Owners need to own and let the coaches coach. It’s an adage that a lot of billionaires around the world have trouble coming to terms with when they decide to buy a football club.

The bizarre week endured by the Gold Coast United Club has ended with the inevitable resignation of coach Miron Bleiberg.

The charismatic and polarising coach was quoted as saying he felt “stripped of his dignity” after being suspended for GCU’s most recent game agains Melbourne Heart.

This after he had offered a light-hearted response to the naming of 17-year old debutant Mitch Cooper as captain of the side – an instruction that came from Palmer himself.

Palmer is an enigmatic character. Rabidly right-wing, he nonetheless supports the abolition of refugee detention centres and has called for immediate granting of visas to asylum seekers, which puts him diametrically opposed to the Liberal Party ideology. As a self-made billionaire, I just wonder if he micro-manages his mining business in the same way he has appeared to do his football club.

His comments over the weekend that the A-League is a “joke” and that rugby league is a much better game hint at a man who has got bored with his plaything.

Yet he has often threatened to sue the FFA if they try to remove his A-League license from him.

Conspiracy theorists should be firing up pretty soon that he is an NRL plant. No, I don’t believe that for a second, please don’t slam me.

Palmer’s most gracious – and canny – move in Gold Coast’s short existence was to throw open the gates last season, which resulted in 15,000 fans pouring through the turnstiles for a game, unfortunately on the same day that it poured from the heavens.

It indicated that there was indeed a potential market for the club to tap in the region.

But every decision Palmer has made since then has indicated one of two things; being a mining magnate does not qualify you necessarily to run a football club, or that Palmer has felt the need to go to war with the FFA by being as contrary and controversial as possible.

Craig Foster in his Sun Herald article felt the FFA needed to share the blame for Gold Coast’s problems, that they did not provide sufficient guidance to Palmer when handing him an A-League license.

While that may be true in some sense, Palmer has shown a tendency to eschew any guidance from the governing body, and has seemingly got himself involved in matters of the club that he is ill-equipped to deal with.

Forcing Bleiberg to name Mitch Cooper as captain was nothing more than a publicity stunt and a terrible burden to put on the boy’s shoulders. Not that I doubt Cooper’s captaincy potential. Ray Wilkins captained Chelsea as an 18 year old but he was already an established first team player by then.

However, the big question is, what was Palmer doing naming the captain in the first place? And how long has this “direct interference” with team selection been happening?

Now that Bleiberg has jumped from the clearly listing ship, we may hear more of the pressures of coaching under the eye of an owner who can’t remain hands-off.