Own goal: Demise of Stajcic in league all alone
An influential group of women decided that ex-Matildas coach Alen Stajcic had to go.
When the Matildas walk into the Stade du Hainaut in northern France on Sunday night to begin their World Cup campaign, the coach who got them there will be on the other side of the Atlantic, holidaying with his family.
Five months after Alen Stajcic was dramatically sacked, no plausible explanation has been given for why a successful coach and team were wrenched apart in the lead-up to soccer’s most important tournament. The closest thing we had — intimations of serious misconduct by the coach — was last week recanted by the Football Federation Australia board and the director who made them.
From the fog of this sports scandal, a complex and bitterly contested narrative has emerged.
It is clear that an influential group of women in soccer formed a view long ago that Stajcic was the wrong coach for the Matildas.
His management style rankled them and his short temper was viewed as a problem. His greater crime, at least in the eyes of some, was to be a man in charge of Australia’s most celebrated women’s team.
Danielle Brogan, a former Matilda who first played under Stajcic when she was 14 and describes him as a father figure, believes a destructive, gender-based campaign was at play.
“I think from day one people didn’t want him there,’’ Brogan told The Weekend Australian.
“There are advocates who want their own type of person being the coach and I think they want a female. That is what the push is for. Definitely not an opinionated male like him.’’
Yet, for all this, Stajcic was also the architect of his demise.
He took the Matildas to unprecedented heights: the quarter-finals of the last World Cup, victory against the mighty US, the top four of world’s soccer rankings. But for the past year, the Matildas have been on the slide.
What began with a series of scrappy matches at last year’s Asian Cup culminated in a meek loss to Chile on home soil in November. Sharp-eyed observers saw a tired coach devoid of new ideas and resorting to the same, proven players. Those inside the camp were confronting an increasingly thin-skinned coach unable to accept criticism.
In confidential interviews with FFA officials, senior staff and experienced players spoke of Stajcic referring to his female detractors as the “lesbian mafia”. Stajcic denies using the homophobic slur.
Stajcic’s downfall can be traced to August 1, 2018. It was then, on the 22nd floor of the FFA’s Oxford Street headquarters in Sydney’s Darlinghurst, that the members of the Women’s Football Committee gathered in the boardroom for a regular meeting. The group included figures from inside and outside soccer: FFA directors Chris Nikou and Danny Moulis, the long-serving head of women’s football Emma Highwood, former Matildas player turned FFA general manager Sarah Walsh, Facebook executive Mia Garlick and Heather Reid, a pioneering woman in soccer administration and a prominent advocate and mentor for women in sport.
It was Reid, since elected to the FFA board, who issued an extraordinary apology to Stajcic last Friday for telling journalists, in the immediate aftermath of Stajcic’s sacking, that if the truth were known about him he would never work in women’s soccer again. The FFA, as part of a legal settlement with the coach, issued a parallel statement saying there was no misconduct on his part.
The items set out for discussion at the April 2018 meeting were unremarkable. It quickly became evident that something much bigger was on the menu. “The knives were out,’’ a witness to the meeting told The Weekend Australian. “It was quite obvious.’’
According to a witness account, the off-piste discussion became a verbal lynching of Stajcic. A crisis had developed within the Matildas and something needed to be done to avert a looming public relations disaster.
Some members of the committee were taken aback; both at the matters being raised and how targeted the discussion became. One committee member took his concerns to FFA chief executive David Gallop. He also passed on a fateful message to Stajcic; they’re out to get you. Stajcic needed no convincing.
Coaching the Matildas is insecure employment. Stajcic’s predecessor, Hesterine de Reus, lasted 15 months before she was dumped on the eve of the 2015 World Cup. An experienced, Dutch-born coach who’d previously led Jordan’s national women’s team, she was effectively voted off the island by players frustrated by her strict regimen.
By the middle of 2018, there was fresh unease within the Matildas.
