AS THE LEAGUE of Ireland enters into another season, where its future lies remains very much uncertain.
There are undoubtedly positives heading into the 2015 campaign — Liam Miller, another high-profile ex-Ireland international has joined the league, while players such as Dylan Connolly and Ryan Manning’s recent moves across the water to Ipswich and QPR respectively suggests youngsters with high potential are still being produced on these shores.
On the downside however, certain clubs have continued to struggle financially over the past year, and though there are exceptions to the rule, attendances by and large have been disappointing in recent seasons.
So where does the league go from here? Will the situation improve? Or are things likely to get worse before they get better?
Technology and sports journalist with The Sunday Business Post, Emmet Ryan, believes clubs must learn from the financial mishaps of the past and suggests that fan ownership is the way forward for beleaguered teams.
“There’s still that uncertainty from year to year, with so many teams spending a lot and losing a lot of cash,” he says “It naturally leads to so many issues, but it’s especially bad for building up that local culture. You look at the clubs that have been able to override that. They are, almost without exception, fan owned.
“Galway had basically a complete joke shop of an operation at the start of last season. But by the end of that season, they beat UCD pretty comprehensively in the playoffs and rightly so. You look at Cork City and what they’ve done since they’ve reformed. You look at Shamrock Rovers, who are a fan-owned club as well…
“Anyone who’s involved in a football club and thinks they’re going to make money out of it — other than selling on the assets of that football club, and this includes multiple property developers who have gone into football over the years — they’re not. You are going to lose money. It is a way to spend money, not to make money.”
He also believes that the recent entry of Cabinteely FC into League of Ireland is, in part, a reflection of its increasingly poor standards more than anything else.
“I’m a Dún Laoghaire guy. The idea of a team from my area [entering] should appeal to me. But Cabinteely FC getting into the League of Ireland says everything about what’s wrong with the league right now. Several teams with much more logical population centres in terms of having a fan base already, having a certain level of football team already, would have made so much more sense. But to them, going into the League of Ireland was insane, because of the travel costs involved, the overall expense.
“There wasn’t much to gain. The teams did not see a benefit to gain in going up to the League of Ireland. When that’s a problem for you, you’re in so much trouble. There is also a question: can the league sustain 20 clubs? It was sustaining more, but with an awful lot of ups and downs. Who could forget how many times the members changed? It was because one team died and another replaced it.”
(Stuart Byrne is a former League of Ireland player)
League of Ireland columnist, RTÉ pundit and former player, Stuart Byrne, agrees that there have been plenty of positives associated with fan ownership, though he is unsure of its long-term viability.
“It’s certainly proved to have been a huge success in Cork and Sligo. The club is under a co-op — the ground you have can’t be sold to a private party. There are huge advantages, because supporters genuinely have the interest.
“Because of the issues we’ve had with clubs being used as hot potatoes in property deals, football groups coming in has brought normality back, but I don’t know if it’s a good thing in the long run. Ultimately, football clubs should be run like efficient businesses. I think the more voices you have at the table, the less supporters could choose to run a company. But I do think the introduction of supporters in the form of co-ops have gone a long way to helping football clubs that were set to be spiralling out of control.
“It has helped an awful lot to bring the focus back to football and to build the football clubs again. Most certainly I think there are an awful number of football clubs that need that at the moment.”
And while the clubs have too often been guilty of contributing to their own downfall, many people believe the FAI — who run the league — haven’t exactly helped matters.
The association’s CEO John Delaney has admitted the League of Ireland is a “problem child,” while former Ireland and St Pat’s manager, and long-term LOI advocate, Brian Kerr, claims the FAI has lost interest in its promotion, in recent times.
League of Ireland reporter Barry Landy says the funding devoted to the league is “paltry,” and agrees with Kerr that its promotion could be much better.
