Irish people love football. But football does not love them back.
How the incompetence and corruption of the FAI could ruin Irish Football for decades to come.
There are so many metrics to show our love for the game. Walk down any street and you’ll see someone wearing football apparel. Go to any league of Ireland ground on a Friday evening and you will see sold out signs. Turn on any radio station and the sports bulletins will be dominated by football stories.
In March, I saw grown men cry on two separate occasions when Shelbourne FC beat Shamrock Rovers in Tolka Park and then again in Dalymount when Gavin Molloy sent Bohemians fans for the exits when he banged in his header to make the game 2-0.
Football has a massive grip on the emotional psyche of Ireland. For all the time, money, emotion and hope invested in the beautiful game in Ireland from fans, very little of it is invested back to us to enjoy from our stakeholders.
The Football Association of Ireland (FAI) is the governing body of football in Ireland. Over the past three decades the FAI has been riddled with gross incompetence, levels of corruption which would make any organised crime family jealous and a fundamental disconnect between the punter and organisation. This is heavily documented in the book ‘Champagne Football’ written by Mark Tighe and Paul Rowan.
The three decades which followed Italia 90, Irelands greatest success at an international competition should have seen monumental investment in grassroots football and infrastructure to support the growing love of the game. Unfortunately what followed was anything but.
Very little investment was made in grassroots football. A huge over reliance on volunteers and farming out our best players to the UK at young ages in the hopes they would ‘make it’ has been the main strategy for developing elite footballers in this country.
It hasn’t worked as has been evidenced in the Senior Men’s football team results in recent years. Brexit has shut the door for players heading to the UK.
The success of the men’s national team usually coincides with pure euphoria amongst the Irish public. Italia 90, USA 94, the 2002 World Cup and the Euros. Just look at any episode of Reeling in the Years for these tournaments. The country grinds to a halt. Flags and bunting are put out, pubs are packed. Even if you aren’t a football fan, it’s hard not to be caught up in the sweeping wave of joy that passes through the country.
Internationally we have become football lightweights, barely managing to get a result against even the weakest sides in Europe.
This isn’t bad luck, this is all a result of the governing body not being able to do their jobs competently. The fiasco of the last year since Stephen Kenny was sacked illustrates this. It’s clear the people responsible for making the decisions haven’t a breeze about what they are doing. PR disaster after PR disaster which all resulted in back to back defeats against England and Greece. These things are all connected.
This has a knock on affect on the fans. We are famous around the World for our fans. We love an away trip and bring an atmosphere anywhere we go. Just look at how Poznan honoured us after the 2012 Euros. The problem is the FAI don’t see us as football fans. They see us only as customers whose sole purpose is to extract as much money as possible from.
Recent commercial practices such as the match ticket bundles for the men’s national team are a great example of this. The FAI have done this on occasions where they bundle tickets for high demand games such as England, France and the Netherlands with low demand midweek games.
You want to go see Ireland play England? No problem, but you have to buy tickets for the midweek Greece and Finland games too at the same time. If you want to bring your kids along then you are down a few hundred quid when all is said and done. Never mind trying to get them home from the City Centre at 10pm on a weekday because games for some reason have to kick off at 7.45pm.
It’s a complete slap in the face to fans. Especially when the national team performs so poorly at these games and fans are heading for the exits ten minutes before the game is even over.
It feels like they hate the fans. A lingering attitude since the John Delaney ere when we were frisked twice coming into the stadium in the off chance we brought a banner in voicing our displeasure at the regime. We were nothing more than a thorn in their side. Fans had to resort to throwing tennis balls onto the pitch to hammer home their frustration with the regime under John Delaney.
If we didn’t love football the way we do in Ireland, nobody would go to these games. We go in the hope that this team will produce a moment where we can tell our kids and grandkids that we were there for. Instead we queue outside Lansdowne Road Station at 9:58pm on a cold Tuesday night in despair having spent so much money for absolutely no return.
I appreciate the FAI are not in a great financial position but they have nobody but themselves to blame for this. Decades of mismanagement and stays at the Plaza Hotel, New York on the company credit card got them here. Using fans as an ATM is not the solution to their financial woes. All they are doing is creating dissent among the very fanbase who will happily spend their money elsewhere if they feel they aren’t getting their value for money.
There was a glimmer of hope among the Irish fans that things could be different when John Delaney finally left the organisation. That things could even be better. That the FAI could be run like the IRFU or the GAA, not that they don’t have their problems but they don’t have books like Champagne Football written about their CEOs.
My optimism and I am sure most others of a functioning governing body went out the window and down the road with Delaneys successor Jonathan Hill and Chief Football Officer Marc Canham.
The Women’s National Team have experienced a lot of success in recent years. None of their success can be credited to the FAI. Look at the fiasco they had to go through in 2017 for them to get their own tracksuits and not have to change in the airport toilets to give their tracksuits back to be used by another team. Not to mention the recent RTE investigates program which unearthed some awful revelations about abuse within the organisation.
FAI mismanagement has also had disastrous consequences for the League of Ireland. Look around any LOI ground with the exception of Tallaght Stadium. The stadiums are dated and dilapidated. They are in need of investment to bring them up to an acceptable standard. The previous CEO John Delaney once described the League of Ireland as the problem child of the FAI. Rich from him considering what he used his company credit card for.
We need to give footballing prospects a stable league with funding and coaching for them to develop in. How are we supposed to grow a league here when one of the most successful teams, Dundalk FC could potentially be out of business within weeks?
Like the Women’s National Team, the League is doing well. Games are regularly sold out, the standard is improving but it has reached a glass ceiling which cannot be broken through without massive capital investment.
The problem is, how is this badly needed investment supposed to happen when the FAI can’t even appoint a manager in a timely fashion or secure a commercial sponsor for their flagship team. These might seem like small things but considering how difficult the FAI made these small things, how could they be trusted to even manage a bonfire on Halloween?
The football pathways program which was announced has some fantastic ideas on how to grow the sport in Ireland but how could Sport Ireland and the Irish government trust the FAI with the hundreds of millions of Euro in State funding it needs.
Football needs to start showing the love back to fans. Fans need to be appreciated, not explotited. To do this, the FAI management has to be stripped back to its core and replaced with competent officials who understand the sport and the value it holds in Irish society.
Proper corporate governance needs to be adhered to. This is the only way in which trust can be built up between the FAI and Sport Ireland who hold the purse strings.
We are in the doldrums now. It doesn’t have to be this way. The interest is there. The money is there.
Can football start loving the fans as much as we love it? Absolutely it can. Will it though? I fear this is going to be a one-sided relationship for years to come.