Phil 'Gus' Gould

In the late 90s.

In 2011, when I went to Panthers –

as the general manager, we had 11 full-time staff.

When I left, we had 54 full-time staff.

Wow, Jesus Christ.

The Bulldogs, we might have, I haven't counted them, maybe 70 or 80 full-time staff.

And just in the football program itself, the amount of expertise that you need in different categories to support the players and to help them be the best that they can be and to support them effectively

um even away from the football field you know with education and welfare and mental health and psychology and all those sorts of things as well the expertise that you need in different forms of injury rehab and outsourcing to people who are experts in that particular injury or experts in that there's a whole myriad of people that are now involved in football organizations and administratively not that i have a big role administratively or commercially but

it's so huge now it's such a big business i mean i think the bulldogs we might be a 35 million dollar a year business i think the broncos are probably 50 or 60 million dollar a year business you need expertise yeah in all of that areas when i coached it wasn't anything like that it was me and a trainer honestly we did the lot wow you know and you'd have a part-time doctor and maybe a part-time physio when i first started playing back in the 70s we didn't have any of that

I mean, our club doctor at Penrith was a gynaecologist from up in High Street, Penrith.

He was just a bloke who loved the footy.

I went to him with a fractured ankle.

He gave me pills for gout.

The whole thing's come a long, long way.

But in the 90s when they started to get really good money from pay TV and all that sort of thing, they –

players were giving up work or giving up the opportunities to work because they were earning enough money not to and they could play their footy and it's a great lifestyle and it's a great existence but I would say probably in the last decade and what we've seen in the last decade is a lot of teams at Panthers we built a tremendous centre of excellence out there we wanted to present ourselves in a certain perspective and all the clubs have sort of pushed down that line there everyone's got great centres of excellence and great facilities and experts right across the board to support the coaches you know like

the coaches have all got four assistant coaches and they've got assistants and they've got everyone's got their own IT person and now we're getting into AI and other parts of data analysis and all that sort of thing and then it goes for high performance as well and how they're using GPS technology and in the medical thing how we get players back from injury how we prevent injury how we prepare their body and again sort of the mental side of the thing their mental health their psychology their motivation kids feel so much under pressure these days you know in this sort of sport and

What you're seeing, when you look at the really great players in our game today, they are seriously professional, full-time footballers who are managed well on and off the field and they'll go on to do better things after their career.

I've always been big on post-career, that your football is only a short part of your life.

I don't want the kid feeling the pressure that this is his life or this is the only thing he's ever going to do in his life.