether you attained the award or not.

My level 2 was also completed in the RAF but external assessors were brought in at the end of the week but the intensity of this course was even more harrowing than the Level 1…as it should be. This was a major step up in attendee experiences and the level of analysis was such that the RFU developers took our final presentations back to Twickenham with them.

My first experience of a third level was in Scotland and took three years to qualify where you had to attend a weekend in June and you had to show a journal of what you were coaching, where you were coaching and in breakout groups, you had to ‘show your workings’ to people like Jim Telfer. There was no formal examination as such, but you were pushed in small groups with elite coaches hitting you with everything to judge whether you had the ‘right stuff’ to be a senior coach.

So why do I bring this up? Well, for the most part the ‘diversity’ on these courses only came from where the attendees lived. We were all white and we were all male. Now that’s not a shot at coaching generally because for the most part, rugby back then was mostly white and male. Very few B.A.M.E. / P.O.C. / Women in comparison to white men were participating in the game as players and even fewer were coaches and referees. I should make the reader aware however that the RAF of the 1990s was a very different world to the RAF of today. There was no women’s rugby in the service, being gay was a disciplinary offence resulting in immediate discharge and women had to leave the service if they became pregnant up to the mid-1990s. So, this gives you an insight as to why we were mostly male…. the white bit is a longer discussion.

In 2005, I was offered the opportunity to be a hidden candidate on a USA Level 3 course. The differences here were stark from my experiences here in the UK. The room was full of diverse rugby coaches. Women made up a ¼ of the room and we even moved a bed into the classroom for one woman as she was nine months pregnant with her husband on standby in case she went into labour.

In the time I have been accredited, more and more diverse coaches have entered rugby, but the sport now seems to have broken into a faction war with each part feeling their view is valid and I know the use of the word ‘faction’ is strong, but it is an accurate one when you look at a modern rugby landscape. Today, we still still have a majority of white male coaches, but we now have vocal groups demanding more of something or other.

Some of the groups demanding time at the front of the queue when it comes to development are

-       coaches who used to be pro-players,

-       female coaches who are new to the game,

-       amateur players (male and female) who become coaches,

-       grass roots adult coaches with high qualifications looking for employed roles,

-       championship level coaches,

-       Male and female coaches who used to be international players,

-       age grade coaches and

-       senior coaches at amateur level

All seem to have created factions looking out for their own needs as they feel they are not being catered for in a manner where their personal development to attain opportunities are being lost behind a NGB approach aimed at making you great at the role you CURRENTLY have but not offering any preparation for a role you could possibly get if true meritocracy was in place.

Nationalised future planning seems to be missing.

All of which makes me wistful for a time when we just had coaches but maybe there was never a time when there were such things as generic rugby coaches?

Sure, there were political appointees to roles even when I started but it seems that appointments in both the male and female game today, at professional and amateur levels, is rife with sinister commentary based on how that person got the job and just as importantly, why they got the job. Ex-pro players insist that the game is now so complex that only those with professional playing experience can coach at the highest level, but no one ever asks why when ex-pro athletes drop down to coach youth, they are the accepted without question when teaching is one of the most consequential roles in society. There is an emerging debate that all head coaches of women’s teams should be women which sounds very progressive and a worthy goal but when presented with a scenario that only men should coach men…. heads suddenly bow.

Nuance and meaningful debate seemingly lost forever.

Without true meritocratic and transparent systems of coach development and the opportunities that comes with that greater insight, we have created a divisiveness where we seem to be building walls around our own opportunities and not exposing ourselves to the difficulties or ambitions of other groups. ‘Old school tie’ and ‘jobs for the boys’ were never positive terms to describe how roles were attained (and in some cases, can still be seen) but society just laughed off any concerns as being part of the world we lived in, and merit took a back seat to ‘who you know’ as opposed to ‘what you know’. It’s an infection that plagues rugby today and it’s the main reason why rugby vacancies are often filled by nice people we know as opposed to superb people we don’t.  

Recently, Stephen Fry, who is politically left of centre shared a stage with Jordan Petersen, a man who is right of centre. They weren’t debating each other as one might expect but rather, they were actually on the same side debating a couple who were praising the merits of political correctness. The debate is online and it’s a fascinating watch but as part of his summation, Fry said something so brilliant that it stopped me in my tracks and inspired this article.

