Today is a day of reckoning for today was the day on which the much-awaited Muir Report was finally released to the public. At 1330 hours, specifically. It arrived on NZ Football’s website with a headline reading: ‘NZF apologises to Football Ferns’, and as far as the organisation in question went, things only got darker from there.

The Muir Report, named after ‘leading employment lawyer’ Phillipa Muir who conducted the whole thing (quite excellently too, might I add), is the investigation commissioned by NZ Football to dig into the situation that came to light after 13 different complaints were made by players in the women’s national team about head coach Andreas Heraf. Of course, in looking into what Heraf did wrong (and there was plenty) the report very quickly gets into the various ways in which NZF itself bears immense responsibility and blame for everything that happened there. They didn’t just drop the ball, they weren’t even looking when the shot came in. They might not have even realised they were playing. They damn sure didn’t have their gloves on.

It was long suspected that Andreas Heraf had gotten the job under slimy circumstances. Andy Martin looking to cut costs by hiring his own Technical Director even though FIFA guidelines say the two roles are discordant. We now know that those suspicions were 100% accurate. Heraf applied for the gig after a trio of players suggested he give it a go – whoops – and that was pretty much it. Not sure if this happened before or after the Thailand tour but the 5-0 win in the second game there certainly gave a bit of enthusiasm to the idea from this end. You can understand why a few players might’ve been invigorated too. What followed was an unmitigated disaster but you can’t blame those players for NZ Football’s uselessness. Three causal recommendations on limited experience isn’t exactly a compelling resume.

Once Heraf applied for the job, he got it at the click of a finger. There was no recruitment process, the PFA was never consulted, and FIFA guidelines were blatantly shrugged off. That PFA thing is crucial. Until the recent CBA it had only been a suggestion in good faith that the PFA would be consulted over coaching appointments for the Ferns while it was a steady rule for the All Whites that they had to be. The new CBA made it necessary for both teams. Not that it mattered, NZF never bothered to bother with either under Andy Martin’s reign.

You already know what happened next and you didn’t need the Muir Report to put it in writing. However, in the interest of clarity, here it is:

Andreas Heraf breached NZF’s Code of Conduct by failing to “respect the rights, dignity and worth” of some of his players and he wasn’t always “fair” or “considerate” when working with them. He breached NZF’s Human Resource Policy on Harassment when he “offended, humiliated or intimidated” players and staff on a repeated basis and that behaviour directly affected people’s ability to perform their jobs, both on the playing and the staff level. The team manager resigned because of all this while most of the 12 complainants (there were 13 complaints from 12 complainants – one player filing a report for both the Spain and Wellington tours) said they’d never play for Heraf again as long as he remained coach. Which he didn’t, resigning in early August.

It’s not really cool to rip into Heraf at this point. He had his ideas on how he wanted to do things and they didn’t work. The fact that he still cannot understand why he was shredded so badly by players and media proves that he doesn’t understand why his methods were incompatible, which in turn proves why he himself was incompatible. I’ve already written about this once and have no new ideas to add, so peek at this one if you wanna know where things are with Andy Heraf.

And anyway, we already knew how he was gonna be represented in the report. There are precious few specifics here other than Muir confirming that she upholds the complaints made by players. A dozen players don’t accidentally all file complaints at once. Where there’s smoke there’s fire and all that. I believed them then and I still believe them now.

(Although there is one story about Heraf presenting his 100 Day Plan as Tech Director to the Executive Committee and including a slide listing names beside all the vacant national coaching roles, a slide which was deleted before the ExCo saw it but soon enough every one of those names ended up getting the jobs he’d already assigned for them – not exactly a fair employment process… in fact Muir calls it a “sham”).

Nah, instead the enlightening parts of the Muir Report are all about governance. And, predictably, no person comes off worse than Andy ‘Snake-Oil’ Martin. Mate and even then he gets off lightly…

"On 29 June 2018 NZF announced that its Chief Executive, Andy Martin, was retiring at the end of the month. The terms of Mr Martin’s departure from NZF are confidential. This limited what I can and have reported in this Review about Mr Martin."

The report was announced on 20 June, Martin ‘retired’ on 29 June and the details and commencement of the report happened on 6 July. He ‘retired’ after he knew the report was coming and then had his terms of departure protected. No wonder he needed such a big pay-off, he had to cough it all up to the lawyers. People who choose to hide from investigators in these situations are almost never innocent same as how people who moan about free speech are almost always at least a little bit racist. Martin did participate with the review, he was interviewed along the way. But a sentence like: “a number of those I interviewed gave strong feedback about NZFs former CEO, Andy Martin” makes it very clear where most people stood with him and I doubt he’ll be getting too many Christmas cards post-stamped from New Zealand this year.

