Auckland City FC is New Zealand’s top amateur club. Yet it can’t shake the rumours that it’s in fact a club of professionals masquerading as amateurs. Martin van Beynen reports.
Fans of Auckland City FC had a lot to cheer about in August. The club’s premier team sealed a spot in the Fifa World Club Cup to be played next year, probably in the Middle East, and also qualified for the final of one of New Zealand’s premier football trophies, the Chatham Cup. The final against another Auckland team, Eastern Suburbs, is played today (Sunday) at 4pm at North Harbour Stadium.
Auckland City’s stellar success tends to fuel the pump of controversy about the team, which has long been the subject of accusations it pays its players through a variety of cunning devices. Most successful teams in New Zealand’s top club competition face the same sort of allegations, but Auckland City FC is the poster boy.
The club was founded in 2004 after New Zealand Football started a franchise-based national league. It was spawned by supporters of Central United FC, a club founded by Croatian immigrants in 1962, which was not then eligible for the franchise-based league. Auckland City FC now sports 16 teams including its men’s first team and seven Futsal teams.
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As each of the clubs say, fans identify culturally, historically and emotionally with both clubs.
On the face of it, Auckland certainly looks like a typical professional outfit. The team squad comprises 24 players ranging in age from 18 to 39. Eight of the squad have represented New Zealand in various age groups and Spain, Argentina, South Africa, England and Japan feature in the team’s nationalities. About nine players have played for or been associated with professional clubs overseas. That’s a pretty good lineup for an amateur club. The team includes another seven or so support staff, including the coach and assistant coach.
Under New Zealand Football rules players are either amateur or professional. A professional player has a written contract with a club and is paid more for their footballing activity than the expenses they effectively incur. All other players are considered to be amateurs. The word “paid” is, as many observers have pointed out, wide enough for a bus to go through.
Auckland City FC maintains its first team players are “amateur” stating the majority have full-time jobs outside football. A trawl through the players’ individual Facebook accounts sheds little light on what these jobs are and who the players work for. Only one player mentions an actual job_apprentice electrician. It would not be surprising if players were unable to apply themselves completely to outside employment given training, game planning, travelling and playing the actual games.
Many of the country’s top string clubs provide jobs for players by providing coaching gigs at their clubs and in businesses supportive of the club. For instance, Eastern Suburbs, which will battle Auckland City in the Chatham Cup final, spent a whopping $805,660 on coaching in the year to September 2021. Whether the players actually put in the hours required of a normal employee or coach is a question often raised.
So we asked Auckland City FC to provide the full time jobs and employers of all their “amateur” players. Did the club for instance employ any of the players in coaching? Did some of the club’s sponsors employ some players? The club has a raft of sponsors, about the same number coincidentally as players in the squad. But the club kept us guessing.
“We are happy and confident to stand by the statement on our website about the majority (that means 13 or more) of our players having normal jobs outside football.
“…we believe that to go into granular detail with you about their employment would breach considerations of privacy and obligations of confidentiality,” the club said.
If Auckland City FC does pay its players, it would obviously not advertise the fact in its published accounts. But the accounts for the club, which is an incorporated society, are instructive nevertheless.
The club’s latest published accounts _ for the year ending June 30, 2021_ are not an ideal indication of the club’s finances due to the disruptions and cancellations caused by Covid. However, while revenue was down, so were expenses.
The accounts show the club had an income of $852,530 of which about $144,000 was the Covid wage subsidy. Grants, sponsorship and donations brought in $678,686. It got surprisingly little from donations and sponsors, only about $20,000. Luckily it had a generous funder in the Trillian Trust ($659,131) but more about that later.
The income was nothing like 2014 when the club brought home $1.24 million for making the semi-finals of the Fifa Club World Cup in Morocco against Argentinian champions San Lorenzo. The tournament is not as lucrative as people think. In 2015 the club won $76,142 in prize money, in 2016 it was $118,244 and 2017, $178,551.
In the year to June 2021, Auckland City spent most of its money on “personnel expenses” ($674,721) and “team costs” ($87,544). We know the club has about 14 staff because that is what it claimed the wage subsidy for. We asked the club to confirm this and break down the personnel expenses figure. The question wasn’t answered.
