The toxic fallout from Alen Stajcic’s sacking gets worse for FFA
And we thought football had left all this behind. Three weeks after his sacking, the mess FFA made axing Alen Stajcic seems only to be getting worse for the game’s governing body, writes TOM SMITHIES.
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It’s a good thing that no one is conducting a “wellbeing audit” of Australian football fans at the moment, for the results would show a great swath of the population mired in the depths of despair.
Little more than 15 years after the reset of the game in Australia, the sacking of Matildas coach Alen Stajcic — and more particularly, its poisonous aftermath — is a 21st Century remix of some very old tunes, the soundtrack of a code tearing itself to pieces.
The brave new dawn for Australian football that was supposed to be ushered in by the end of the governance civil war has turned out to be a nightmare, and one from which there is no obvious exit.
Three weeks after his sacking — one that no one, least of all the man himself, saw coming — Stajcic ensured this sordid tale exploded once more with a detailed, emotional and at times forensic rebuttal of what he called the “innuendo” suffusing it all.
His contention was clear — he had suffered “termination without cause” and “no actions or behaviours of misconduct could be attributed to me”.
And therein lies why this story is continuing so explosively. Thanks to the ill-discipline of some in positions of authority, Stajcic had no choice but to push back hard against the conspiracy theories growing in the wake of what one director has euphemistically termed a “cultural reset”.
FFA had, Stajcic pointed out, made no claims of misconduct. But thanks to a combination of radio silence from the governing body since, and anything but silence from members of its board, his reputation is damaged by the absence of a clear, coherent narrative of what caused him to be sacked.
A well-informed figure drew a contrast with the way that one of Stajcic’s predecessors, Tom Sermanni, was himself sacked by the US Soccer Federation in 2015. Arguing simply that it wanted to take the team in a different direction, the USSF thanked him and paid him out.
Had FFA done similar, it’s questionable whether the reverberations would still be echoing, or with such toxicity.
The most frustrating part is the continued neglect of the A-League and W-League. As the A-League in particular atrophies, its crowds and TV ratings sinking, the one good-news story in the game has become the most toxic wound.
A Sam Kerr hat-trick in the W-League semi-final becomes an afterthought when the news pages are dominated by a sacked coach returning fire so spectacularly against his erstwhile employers.
Over in Westfield Tower, a certain Steven Lowy could be forgiven for muttering “I told you so” but even the former FFA chairman couldn’t have foreseen such an implosion when he walked away from the game three months ago.
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Originally published as The toxic fallout from Alen Stajcic’s sacking gets worse for FFA
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