Geelong premiership coach Chris Scott has a winning percentage of 68.97 over 271 games. He is well respected by his peers. So he stunned audiences of Footy Classified midway through last year when he said, “Coaching is not a very good job.”

Scott wasn’t complaining. He was just stating a modern reality: that for all the great experiences, friendships, satisfaction, financial reward and perks that come with being a senior coach there is a downside.

Make no mistake. For their trouble, the AFL’s senior coaches earn anywhere from $400,000 to $1 million a year (before the pandemic forced the AFL to cap each club’s football department spending). And they have a decent break over summer. That’s good money in anyone’s language. Yet, as one club CEO confided, they deserve every cent because the unrelenting nature of the job can take people to some pretty dark places.

Most of the coaches hide any troubles. After all, no one is forcing them to work in a plum job inside a popular sport. They are competitors who are to some extent addicted to the game and the challenges it presents. They know there are plenty of genuinely tough gigs that people work in every day; and that every job comes with its negatives – although, when you hear that one coach’s wife stopped attending games because of the abuse she heard directed at her husband, you get a small hint that all is not as glamorous as it may appear.

So, what does the top coaching job involve in AFL? And why can coaches have a love-hate relationship with their job?

What’s the coach’s curse?

The strain of coaching has, for different reasons, affected big-name football figures from James Hird, Rhyce Shaw and Mark Thompson to Justin Leppitsch and Don Pyke – prompting four-time premiership coaching legend Alastair Clarkson to raise his concerns at the end of 2020. “We’ve always looked after everyone else in the club and put everyone else in the club before ourselves. It might be time for us to take stock ourselves of just what our workflow is and our schedule because it’s now getting to a point where we’re seeing some real casualties out of our industry,” Clarkson said.

One factor at play is that for all the pressure, the responsibility, the disappointment, the public scrutiny and the decisions they make, much of a coach’s fate is in the hands of others.

Leigh Matthews, who coached for 20 seasons and won four flags, describes the mental battle that comes with the job as “the coach’s curse”. “Everyone else thinks you are in control, but you know you are not as in control as everyone else thinks you are,” Matthews says.

The technical side of coaching must combine with the art of people management to create an environment for people to thrive – so long as luck doesn’t go against you.

The anguish we see on a coach’s face as players make mistakes – as they always do – reveals this inner turmoil. During matches, most coaches contort and twitch as they “compete” from a chair inside the coaches’ box while a camera trained on them throughout a match broadcasts their most emotional outbursts.

“It used to be the senior coach did 99 per cent of the coaching but now the senior coach delegates much of the coaching role,” Matthews says. “It’s very much a management role before you even get to the group of players.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, senior coach was a part-time job, with the main role being as a motivator and ra-ra speech maker. The idea of the “super coach” was instilled into a generation of supporters despite it being a fallacy that results were the work of one man. The assistant coach coached the seconds, the club doctor dropped in occasionally when on his rounds and the chairman of selectors was a sounding board. Players rocked up to training about 4pm and the odd footy journalist might head to training to chat to the coach.

Nowadays, the senior coach leads a coaching panel of six assistants and analysts, working hand-in-glove with the football manager in liaising with strength and conditioning staff, medical experts and media. Adding to the workload are increasing demands from sponsorship, membership and marketing departments to help drive revenue.

At the same time, the lack of traction doesn’t equate to diminished emotional investment. It certainly doesn’t alleviate the pain of defeat, says Matthews, who is a coaching legend but still lost 186 of the 461 games he coached. “No player ever feels as miserable after a losing game as the senior coach does,” he says.

Yet, as one long-serving senior coach, who prefers to remain anonymous, says, although all coaches find it hard to lose well, they can’t let results affect their performance. “It takes a lot of energy and concentration to make really good decisions at the time you are under an enormous amount of scrutiny,” he says.

“When you lose or if things aren’t going well it is just natural for the senior coach to take that reality on board more than anyone else. The hardest thing is to check yourself and not do a 70-hour week looking for answers.”

The board will determine how effective a coach’s performance has been across all of their portfolios – yet the main metric remains the win-loss ratio. Like any CEO position, success is measured by results, but the average business leader avoids being judged publicly each week.

“That’s the layer everyone talks about,” the senior coach says.

What makes a good coach today?

The best coach empathises with all those around them, listens well, communicates clearly and is calm under pressure, while also having the capacity to direct the playing group both through the week and spontaneously on match day.

North Melbourne coach David Noble sums up what attracts people to the gig.

“I love the contest, I love the planning, the strategy. I love the fact we are teaching guys to be better. I love working with our staff to make them better and better people as well,” he says.

The best coach can change when change is needed, and hold the line when maintenance is more important.

Richmond’s Damien Hardwick recognised at the end of 2016 he had to change. He went from being a hot-gospeller to a creative coach who had fun, even introducing the kid’s game of Connect Four to one of his pre-match addresses. Richmond won the 2017 flag as the team embraced a new attitude.

The best coaches are hard to find, and even they have many moments when they are far from their best. And, as always, the coach is the conduit between the club and the supporters. “Everyone craves time with the senior coach,” says former Adelaide coach Neil Craig.

Some crumble under the pressure, focus on the wrong things, call crisis meetings, lose confidence and eventually reveal that their time is up. Others keep perspective, analyse and recalibrate – regularly – to forge a long career.

“You have to be really clear what you are signing up for,” Craig says. “It is an elite leadership position. The chair you sit in is the most influential chair in the club.”

Craig has been a coach and coaching mentor since he stopped playing in the early ’90s. At the Crows, he coached Melbourne premiership coach Simon Goodwin for seven seasons. Goodwin cited him as the greatest influence on his approach to coaching.