By way of comparison Eastern Suburbs based in Kohimarama, a club also generously funded by the Trillian Trust and other pokie trusts, has an income of $2m ($839,000 in grants and donations), employs three full-time administration staff, one part-time finance manager, three full-time coaches, and numerous part-time coaches. But it has about 2000 playing members compared to Auckland City’s 200 (approx).
The interesting thing about Auckland City is that it spends no money on its home ground and clubrooms at Kiwitea St in Sandringham. The facility has one international quality pitch, two small grandstands that can take 250 people each and a tower for video and broadcast. Apparently about 2500 people can pack into the facility but it would be a tight squeeze.
The reason it doesn’t spend any money on the ground is that the expenses are paid by its sister club Central United which shares the ground.
Central United, or Central Soccer Club as it was then called, moved to its Kiwitea site in 1965. The field was only 45m wide and many volunteer hours and donations went into developing the pitch to the standard seen today.
The clubs share many things including sponsors and the same accountant, George Franich, who reviews and signs off both club’s accounts.
Central United has 30 teams, plus 101 first kicks (5-8 years), under the club umbrella. Its accounts for the year ending October 31, 2021, show an income of $481,247 ($145,000 in wage subsidies) and expenses of $481,000. It spent $87,970 on “field and hireage” expenses and $239,527 on an item called “senior football section”. Asked where this money actually went, the club declined to answer, citing privacy concerns.
Clearly some of the money spent by Central United benefits Auckland City. Central pays for the clubrooms they share and also pays for pitch expenses. We asked why the club did this when Auckland City received its own funding, but received no response to the question. Many observers believe the one club/two entity format gives Auckland City an unfair advantage.
As mentioned Auckland City and Central United get most of their funding from the nationwide pokie machine charity Trillian Trust which has been licensed to distribute grants since 1999. The trust is not authorised to fund professional football and got into trouble in 2009 for funding racing.
It has seven full time staff including the chief executive Dean Agnew and five board directors_ Agnew, John Harpin, Stanley Malcolm, Kevin McDonald and Brett Kilburn.
The trust’s annual report for the year ending July 31, 2021, shows it distributed $8.9m in grants from a revenue of $25.7m. About 10 per cent of grants regularly go to Auckland City and Central United
What is notable is that the trust has for years approved just about every application made by the clubs for funds. Other clubs miss out or get partial payouts but Auckland City and Central United, with rare exceptions, get their money as regularly as clockwork.
It led former All White Billy Harris, in a column for Stuff in 2009, to observe the most important person at Auckland City was not the coach or the club president but the person who wrote out the funding application forms.
We asked Trillian why it seemed to provide so much regular funding to the two football clubs but did not get an answer. Trillian said it had made grants to football and rugby clubs of similar amounts. We also asked Trillian whether it made its own checks on Auckland City to satisfy itself it was not actually funding a professional team. It said grants were made for an authorised purpose and at the end of the period an audit was undertaken by Trillian to ensure the money was spent.
Trillian said it regarded Auckland City and Central United as separate duly constituted entities but did not answer a question about Central United paying for services used by Auckland City and whether this gave Auckland City two bites of the funding cherry.
In addition we requested more detail about Trillian’s expenses, in particular an item in its annual report for “other expenses” of $1,488,837. Again Trillian declined to answer saying the question was “irrelevant”. If the amount is for wages and salaries, which seems logical, Trillian staff earn an average of $212,691 each.
Three Trillian board members – Harpin, Agnew, Malcolm – have a company called Bassant Professional Trustee Services. Bassant is the name of the street on which the Trillian Trust is based. We asked if this company provided services to Trillian. No answer. We sought information on how much the board members were paid by Trillian. Again no answer.
Trillian said information on director payments and personnel expenses would breach confidentiality obligations and was commercially sensitive information.
If you have information to add to this story please email martin.vanbeynen@stuff.co.nz in confidence.
“Trillian only makes grants for authorised purposes and believes its processes in making all grants are robust. Trillian is subject to full audits both externally and by the Department of Internal Affairs on a regular basis to ensure compliance with all regulatory requirements.”
This is essentially the line taken by both Auckland City and Central United. In other words they say they have been audited by every relevant organisation and agency and come up smelling of roses. Unfortunately that won’t make the whiff of professional footballers posing as amateurs go away.
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