And fair enough because most of this is his fault. His and the Executive Committee that enabled him by sitting back and doing bugger all. “The Executive Committee board has been too 'hands-off' in its governance (of the high performance area and some HR matters) in recent years and needs to obtain greater reporting from management,” reads one area of the findings. That about sums it up. Those are volunteer positions but they’re important ones. That board is supposed to be the source of leadership and accountability and they basically just deferred to Andy Martin on everything. Complaints came in from some Ferns players, those complaints were sent straight back to the same people at fault – Martin & Heraf.

There was no protected avenue for players to lodge complaints, other than with the Players’ Union which understandably has a very frayed relationship with NZF right now. New Zealand Football has no HR department and no Diversity & Inclusion policy. It’s suggested from some interviewees in the report that there’s a boy’s club thing going on there, especially with only 8 of 38 employees being female and none within senior leadership (there are now two women on ExCo, though). Frankly this is an organisation that cared more about protecting its own reputation than anything else. It clearly didn’t care much about going out of its way to include women in anything. And if you need to go out of your to include women then it’s because your whole organisation is tailored specifically to the wants and needs of men, let’s be honest.

That’s Andy Martin for ya. He was an image of a CEO more than an actual CEO. His egotistical/maniacal/utterly obsessive focus on appearing to be a pleasant, successful CEO under whom there were no problems whatsoever led to, ironically, enormous problems. He then didn’t wanna deal with the dramas he created because then everyone would be able to see what a con artist he was. Complaints were made and the Muir report explicitly states that those in power did not take them seriously. Players were abused and ignored, the PFA were also ignored, NZF's structure was a mess, recruitment processes were irrelevant, there was not even a hint of interest in diversity… all because of lazy governance from ExCo and the enormously imbalanced power held by Martin and Heraf.

But but but… the new CBA!? With the travel arrangements and equal pay!? Yeah, about that…

“There needs to be greater respect for (and adherence to) the CBA that was entered into earlier their year with the PFA on behalf of the Football Ferns and All Whites. The PFA and some of the Ferns believe NZF used the pay equity deal as a media opportunity and then effectively disregarded the commitments to business class airfares for Ferns (for the Wellington Tour – until the PFA threatened to publicise this) and have ignored the obligation to consult over national coach roles.”

Typical. I remember feeling conflicted about that at the time, what with NZF’s obvious attempts to spin it for their own reputational benefit, but didn’t really wanna say anything while top level women’s footy was bathing in all that positivity for once. So no real shocker to find they tried to undermine those benefits the very first chance they got, the scummers. (More regrettably I also remember going with the flow on Heraf’s appointment, unaware as most people were about the FIFA guidelines, assuming that if he wanted the job it was for the right reasons. Which might still be true but… yikes. Hey, nobody gets it right every time).

This was also no shocker:

“In recent years, all of the head coaches for NZ’s elite women’s football teams (Football Ferns, U-20’s and U-17’s) have been men. For the Spain and Wellington Tours, the Sports Scientist was also male. Almost without exception, those I interviewed said greater opportunities for the development of female coaches (and to a lesser extent, referees) in NZ needs to occur as a priority and that this is a consistent issue for all high-performance sport in New Zealand, that the NZ sports sector needs to grapple with.”

Chuck in that 13 of the last 14 All Whites managers have been foreigners and it seems like there’s some slack-arse typecasting going on for these roles. Local coaches, especially women, are given relatively minimal pathways and there are only a handful of major, full-time gigs in the sport here as it is. Strange to be outsourcing them all. This isn’t some NZ First complaint about foreigners stealing up all our jobs but when your role entails creating a winning environment with a group of kiwi players, it really helps to have a grip on the culture. Not essential, but it helps. Andreas Heraf not only bowled a wide one straight past the keeper to the boundary on that regard but he also hurled down a no-ball by never having coached a women’s team at any relevant level before going straight into an international role and another no-ball with his Technical Director status. Honestly, there’s just no way that he should have ever been considered. That, Mr Martin, is all on you.

But save that idea for another day. We can talk about the differences between coaching the genders another time, there were some very interesting quotes from Sarai Bateman included in the Muir Report that deserve their own thoughts. Right now the task is to take the findings from this report and ensure that we never have this trouble again. So many things were neglected that brought us to this point. So many people were ignored. So many others buried their heads in the sand.

What we have now is an opportunity to be better. Andy Martin is gone and Andreas Heraf is gone. These are no longer current situations that we’re dealing with. There’s even been change on the ExCo board. There are too many bright and passionate people who care too much about football in Aotearoa to let it go to waste and now that the fridge doors have been opened, the rancid stench can start to fade. The day of reckoning has come and it’s a reckoning that’s being felt in many sports not only in this country but around the world.

And let’s not forget that this happened because twelve of our finest female footballers took it upon themselves to risk their international careers to bring it to light. Because of their courage, we can now move forwards.

Smash an ad if you have hope for football in Aotearoa

If you dig what we write here at TNC, get on over to Patroen and make a little pledge – that’s the quickest and most effective way to make sure we can keep on delivering for ya