“Promotion isn’t merely having a flash website, putting on a glitzy launch or pushing the league on Twitter. The annual February launch isn’t dreadful. Players and managers always attend in numbers and are welcome to talk. The other two the FAI fail to provide.
“But beyond that, promoting a product — and the league is a product — begins with organisation and structure. Can potential supporters and consumers take seriously a league where a player can — having picked up four yellow cards in 33 games over the course of a season — start the next campaign suspended? Nope. The list goes on. People think it’s a nonsense. All too often, it is.”
Byrne, meanwhile, takes a similar position, suggesting that promotion of the league (or lack thereof) is the main problem.
“Six or seven years ago, there seemed to be a substantial budget to promote the league, but it just never materialised. They just don’t promote it at all. The impression I get is that the FAI don’t want to be promoting the league. If they had the option, they wouldn’t, but there seems to be a reason why they have to do it. Football in this country needs to be run by an interested party whose sole job is to run the league.
(FAI CEO John Delaney has referred to the League of Ireland as a “problem child”)
“In England, it’s the job of the Premier League to run their league and nothing else. They don’t deal with other issues. Their sole focus is on the Premier League — and I know that there have been attempts in the past to have that here.
“It all coincided with the financial crash and there were some very difficult years, but I don’t see any improvement in the league as long as it’s under the umbrella of the FAI. They just don’t have the interest, they don’t have the enthusiasm, they don’t have the skill set for modern football and they don’t have the finances.”
But despite the current problems facing the League of Ireland, Ryan believes it has the potential to be in a much healthier position, and points to lower-league clubs in England as a template worth attempting to emulate.
“There’s no question that the biggest problem domestic football faces is that the governing body doesn’t see its top flight as a promotional tool. And that’s bonkers! The governing body only has x number of internationals a year. Your league — that’s your advertising year-round.
“You’re competing with the Premier League. It’s grand to be fans of it and you’re never going to compete on a direct, quality basis, so you have to offer a product that’s different and focuses on the community side. That’s why lower-league football [in England] has been able to benefit.
“Crowds in England have gone back up. And that goes all the way to non-league. It’s because they’ve sold a product that’s different to the Premier League. That’s what the FAI have to do. They’ve got to realise there are benefits to them in getting that community interest — actual, real on-the-ground support. Not just relying on having certain people, in certain positions of power. If you actually have a critical mass as well as that, that means you have two things that are really good to have.
“So if they don’t cop that there’s a benefit in having that support, then you have to really question the thinking at the higher structures of the organisation.”
Another perceived problem and common gripe among certain supporters is the supposed lack of media coverage that football in this country receives. Could it genuinely be better or does it merely reflect a lack of interest from the public at large?
“For a league of its size, its attendances and popularity among the general public in Ireland, the national newspaper coverage it receives is great,” says Landy.
“Relative to the readers of those publications that are interested in the League of Ireland, the amount of soccer writers, pages, pullouts and long-haul trips to Eastern Europe in the summer dedicated to it is excellent. As online media continues to grow, its reach is greater than ever — that is a credit to Irish soccer media and organisations like the SWAI.”
(Brian Kerr recently claimed the FAI had “lost interest” in the League of Ireland)
Byrne even believes that the coverage devoted to the league is arguably excessive under current circumstances.
“I think it does [get the coverage it deserves]. There are games in our league that just shouldn’t be shown on television. As a visual product, they are awful. Since I’ve retired, I’ve switched over to the media side of things, so I’m well aware of what’s going on.
“If we had the media coverage we have now back when I was playing in the 00s, this league would have been a different place, because that was when football was at its prime and we weren’t able to give it the coverage that it deserved back then.
“There’s a lot more coverage now, but the standard has fallen back. There’s plenty of newspaper coverage, there’s plenty of online coverage, as far as I can see, the Soccer Republic show that I work on, the radio coverage, there are live games shown, I think there’s an argument that they could be actually overdoing it, in terms of what we’re showing quality-wise.”
