There is a version of Anthony Seibold’s career that reads as a cautionary tale, the coach who had success in his first season and spent the next eight years being punished for it. There is another version, more accurate and considerably more interesting, in which a man who never really broke through in first-grade as a player built one of the most unusual coaching résumés in the sport.

Seibold’s playing career was a tour of rugby league’s margins. Four years in Brisbane’s lower grades between 1992 and 1995, a season with St Estève in France in 1996 that yielded a French championship, two years at Canberra, then a stint with the London Broncos in Super League.

He learned the trade under Craig Bellamy at Melbourne, moved through assistant roles at Manly and then South Sydney under Michael Maguire, and in 2018 took the Rabbitohs head job. His debut season delivered a preliminary final and the Dally M Coach of the Year award. Then came Brisbane, where a 2020 wooden spoon ended the tenure in the ugliest possible fashion, and a genuinely unexpected pivot to rugby union as England’s defence coach under Eddie Jones from September 2021.

Manly recruited him back in late 2022. He rebuilt a fractured club into a semi-finalist by 2024, a considerable achievement given where he found it, before an 0-3 start to 2026 cost him his job just three games into a fresh two-year extension, with Kieran Foran installed in his place.

Which brings us to the PNG Chiefs, and to Willie Peters, with whom Seibold worked at Redfern. A catch-up during a European trip with his wife started the conversation that ended with Seibold confirmed as an assistant on Peters’ staff alongside Luke Burt, ahead of the club’s inaugural 2028 season.

The value here is obvious once you stop thinking about win-loss records. An expansion club does not need another alpha head coach, it needs someone who can build systems from nothing, install a defensive structure into a roster that has never played together, and teach. Seibold has done all three at NRL and Test level, and has reportedly made peace with not chasing another top job, which removes precisely the friction that sinks most assistant appointments.

The Chiefs already have Jarome Luai, Zac Lomax, Alex Johnston, Connor Watson and Matty Lees on the books. Talent was never going to be the problem in Port Moresby. Cohesion was. Hiring a career educator with two decades of elite coaching scar tissue is the most sensible thing this club has done yet.