Gavin Cooney

AND SO DAWNS another significant day in the history of the Football Association of Ireland. 

The FAI’s 135-member General Assembly will vote tonight on a key part of the Association’s Player Pathways Plan: whether to switch the calendar of underage and amateur football to a summer season, thus aligning it with the professional game. 

It won’t all happen at once. Tonight’s vote is to implement the change on a phased basis, and so 5-12 year old age groups will switch in 2026, along with the FAI’s national competitions, such as the Junior and Intermediate Cup. Thirteen-16 year olds would then move to a calendar season in 2027, with all youth and adult amateur leagues moving in 2028. 

Its a hybrid meeting, where delegates can either vote in person at the Carlton Hotel in Blanchardstown or else dial in and vote online. The FAI wanted it this way to maximise turnout, and thus their hopes of getting the vote over the line. 

The FAI need a simple majority to pass the resolution, but it’s expected to be a close-run thing. 

The board of the FAI have unanimously endorsed the aligning of the calendars and all other parts of the Pathways Plan, though rather than vote this through themselves and dictate its implementation to the FAI’s affiliate leagues, they have decided to kick it to a vote to the Assembly. 

Cynics would say this is a means of some board members killing the plan without being seen as responsible for doing so, but CEO David Courell instead says a member-wide vote is the best means of ensuring its implementation. 

“We want our community to come together, for too long Irish football has been divergent”, he says. “While we may need to make contentious decisions, we would like to do it in as collaborative a manner as possible so those decisions, when arrived at, can move forward, instead of being second guessed and questioned for eternity.” 

Ireland stands alone as the only one of Uefa’s 55 members to run separate calendars for different parts of the game, albeit, in typical Irish football fashion, even our inconsistency is inconsistent. Some leagues, including Mayo, run summer football seasons. 

The Pathways Plan is the result of 11,000 hours of consultation at workshops across the country, and its main architect is the FAI’s chief football officer, Marc Canham.

The FAI’s main motivation in aligning the calendars is pretty simple: it’s to make the most of summer weather and give players more opportunities to play football. The Pathways Plan estimates that the football calendar in Ireland runs for only 30 weeks a year, with very little provision for games at U8-U11 level. 

Aligning the calendars would also unite the sport in Ireland. The FAI want to cohere the game in a single pyramid, in which any club could theoretically dream of ascending the ranks to full professional, LOI status. 

The FAI believe this is the first major stop in ensuring that playing opportunities are more evenly spread across the country. As it stands, Dublin and Cork are the only counties in Ireland which offers every level of the game – youth, junior, intermediate, and professional – and that is only in the men’s game. No county in Ireland offers the same in the women’s game. 

Tonight’s vote has potentially historic consequences. 

Unsurprisingly for an organisation itself born out a split, the first century of the FAI’s existence has been defined by divisions and fractures; the sport in Ireland can be said to consist of wildly different parts of the game who are united in nothing but mutual suspicion.

But we shouldn’t be surprised that the sport on which the early State declared a fatwa could not build the brilliant, unified structure of the GAA. 

For decades the FAI existed as a tiny organisation that existed mainly to administer the men’s senior international team. Their problem was the sport’s booming interest in Ireland, which was turbocharged when their international team tasted success under Jack Charlton. Leagues thus popped up around the country, largely to arrange games and serve local interest in simply playing football.

Clubs belonged to leagues affiliated with the FAI, rather than belonging to the FAI itself. 

Hence, for decades, local leagues have wielded decision-making power, and this ancient impulse is providing some of the opposition to the FAI’s calendar alignment plans.

The FAI, for their part, are at pains to point out that leagues will still have the power and flexibility to decide on their own fixtures and competition formats. 

Opposition is also rooted in fears and practicalities, with both football and juvenile leagues in Carlow issuing a statement saying their clubs have given them a mandate to vote against the FAI’s proposal, stating clashes with exams, the GAA season, and holidays risked damaging playing numbers. The FAI’s response to this has been to tell leagues they do not necessarily have to run leagues throughout the whole height of summer, but can arrange tournaments and blitzes. Anything, in other words, to ensure players have more football available to them for a greater portion of the year. 

FAI figures have spent the last few weeks fielding calls, clarifying details and lobbying members to try and get tonight’s vote over the line.

It is likely to be a knife-edge result, with opposition expected from at least part of the schoolboy and adult amateur sectors of the sport. 

A defeat tonight for the FAI would be damaging to the Player Pathways Plan, but it would also show that the Irish football community are ultimately still resistant to change. 

In that scenario, the fractured status quo and Ireland’s status as a European outlier will abide.