‘When did we become so certain that our point of view was correct?’

He went on to stress that the issues we face as a world, is now entrenched in one where our view is irrefutable and that anyone who has a thought that challenges that view isn’t seen as someone, we should debate but instead, they must be seen as the enemy.

How many times have you heard the phrase ‘Dissent isn’t disloyalty’. Applies to many things and that includes rugby.

Ted Lasso also said something similar in his famous darts game with Rupert when he said ‘Be curious not judgemental’. The crazy truth behind that quote is that Walt Whitman never said this, in fact no one did which has led to an interesting debate online as to whether the writers of the show put that in to see who would believe that the quote was real. Many of you know the clip from the Apple TV+ show I refer to and enjoyed the scene but knowing that this quote isn’t true may bring you down a little….it shouldn’t because I thought it was real too. I’m better for knowing that my original thought was wrong and I am better for my knowledge being challenged as I now know to be more careful in the future.

‘The problem with finding quotes on the internet is that they are often misattributed’

Abraham Lincoln

Trying to make a living as a coach within rugby today is exhausting unless you have a significant leg up the ladder to where living wages can be earned but its where we are now in the game. If we had tried to introduce a generally agreed meritocratic system many years ago, maybe we would have more female coaches, more black coaches, more gay coaches, more coaches that never played professionally working at the highest levels of the game but we now don’t believe that meritocracy is a good way to run a rugby program. There are even groups in society who can be dismissive of the role of the coach in the first place and what skills they can bring to the game.

Just being a highly qualified coach isn’t enough anymore as we have Level 2 coaches coming out of universities now with all the underpinning academic knowledge to back up their (limited) coaching footprints. Of course, experience counts when hiring a 21-year-old who may not know anything about professional rugby but when that graduate turns 31 or 41, what coaching knowledge do they now possess allied to their academic knowledge?

Still not worthy of consideration?

As I write this, England football have just lost the final of EURO 2024 but before the website is changed, it would be worth checking out the backroom staff of Southgate’s program. They have reached the final of two Euros and a World Cup Semi Final with a coaching group that aren’t all made of ex-professional players. Many of them worked their way up through the game through academies and lower roles at senior levels to a point where their expertise was enough to suggest that maybe they had something to bring to a national program. Southgate (and the FA) deserve credit for this and despite the frustration about playing styles or on-field personnel that are being debated ad infinitum on any number of media outlets this week, his legacy is one that any following manager will be hard to match. He saw a problem and found an expert to solve it…. not just a mate he knew.

When things go wrong at rugby clubs, who do they call in? Not another rugby coach (unless they sack the one they’ve got that is) but rather management experts, you know, the ones with degrees. Imagine if they already had those in-house prior to any issues occurring. I am not naïve to suggest there will not be issues regardless of in-house expertise, groupthink happens in the best of organisations, but maybe how to solve them and deal with their repercussions wouldn’t be a dramatic as having to sack the coaching staff and start again if we had people the head coach could turn around to who had experiences other than they once wore a pair of boots for a living.

The IP of modern professional players is extraordinary, and it would be insane of any organisation not to use that to enhance the knowledge of the next generation of player. Sadly, I suspect we are creating a generation of elite peer mentors and maybe, that’s enough for the top end of the game who would rather accept those who ‘know the club’ while they learn to be a coach ‘on the job’. If it is acceptable to learn on the job while getting significant wages, then so be it.

Then it must be reflective of the hiring practices of other multimillion pound business organisations – is it?

Every time we hired a mate,

every time we picked someone because they went to the right school

every time we chose a candidate because they were famous,

we brought frustration and anger on ourselves as a sport.

We ignored opportunities to celebrate the intelligence and talents of the people around us letting our worst angels shape society in an image that selfishly helped us at the time but has in truth, created a world where factions now exist to stultify diverse, creative and enigmatic thoughts.

But maybe the issue is the word ‘meritocracy’. I have used the word several times throughout this article but maybe the word itself is the problem. Maybe merit based promotion and opportunities are too old fashioned a way to describe modern working practices.

Does meritocracy bring with it a whole raft of other problems?

Someone should write an article on that…...