In that hall of corporate shame reserved for particularly dire UK chief executives, Mark Dodson may never attain the level of notoriety enjoyed – ok, that’s possibly not the word – by Paula Vennells, who sat in the Post Office hot seat while her organisation ruined the lives of so many sub-postmasters, or Peter Hebblethwaite, the P&O panjandrum who sacked hundreds of long-serving seafarers in a fire-and-hire operation that led to his ferries being crewed by staff on close-to starvation wages.
Yet Dodson’s stewardship of the affairs of Scottish Rugby during his 12 years as Murrayfield’s Capo di Tutti can hardly be remembered as a golden era for the sport in these parts.
Appointed in 2011, Dodson made a promising start under the wise guidance of Sir Moir Lockhead, the former First Group CEO who had just been installed as SRU chairman, but Sir Moir’s departure in 2016 precipitated a death spiral of catastrophic mismanagement, arrogance, hubris and scandal.
To save Dodson’s blushes, we will resist the temptation to itemise those myriad failures. So let’s just say he’s not a particularly hard act to follow.
So where should his successor’s focus be trained in the months and years ahead? The failings of the Dodson regime provide a kind of what-not-to-do road map, but there must be more to the job than not sacking a wise and popular administrator (Keith Russell), not forcing through an ill-conceived and doomed-to-fail domestic tournament (Super 6) and not dreaming up sinister ways to subvert the historic authority of the union’s member clubs by bolstering the executive’s authority (too many examples to list).
Read more:
- Rob Robertson examines Mark Dodson's Scottish Rugby tenure
- Mark Dodson no longer a director of Scottish Rugby
Even so, the SRU’s stock of public trust had fallen so low over the past few years that restoring it must be a priority.
John McGuigan, the Union’s new chairman, has already made that clear in a number of public announcements, none more welcome than his admission that the governing body failed the family of Siobhan Cattigan following the death of the former Scotland Women’s team forward in November 2021.
McGuigan’s apology to the Cattigans, issued at last November’s SRU annual meeting, should be seen as a turning point and an example of how the union must act in the future.
So executive arrogance and hubris of the kind Dodson displayed has had its day.
And into the dustbin of Scottish rugby history we must also pitch the kind of eye-watering remuneration Dodson enjoyed, famously trousering a figure not far short of £1 million in one of his years in charge.
Running Scottish Rugby is a big job, but not so big that the salary on offer should dwarf what others in equivalent positions (but in charge of much bigger unions) have been able to negotiate.
When Bill Clinton was running for president (of the USA, not the SRU, just in case you wondered) in 1992, his mantra was: ‘It’s the economy, stupid’.
It was a reminder to all his campaign staffers that nothing, bar nothing, was more important than getting control of the nation’s finances, which were looking pretty parlous at the time. Clinton’s needle-sharp focus on the bottom lines was seen as key to his victory that year.
Dodson’s successor will need to adopt a similar outlook after the most recent set of Murrayfield accounts showed a £10.5 million deficit.
With regard to getting the union back into the black, McGuigan suggested that raising revenue – with an initial target of £100 million per annum – was more important than cutting costs.
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I wish no ill to anyone on the Murrayfield payroll, but I can’t for the life of me see why there are so many of them.
Sure, it’s a complex and multi-faceted organisation and it’s delusional to hark back to the days when its affairs were run by a diligent secretary and a part-time admin assistant who popped in every second Wednesday, but there does seem to be an awful lot of fat on the corporate body at the moment.
The 2023 accounts showed that the union’s employment costs had risen to £39.2 million, well over half the annual revenue figure and an increase of 19% on the previous year. The average number of employees over the year was 479, of whom only 144 were professional players.
Among the 335 non-players on the staff, 49 were engaged in ‘financial operations’ and 82 in ‘commercial operations’.
Read more from our Fixing Scottish rugby series
- Fixing Scottish rugby: Exclusive Scotland Rugby News series
- The priorities for new Scottish Rugby chief executive
In the continued absence of a new CEO, the chairman should be commended for starting the 'financial reset' plan.
In a sense, though, the financial side of things offers the easiest pickings, the lowest-hanging fruit, for putting Scottish Rugby in a better place.
I’ve seen a succession of SRU chief executives come and go over the years. Like Roman Emperors, they tend not to pass away peacefully in their sleep; their reigns end messily.
The new CEO will have to go in with eyes wide open to that reality, but they will at least have the chance to create a positive legacy before things start to go sour.
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