Count me out
Published on 15 Jun 2011

If yesterday’s official announcement of Gordon McKie’s departure from Murrayfield was taken at face value, the situation would seem inexplicable.

This was a chief executive who was unanimously backed by his board, had the full support of his executive and was lauded, apparently unconditionally, by the organisation’s chairman, for the job he has done throughout the six years since he was appointed. Why on earth would anyone performing so well be forced from office?

The reality is, of course, very different. It is abundantly clear all was not well at board level, that McKie had been challenged by directors – in particular Ian McLauchlan, the president – and had been unhappy about that, responding in what he would no doubt describe as robust fashion.

Underlying that was deep concern within rugby about the direction in which the organisation has been going.

That has been the case for some time, which was largely why McLauchlan, himself a no-nonsense operator and one of Scotland’s greatest and most formidable rugby players, accepted the presidency a year ago.

It is now more than two years since that became evident, no more obviously than when McKie tried to prevent this correspondent from attending a press briefing at Murrayfield because Herald Sport had led the way in pointing towards the level of disquiet building within the sport about the way he was running things.

Yet that must also be placed in the context of recognising the exceptional job he did in the early part of his six-year tenure, bringing order to Scottish Rugby’s affairs at a time when spending was in danger of getting out of control.

Given the size of the asset that the Murrayfield estate represents, claims that the organisation was facing insolvency seem overly dramatic, but undoubtedly there was deep concern being registered by Scottish Rugby’s bankers about the rate at which its debts were increasing.

Setting aside just how much say the bank had in his appointment, McKie addressed that, making great play of how he had discovered that there were too many ledgers in operation and tightening up financial controls. His approach was very different to that of “Firework” Phil Anderton, his predecessor, whose brief time as head of the organisation followed on from his successful, but relatively free-spending, term as head of marketing. Where Anderton believed in speculating to accumulate, McKie seemed to see any spending on promotions and marketing as frivolous and even extravagant.

The books were balanced, which, in the short-term, was absolutely vital but, as he maintained his emphasis on that, so the feeling grew, a strength increasingly became a weakness.

In order to keep a firm grip on the profit-and-loss account, the answer always seemed to be to release assets, particularly in the form of leading players, rather than seek to generate extra revenue by upping excitement levels in what is, after all, the entertainment industry.

In business terms, it may have made sense to let the big earners leave and allow others to pick up most of their wage bill. However, as we have pointed out repeatedly throughout rugby’s professional era, the sports business is very different from others and requires a level of empathy with customers that Scottish Rugby has lost in recent years.

Rugby supporters did not want to be told that Scottish rugby was too small to compete but that, effectively, was the message when it came to the professional teams.

When he took office, one of the first major issues McKie had to address was the dreadful decision, driven through by Jim Telfer, the then director of rugby, to defy economic reason and re-establish a professional team in the Borders.

His decision to axe that team was accepted as a necessary evil by those who understood the reality of the market-place, but only on the basis of the accompanying promise that the funds and assets released would be used to help the remaining professional teams in Edinburgh and Glasgow become genuinely competitive. Instead, what has happened is that those teams are now operating at the same sort of competitive level as the Borders had reached when the team was closed down, becoming little more than development teams.

That has demoralised the rugby community to the extent that, even with the Scotland team having claimed some astonishing results in the past couple of seasons, not a single home Test match was sold out in the 2010/11 season.

Ironically, though, while lack of vision has been a major problem since that initial fine job on the finances, what ultimately seems to have accounted for a man who was eager to portray himself as a blunt-speaking, hard-headed businessman, is his apparent over-sensitivity.

On finding himself involved in a very different business to those he was used to – he had previously specialised in the short, sharp, shock treatment for troubled businesses – he at once enjoyed being in the public eye, but seemed to detest any sort of criticism.

As with the way that sports teams reflect their coaches so, it seems, Scottish Rugby took on those characteristics so that even constructive criticism was met with instant rebuttal rather than a preparedness to countenance an alternative view. As McLauchlan said yesterday, as unpleasant as it is to have to dispense with anyone’s services, the decision means Scottish Rugby plc is now, once again, open for business but, perhaps more importantly, also to marketing ideas.

McKie must not be treated as a scapegoat, though, and those taking over, both in the short and longer term, must also look closely at executives who have been guilty of the corporate equivalent of blind faith in supporting, apparently unquestioningly, their chief executive’s every move, while mindlessly attacking anyone who did not follow the party line.

This article was posted on 16-Jun-2011, 06:21 by Hugh Barrow.