Nathan Buckley contract: How Collingwood can solve drama over coach’s future
Nathan Buckley is out of contract at season’s end and it’s yet another distraction Collingwood doesn’t need — but there’s one simple solution to fix it.
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Rivals have long believed their competitive advantage over Collingwood is its ability to self-destruct due to the controversies and distractions that continually plague them.
Last year alone even before the disastrous trade period came Steele Sidebottom and Nathan Buckley’s COVID breaches, Jordan De Goey’s indecent assault charge and Heritier Lumumba’s sustained attacks on the club.
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Every club has its issues but rivals believe if they don’t beat the Pies they are every chance to beat themselves.
This year a club already attempting to prove to an irate fan base that its contentious trades of
Adam Treloar and Jaidyn Stephenson are justified has started the year on familiar ground.
Not only has its attempt to heal its rift with Lumumba through an independent review totally failed, it is about to run into yet another Nathan Buckley contract saga.
Thankfully for Eddie McGuire, he can sidestep a decision on Buckley in his final year given he will be departing at season’s end.
“We’ve got plenty of time on these things, there’s no rush,” McGuire said in January of the club’s senior coach.
It is inconceivable to think the Pies would make an early play to extend Buckley’s deal given the way the 2020 season came to a close.
An epic victory over injury-battered West Coast was followed by a 68-point demolition against Geelong then the trade period from hell in which Treloar maintained Buckley told him senior players wanted him gone.
The solution as Buckley embarks upon his 10th season of coaching seems clear.
A club with a significant messaging problem over its racism report and its trade period can clear up Buckley’s coaching contract with a simple change in coaching status.
Put Buckley on an employment contract that means he is simply the coach of Collingwood until he or the board decide it is time for either of the parties to move on.
The alternative is a familiar refrain: every Collingwood win or loss becoming a referendum on Buckley’s future at the Holden Centre.
For a club that came so close to a premiership in 2018 this is a season the Magpies must cash in on their window — they don’t need the distraction of endless questions about Buckley’s future.
Former Adelaide and Carlton chief executive Steven Trigg remains a fan of rolling employment contracts after putting Neil Craig and Brendon Bolton on those kind of deals.
He says they don’t guarantee tenure — Craig left the club in the year he went onto that kind of deal — but they take away a significant distraction for a club about its most valuable property.
“I think it makes perfect sense,” Trigg told the Herald Sun.
“The reason being is that when you are talking about executive roles the vast majority of executives in clubland are on rolling agreements with periods of notice. And you just treat your coach the same way.
“The accompanying thing for senior coaches, which drove me originally, is that the speculation about a coach’s contract being renewed or otherwise is now starting 12 to 18 months out.
“I think it’s nonsense, so a rolling agreement with a period of notice doesn’t have a public sunset on it that has to be debated.
It is always going to be a performance game and you live or die by that, but you take away the conjecture.
“Because it was new, I remember a couple of management types saying, ‘What protection does a coach have?’.
“But what do they have at the moment with what we are seeing across the industry?”
Collingwood will be bracing for the conga line of TV cameras approaching its players at the Holden Centre after losses, with Buckley’s future never far from sight.
Or in a year where almost none of its AFL stars come out of contract, it can make a mature decision on Buckley that ensures it minimises its chances of beating itself again.
Originally published as Nathan Buckley contract: How Collingwood can solve drama over coach’s future
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