THE prospective Gold Coast Football Club has been dealt a serious blow, with coaching aspirant Michael Voss rejecting a three-year deal in favour of an assistant coaching position at West Coast.

Voss was widely considered the coach-in-waiting of the new club, still yet to be named, and had served as an advisor to the GC17 bid team. But in the end the two parties were unable to agree to terms, with Voss demanding a five-year contract.

That would have resulted in Voss coaching the putative team for three years at AFL level after a year each at TAC Cup and VFL level, a guarantee the Gold Coast consortium was not prepared to entertain.

Without that guarantee, Voss' preference was to step straight into the big league, even if only as an assistant to Eagles coach John Worsfold, a position he was offered — and turned down — last year.

"I guess (if) you want to measure what the next two years holds, well currently one's in an AFL environment and one's not," Voss said. "I just couldn't go forward on the premise that it was going to be one year (in the AFL); we never got to (talking about) dollars, we never talked about anything else, it was, can the terms stack up … I respect their decision, I'm not begrudging their decision. I hope they don't begrudge mine."

Voss said he was now "100%" committed to the West Coast job. "They have a really unified belief in what they stand for and where they want to go and I want to share and be part of it in some form," he said. "There was a chance to be able to operate under not only a premiership player but a premiership coach."

Voss denied he was approaching the job solely as a stepping stone to a senior role. "That was one of the things I had to ask myself — am I just using this as a tool, or am I genuinely going there with good intentions to give the best of myself, and I wouldn't do it if it wasn't the case."

Voss added it was important Worsfold respected his senior coaching ambitions, saying the Eagles would "emphatically support" him in the transition to a senior coaching role were one to arise. "There's no hidden agenda here for me, it's pretty clear."