Ian Costello
“It was a real-time case study, research that I could immediately put into effect.”
Ian Costello seems to love a challenge. In October 2024, he was balancing the demands of his role as Munster’s Head of Rugby Operations with the academic workload of DCU’s Professional Doctorate in Elite Performance Sports.
But then, to add to the pressure, Ian had to step into the role of interim Head Coach at Munster, following the departure of Graham Rowntree.
“That was definitely the most challenging 7 months of my professional career. Looking back now, I loved how difficult that period was and the opportunity to learn so much about yourself.”
Remarkably, this was the second time during his doctoral studies that Ian had been asked to ‘front up’ as coach for Munster. In 2021, he stood in when the coaching team and senior squad were stranded in South Africa due to a Covid outbreak.
Ian had to put together a make-shift team featuring 12 academy players to contest their upcoming Champions League away fixture. Ironically, it was against Wasps, the team Ian had been coaching until 6 months previously.
Despite the odds being stacked against them, Munster romped home with a bonus point victory. “You couldn't have written it,” says Ian when recalling the episode as “a really, really cool story.”
But beyond the compelling narrative, Ian saw these experiences as valuable learning opportunities that fed into his thesis.
The research focused on Munster’s unique player development system. The club integrates the academy for developing younger players with the senior squad’s training setup. Among the core questions he wanted to unpick was how the club should “maximise talent development, but also maximise the team's performance.”
The Wasps experience was a perfect case study of how academy players respond when asked to step up to first-team performance levels. “So, it was a real test of the alignment and integration between a talent system and a performance system.”
For Ian, this concrete link between his academic and professional work was a key benefit of the professional doctorate. “The research constantly informed my practice, and constantly challenged my practice. It was a real-time case study, research that I could immediately put into effect.”
This “feedback loop” was also a huge motivator to press on even when the combined demands of research and work seemed daunting, such as during his second stint as head coach.
The research process involved in-depth interviews with players and coaching staff at all levels. As a senior leadership figure at Munster, he admits he had to work to create the conditions where staff and players could be open and honest.
Ian says framing those conversations in terms of “this is to make us better” was important. He’s confident he got honest responses because “we got plenty of critical feedback as well, and that was a good signal.”
In 2025, Ian was promoted to General Manager at Munster, and he is still implementing the skills and knowledge gained from his doctoral research in this role. Today, Ian says he is “far better equipped and far more confident in my ability to think critically and my ability to reflect on anything I’ve done.”
Previously, Ian might have hesitated to use academic terms such as “shared mental models” for fear of a “who does your man think he is” reaction from players and staff. That has changed. “I was like, we want to be the very best. So why are we avoiding language that's very effective and very useful in helping Munster design and operate world-leading talent and performance systems?”
While Munster has been going through difficult times recently, Ian is upbeat about the pipeline of talent coming through the club’s academy. The number of academy players breaking into the senior ranks is “tracking really positively”, and Munster representation in the Ireland under-20s is “the strongest that we've ever had.”
He believes the quality of these young players will drive competition and standards at Munster.
Ian accepts that the club is facing a lot of pressure due to recent results, but looking to the longer-term, he says, “There is plenty of hard work ahead of us but we have a lot of really good people doing excellent work, which makes me optimistic about the future.”