This blog is about football: not Gaelic football, but football as it is played by many millions of men and women around the world, the ‘beautiful game’ as it is played by Brazil and France and Argentina, at Real Madrid and Paris St Germain and Bayern Munich. I have been a passionate Irish football fan since I was 10 years old, when I followed the great Northern Ireland team of Danny Blanchflower, Peter McParland, Jimmy McIlroy, Billy Bingham and Harry Gregg as they beat Italy, Argentina and Czechoslovakia to reach the quarter finals of the 1958 World Cup (I didn’t have the hang-ups of Irish republicans: I was quite happy to have two Irish football teams to support: one representing my birthplace, the other representing my citizenship and eventual place of residence).

But what a mess football in the Republic of Ireland is in these days! We are very, very far from the halcyon years when Jack Charlton managed the national team, and the whole nation was enthralled by its exploits in the 1988 European championship and the 1990 and 1994 World Cups. I was a travelling supporter at those last two tournaments. After the Republic beat the Netherlands, Germany and Italy (the last of these in New York in our opening match at the 1994 World Cup), we were ranked by FIFA the sixth best team in the world. We are now ranked 60th, behind such giants of world football as Jamaica, Paraguay and Iraq.

The governing body, the Football Association of Ireland, appears to be mired in a malign cycle of mismanagement, incompetence and corruption. Last month its English CEO, Jonathan Hill, was forced to resign after humiliating appearances before the Dail’s Public Accounts Committee, where he was confronted with various illicit holiday and travel payments (he had carried on living in England and commuting to Dublin on weekdays) and breaches of his permitted (extremely high) salary limit.

As Ken Early wrote in the Irish Times, Hill’s task had been straightforward: “to be a plausible frontman to represent the interests of Irish football after the chaos and shame of the John Delaney era. In Ireland we have an absurd and unjust situation where the government lavishes support on the elitist sport of horse-racing and the moribund entity of greyhound racing, while keeping the mass participation sport of football on subsistence rations. In this context, the main job of the FAI CEO is to lobby the government for more investment. But Hill blew his own credibility over the ‘accidental’ holiday pay chicanery. Instead of Hill pressuring government over the big-picture injustice of how funding is allocated across sports, politicians were pressuring Hill over his petty financial shenanigans.”¹ There was absolutely no chance of the organisation getting the €517 million in state funds it was looking for to enhance the poor soccer facilities across the country.

But the most farcical process of all has been the seemingly endless saga of the appointment of a new national team manager to succeed the hapless Stephen Kenny, who oversaw a disastrous European qualifying campaign in which the Republic lost home and away to France, Netherlands and Greece, and beat only Gibraltar. Kenny was let go last November (although he was clearly doomed as long ago as last summer) and the FAI’s director of football, Marc Canham, another Englishman, promised an appointment in early April, after two earlier deadlines for announcing a new manager were missed.

In the event his deadline was missed again. Canham did not dare face the media, but newspaper reports said he was now hoping to have a manager in place for the visit of England to Dublin for a Nations League match in early September, nearly 10 months after Kenny’s last match. Those reports said that at least four people had already turned the FAI down: former internationals Lee Carsley, now managing the England under-21 team and Chris Hughton, managing Ghana; Portuguese assistant coach Anthony Barry and former Greek manager Gus Poyet. Former international John O’Shea – who had been Kenny’s number three – took over temporarily for matches in March against Belgium (a 0-0 draw) and Switzerland (a 0-1 loss).

Is this lack of interest the manager’s job (despite its €600,000 annual salary, more than what one-third of coaches at this summer’s Euro 2024 are earning) any surprise given the double whammy of the chaos at the top of Ireland’s football administration and the poor quality of the players in the current Irish team? A glance at the Irish footballers regularly playing in the English Premier League shows the dearth of talent: in recent weeks the number of those players has varied from six down to two. What a contrast with the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, when League and Cup winning teams like Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United had two, three or sometimes even four first team Irish players each (in the 1978 Cup Final Arsenal and Ipswich Town fielded no fewer than seven Irish players from North and South; in the 1979 final between Arsenal and Manchester United there were eight).

Malachy Clerkin in the Irish Times has calculated that in 2012-2013 30 Irishmen played just over 44,200 minutes in the top five European leagues; last season 16 Irish players registered just over 9,800 minutes between them at that elite level.² And the numbers in 2012-2013 were already way down on those playing at top level in the heyday of Irish football in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Here’s another uncomfortable question: is Marc Canham qualified to be the FAI’s director of football? Columnist Kevin Kilbane, another former international, asked whether he was over-promoted to his present position. Why did he only spend a year as the Premier League’s director of football?³ He had an extremely undistinguished career as a professional footballer. A quick look at his entry in Wikipedia (if it’s correct) will show that that he played precisely four matches for second division Colchester United (in the fourth tier of English football) and spent the rest of his career with ‘non-league’ sides.

It must have been hard enough for Stephen Kenny, a John Delaney appointee who had spent all but two seasons as a manager in the League of Ireland, to motivate highly-paid Premier League footballers. How are they going to have any respect for a director of football who has spent his entire career in the lower levels of English football? Certainly the former women’s team manager, Vera Pauw, had little confidence in him last summer after the Women’s World Cup finals, when she queried his competence to carry out a review of her largely successful period in charge of the Irish team (she was sacked).

Here’s another problem: the Republic has very few promising young players coming through the FAI’s rickety under-age system. There are currently just nine Irish footballers aged 17-18 who are receiving full-time professional coaching. Theoretically there are 24 soccer academies for such youngsters, but only 10 full-time coaching staff to run them. Only three other European countries have fewer than one coach per academy: Northern Ireland, Andorra and Luxembourg. Compare that to Portugal, which has seven academies and 315 full-time professional staff. Back in pre-Brexit times around 30-50 players aged 16-17 went to England every year to become full-time professionals, writes Clerkin. “We don’t have English football to do that for us any more. We have to do it for ourselves.”

Is the FAI up to the huge job of overseeing the total makeover of Irish football that is so desperately needed? The GAA and the IRFU have shown the way in recent years with superb leaders like Peter Quinn, Páraic Duffy, and Mick Dawson turning them into modern sporting organisations that are the envy of all. But in its present lamentable state, rotten with tinpot egos and toxic internal politics, the FAI has a huge distance to travel. Gareth Farrelly, another former international, now a lawyer, proposes a nuclear solution to the FAI and its multiplicity of problems: “I’d raze it to the ground and start again,” he says bluntly.⁴

¹ ‘New manager staring FAI in the face’, Irish Times, 22 April 2024

² ‘Rare dose of FAI truth reveals the game here is in a worse state than you think, Irish Times, 27 April

³ ‘Why is director of football Canham hiding behind FAI TV? Irish Times, 20 April

⁴ Gavin Cummiskey, ‘What to do with the FAI? ‘Raze it to the ground and start again’, Irish Times, 20 April