Ryan, meanwhile, feels the league largely has itself to blame for the perceived lack of coverage.
“The sports that are below the top tier — they get that level of coverage, because they have been smart enough, because they market themselves a certain way, they market themselves around events, they market themselves around the stories behind it. They don’t market it on x versus y, they give you a story behind it. They give you a reason to care beyond the simplicity of the local rivalry. They understand that and they build these stories over time. They don’t just say okay, this player did that, the end.
“One of the great things about Monday Night Soccer was that it was able to craft those stories, even if the sport itself didn’t seem into it… I remember the dark days of the 1990s when cup semi-finals and finals were the only games shown and if you were lucky, the big league title match.
“These are investment decisions and right now, heavy coverage of League of Ireland is not a smart investment decision. They need to look for stories that will sell more papers, that will get more page views, get more listeners on the air. That’s what you’d sell. You don’t sell ‘ugh, we’re the best league in the country, follow us’. That’s just going to make me go ‘yeah…’
As regards the future, Landy is pessimistic, suggesting that First Division clubs in particular are vulnerable to further problems off the field.
“Look at Bray’s recent teetering on the brink. It’s a minor miracle Drogheda United are still an entity. They are just two examples in the Premier Division in recent years. It’s the First Division where worries should lie. Bar a minority of hardcore types, the First Division hardly makes ends meet with paltry attendances and seemingly no wider interest… Kilkenny City folded citing ‘lack of finance, poor results and paltry attendances’. It’s a similar story for many.”
(Liam Miller is one of the more high-profile players to have returned to the League of Ireland recently)
He adds that the recent entry of a couple of high-profile players can be beneficial to the league, even if their marriage is one of convenience more so than anything else.
“It might have a knock-on effect. I can envisage fans of smaller or regional sides coming out to catch Liam Miller or Keith Fahey when they come to town, fans that perhaps wouldn’t tend to go every second week.
“As for the perception [of the league], I do wonder whether it will make a real difference. McPhail and Miller — who you’d put in a bracket alongside the possibly returning Damien Duff — are coming towards the end of their careers. They want to raise their children at home. Are they home because of the strength of the league? Really, no.”
Byrne, in contrast, is a little more optimistic about the league’s standard. In reference to those now-infamous Roddy Collins comments from last season, he says:
“I’ve no doubt there are players good enough in this league to play at a seriously high standard. A good portion of players in this league would easily play League Two football.
“I’d be looking way beyond League Two — I’d be looking at the Championship and even the Premier League.”
Top players such as Fahey and Miller, according to Byrne, need better promotion in order for the league to thrive.
“I love seeing players of that quality coming back here, but I’ve seen it time and again, we don’t profile them. If we don’t really promote them, or give kids a particular player to focus on, we’re pissing in the wind.
“The likes of Liam Miller, Colin Healy, Keith Fahey… These players should be on billboards, they should be selling advertising products, and not just them but the young guys coming through as well.”
Ryan, likewise, reiterates the importance of marketing — something rugby in this country, to cite one example, has been especially successful at in recent times, even if it has been helped by Irish teams’ unprecedented levels of success in the sport.
“The results on the pitch can’t be your end game. At Leinster Rugby, they know that. They obviously have had a lot of success, but they aren’t the force they were in Europe now, but they’re still getting the bodies in the gate because: 1. They’re playing at a high level. And 2. It’s turned into an event — it’s part of people’s week.
“And so long as they’re not utterly dreadful, they’re still going to be part of people’s week no matter what level they drop to long term. And that’s what you have to think about, much more so than whether you win or lose.”
You’ve heard the journalists’ view, but what about the fans and players? Keep an eye on the site during the week for parts 2 and 3 of our series, in which supporters and contemporary players respectively look at the league’s current problems and the challenges that lie ahead.
What are your thoughts on the League of Ireland as we approach a new season? Let us know in the comments section below.