One of the thornier issues was tensions between Stajcic and some of his players over how to manage the balance between high-performance sport and sexual politics. Some players didn’t see why teammates sharing a bed should disrupt team harmony on the pitch. The coach took a different view. Some parents of some younger players raised separate concerns about senior teammates making sexual advances towards them.
“We are talking about personal relationships and predilections inside the Matildas squad being thought to distract from performance,’’ an FFA insider said. “Alen was trying to enforce a soccer regime and was being railroaded by a more powerful group who saw it as against their interests.’’
Whatever the cause, a once-strong, winning team culture was starting to rupture amid reports of ill-disciplined conduct by coaches, staff and players alike.
Concerns from inside the Matildas camp were echoed by former players and other leading women in the game. Reid, Highwood, Walsh and Moya Dodd, an FIFA executive and former FFA director who’d backed the appointment of De Reus were troubled by things they were hearing.
In response to the August meeting, the FFA fast-tracked a wellbeing audit of the Matildas previously commissioned at the suggestion of the players union, Professional Footballers Australia. Our Watch, an organisation established to reduce violence against women, had been commissioned before the August meeting to conduct a separate, cultural review.
Neither of these reviews was originally commissioned to deliver a judgment on Stajcic but their twin findings exposed a World Cup campaign in trouble. Stajcic’s blunt response to the survey results sealed his fate. He told Gallop the Matildas were a dysfunctional and “cancerous’’ environment and had always been so. The question left hanging was how the coach had allowed it to happen under his watch.
That night, the newly elected FFA board met and decided to sack him with immediate effect and pay out his contract.
The findings of the wellbeing survey, as reported by the ABC’s Tracey Holmes, were damning. The ABC reported that only 20 per cent of anonymous respondents to the survey felt the team environment was helping them become better players and people. Some said they were too fearful to speak up about problems and were riddled with stress.
The methodology behind the survey was contentious. Originally, the sample was intended to be the 20 Matildas players in camp for two matches against Chile. Instead the PFA decided to expand the sample size to 32 current and former players. This fuelled suspicion by Stajcic and his supporters that powerful forces were out to get him.
Had he accepted the survey findings he may have survived. Prior to the January board meeting, the FFA arranged for the Australian Institute of Sport to run a two-day workshop to help resolve issues between Stajcic and his players.
Instead, that meeting became a wake. The team’s captain and best player, Samantha Kerr, declared she was shocked and upset by the decision. Others were in tears at hearing the news.
The Matildas are now in the hands of interim coach Ante Milicic, a well-regarded and experienced assistant coach who has never been in charge of a women’s team. If gender politics drove the push to replace Stajcic, they will roar to life after the World Cup, when the FFA appoints its next full-time coach.
The notion of Stajcic being torn down by women in soccer sits at odds with a sport that is governed overwhelmingly by men. As one female administrator put it: “I don’t know of any coach who has been fired from women’s football for being a man. That is just not a thing. Women just don’t have that much power in sporting organisations.’’
The treatment of Stajcic has nonetheless appalled former Matildas like Brogan and Catherine Cannuli, who has known Stajcic since she was nine or 10 years old. She says the game deserves a proper explanation. “I think everything needs to be laid out on the table,’’ she said. “As a football person and a football lover I would love for us to get everything out in the open.’’
Cannuli said the Matildas preparing to play against Italy would be as confused as anyone about why their coach is in the US with his family, instead of on the sidelines urging them on.
She said: “None of those girls would know exactly what has gone on and what the true reasoning is behind Alen’s removal. Now with the public apology, I’m sure a lot of those girls have got a different opinion to what has happened.’’
Brogan played in the first team Stajcic coached, the NSW Sapphires in the old National Soccer League. She says for all the progress in women’s soccer, some things haven’t changed. “He pushed the boundaries and some people didn’t like it. I think it was gender-based as well. But he was only ever fighting to get us more.’’
This time, Stajcic picked a fight he could only ever lose. Whether the FFA decision to dump him was a grand folly or necessary in the circumstances, the next four weeks will decide.