Craig enjoyed the job and received good internal support when the losses mounted at the Crows before his departure near the end of 2011. But he has seen what the job can do to high-achieving, capable people.

“If you haven’t got a clear picture in your head of what that leadership role looks like for you and the responsibility that goes with it, that can be really difficult,” Craig says.

How do you stay a good coach under extreme pressure?

Goodwin took time to learn that relentless work wasn’t the only way to be a good coach. He admitted on an AFL Coaches’ Association podcast that he needed to change his outlook around 2019 to survive in the job as his self-esteem and self-confidence took a beating when the team finished 17th after reaching the preliminary final in 2018.

“I had to build a skill set away from footy that would enable me to handle the stresses and enjoy the game,” he says.

He began to worry less about what he imagined were the perceptions about him and redirected his energy to the players and staff and his love of the game. A retreat he went on that focused on his diet and yoga became part of the package. Other coaches escape to quiet properties away from the club. The stayers find an outlet away from football.

Such tools came in handy for Goodwin when he hit the front and back pages of the paper after conversations during board meetings, held the previous summer to discuss his behaviour inside and outside the club, made the public domain; he also had experienced people working alongside him, such as former senior coaches Alan Richardson and Mark Williams, and a president – Kate Roffey – who backed him.

“There are times when things can get out of order and [the club] must come out with a strong statement,” Craig says.

Why is coaching so tough on personal lives?

Football can easily take over a coach’s life, especially during the season. Everyone wants a piece of a coach’s time. Mistakes can be magnified as any sign of weakness is pounced on. This can leave little time for relationships at home. In the past two years, the marriages of Goodwin, Hardwick and former Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley have ended. It’s a miracle that more don’t. And friendships falter too, both inside and outside the club.

Alistair Nicholson, the CEO of the AFL Coaches Association, steers away from commenting on individuals but says the industry should be concerned about what the job demands of some of its best and brightest people. “It’s a challenging role that has got even more challenging with the demands of a modern football program where you need to build culture, relationships and that takes a lot of time with players and football department staff,” says Nicholson. “It is then hard to make sure you have enough time for your own family and the people important to you. The coaches tell me it is significantly harder than it used to be because of the demands that are not just about coaching the team on a Saturday afternoon.”

Buckley admits he is yet to break bread with former Collingwood star Adam Treloar after the midfielder was traded to the Western Bulldogs on his watch; while coaches have conceded that old friendships can slip. And one former coach said he had an agreement with his wife that he would be at a social event if he could; otherwise, she accepted that he would be, invariably, working.

Buckley’s reflections on his time in the job at Collingwood point to the potential price an individual can pay if they prioritise the wrong thing. “The hardest thing going into senior coaching was how time-poor you felt, how big the job is and how many people there were to connect with, and where you allocated your attention at different times,” Buckley says. “That always impacts on relationships because if you spend too much time somewhere and not as a priority over another area, that may or may not be the right allocation … sometimes that can cause friction and things can be going south and you are not even aware of it.”

What might improve things for coaches?

The challenges of prioritising is one reason why Craig says people must continue to ask what the club is doing to support the senior coach. He says any perceptions that a senior coach doesn’t also need help and a sounding board are misguided.

“People say it is a lonely position. It is if you want it to be,” Craig says.

Craig applauds St Kilda’s move to have former soccer coach Ernie Merrick brought in to help Saints coach Brett Ratten and his assistants perform at an optimum level, with Merrick taking a big-picture view of the dynamics among coaches and players and noting any trends in behaviour that may ultimately have a negative impact on their coaching.

“Coaches make decisions that impact such a large group of people and try to adjust to all of the individual things going on in [those people’s] lives, and you tend to take a lot of that on,” a club CEO says. “You need a good football manager, good welfare person, good doctor, good high-performance professional, good senior assistant where you can share some of that [burden], but it doesn’t take away from the intensity and individual responsibility that sits with the senior coach. All the probing about your club ends up falling back to you [the senior coach].”

Football’s culture doesn’t allow relative success – or winning more than half the games – to be celebrated as some other sports do.

Goodwin says it’s a myth that the coach is responsible for everything, good and bad. “You need a lot of good people in your footy department to have success. The senior coach is a piece of that puzzle but not everything.”

One of the issues coaches face is that as the gap between what is happening on the ground and the average supporter’s understanding of the game grows wider, the ability to assess a coach’s performance becomes clouded, if not impossible.

Wanting to protect intellectual property and the reputation of their players, the coach often has to take the blows without responding to criticism, whether the “helpful” advice is warranted or not.

That’s hard at times. At the Cats’ annual general meeting in 2017, a supporter questioned Scott’s ability in the coach’s box, asking whether he had a plan B. The exasperated coach, who had a winning record above 70 per cent at the time, described the scenarios as “unsophisticated cliches”.

It probably wasn’t the response the marketing team had in mind from a coach who other coaches say is one of the toughest people in the game to coach against.

An incredulous opposition coach just shook his head at the end of last season when contemplating the criticism directed Scott’s way, despite Scott’s constant success, knowing it’s a fate that falls upon all coaches near the top of the ladder whose teams just fall short. Football’s culture doesn’t allow relative success – or winning more than half the games – to be celebrated as some other sports do.

Win or lose, it has become apparent that senior coaches aren’t infallible. Craig believes passionately that clubs need to be asked what they are doing to support their senior coach. “And not just an extended holiday but daily support,” he adds.

No-one should be afraid to put up their hand to seek advice, listen to mentors, take stock or take a break to regroup, says Nicholson. “We have got to make sure we are looking after these people. These guys who are good at it are not everywhere.”