saints35 bulls0 wrote:
I applied to a commercial post being sought by Sporting Appointments about a year ago, for which I had all the relevant "job experience" they were asking for, but was told straight off that they dont put forward candidates to employers without relevant industry (i.e. sports) experience.
Like you say, they should be seeking candidates from outside the industry who can bring something new to the party.
I once worked in a sports council briefly (I was on my way out of the civil service and fancied a quick sojourn somewhere very different first). I was imediately aware that I had entered a very small, closed world. Nearly everybody in the sports councils, or indeed in the governing bodies I met, had started as a development officer, or national squad member of their particular sport. Then they moved up their sport's ladder, before jumping on what was effectively a merry-go-round of different sports at club and governing body level, where they just swapped places occasionally. For many of them, their only qualification for any job, whether it was marketing, youth development, high performance, facilities or whatever, was that they used to be handy with a bat or a ball or fairly fast. There were some people who were clearly just hobbyists - the sort of people you find on the committee of any amateur RL club, who were in full-time jobs running entire sports or clubs with multi-million pound budgets. It was astonishing to see.
I'm not saying that all these people were deadbeats, and that you can't possibly be a decent marketeer or chief exec if you only ever worked in sports admin, but it seemed a very shallow pool to be fishing in. Nevertheless, we do have to accept that most sports organisations have very limited budgets, and so they're always going to rely on trying to find the diamond who can do a good job and is willing to do so for not very much, rather than being able to shell out for the top professional with experience elsewhere.
Personally, I've always thought that something like marketing should be entirely outsourced to a marketing company who get paid by results. Give them a budget to work with, and they get a proportion of the gate fee for each fan over last year's average. That's focus their minds a bit.
We wouldn't get on Sky much though.
)
