IRELAND IS SO flush with corporate tax receipts that we are taking our place alongside the sport-branding nations of the Earth by setting up our own sovereign wealth fund.
But unlike your UAEs, your Qatars, and your Saudi Arabias, rather than use our wealth to pay superstars’ wages and try to win the Champions League, we should use it to fund the sport here.
The FAI today unveiled their 15-year, €863 million infrastructure plan, which accentuates the pitiful state of the sport’s infrastructure in Ireland while offering a clear menu of correctives. It is a comprehensive and ambitious document, and the kind of work the FAI should have been doing decades ago. But, hey, maybe it’s better lamentably late than never.
Reading the document should force a realignment on the expectations of success for Irish teams on a European and international stage, as it starkly lays out the sport’s lack of investment and the substandard facilities with which generations of players and volunteers have had to put up.
The FAI’s report plainly states the well-known issues with facilities at League of Ireland grounds, which they describe as “archaic”. They are clearly strangling growth, with some clubs turning fan away from men’s games this season owing to a lack of capacity. Of the biggest 40 sports stadiums in Ireland by capacity, only three – the Aviva Stadium, Tallaght Stadium, and Turner’s Cross – stage football. Parnell Park, too small for the Dubs, is bigger than every football ground in Ireland aside from the Aviva.
The target of developing 10 LOI grounds with capacities of between 10,000 and 20,000, however, seems to stretch beyond the ambitious to the unrealistic, given Dalymount Park is expected to cater for around 8,000 fans when it’s finished. The plan to do this work in phases – one main stand, followed by another facing it, then followed by stands behind either goal – do at least offer a few offramps. Another issue may be building costs in Ireland, which have a unique propensity to scale vastly beyond expectation, and more detail is needed around the various contributions of clubs.
Even more stark are the problems at grassroots level. Only 3% of surveyed clubs have more than one changing room per full-size pitch. 23% of surveyed clubs have no showers in their changing rooms. 38% have no female toilets. 61% have no toilets in their referees’ rooms. 43% of all grass pitches are rated as ‘moderate’, ‘poor’, or ‘very poor.’ 31% of clubs have had to find a second location out of which to work to meet demand.
79.3% of clubs say their biggest barrier to making upgrades is a lack of funding, but the report also exposes a deep flaw with the Sports Capital Grant Programme.
To qualify for a grant, a club must either own their facility or have at least 15 years remaining on their lease. But in Irish football, 55% of grassroots clubs do not own their facility, and more than half of these are on leases of less than 15 years. Therefore, 282 of the surveyed clubs are not even eligible to apply for a Sports Capital Grant to improve their facilities.
It is also a costly exercise to run a club. John Moran of Melview of Longford – whose former player James Abankwah made his full Serie A debut last weekend – got in touch to say his club’s overheads average €1000 a week during the season.
Plus, 21% of clubs renting facilities do so from private owners, which is a significant chunk of money flowing out of the sport.
The FAI want to build eight regional headquarters around the country, beneath which will sit at least four centres of excellence per region, all to ensure that nobody has to travel more than 30 minutes to play football.
CEO Jonathan Hill plainly stated today that the sport in Ireland has suffered from under-investment for 25 years, with Chairman Roy Barrett adding it is a symptom of the country’s wider lack of investment in sport. It is difficult to disagree with this, given Ireland spends 0.4% of GDP on sport, which is half the average and a quarter of what is spent by the Nordic countries. In these rankings, we languish at the bottom between Malta and Bulgaria.
A third pillar of this infrastructure plan is the building of a National Football Centre at Abbottstown as, 21 years on from Saipan, Irish international teams still don’t have full changing room facilities when they go to work. There are no proper analysis facilities either, with staff working out of a single, repurposed container plonked by the side of one of the training pitches. Given the absence of any real social return on investment on this and its relatively narrow use, however, it is the element of the plan least deserving of taxpayer money. (Whichever minister who would do the official opening might get their name on a plaque by Michel Platini’s, mind.)
The FAI say they will cover 20% of the total cost of implementing their plans, with local authorities contributing 20% but the majority (a forecast €517 million) will have to come from the State. The Association have suggested a number of potential revenue streams in this regard, one of which is the betting tax, which became a fraught topic last month in the wake of news emerging of the FAI-commissioned report on it.
The FAI were not exactly celebrated for raising the issue of the State’s funding to the horse and greyhound racing industries – Taoiseach Leo Varadkar criticised them for supposedly pitting a sport against the racing industry – but the scale of the reaction was interesting, suggesting there is at least a constituency large enough to sustain the debate. And in spite of criticism, senior FAI figures were content with the fact the issue had become a matter of public conversation.
The Association want the betting levy to increase from two to three percent and to benefit from that increase, which would earn them roughly €20 million a year. Given the State would commit €34.5 million were they to agree to every single request in the FAI’s infrastructure plan, that single change to the betting tax would be transformative.
Plus, there is money elsewhere. The State ran a €5 billion surplus in 2022, recording a tax intake of €83 billion.
“There are significant surpluses and there will be next year”, said Barrett at a press event earlier today. “The government decides how it will spend those. It makes sense in any economy, when you have surpluses like that, to spend a chunk of it on improving infrastructure. We have lots of needs in this society, with the housing crisis, the housing needs, but we also have a sporting infrastructure deficit.”
The FAI’s previous regime must own its responsibility for football’s dejected contemporary state, and one of its failures was its totally wrong focus. Rather than building up a base from which the sport would eventually sustain itself, the senior men’s international team was hosed with money in the hope they would strike gold at major tournaments and fund the sport from the top down.
That plan has now been exposed as being (at best) outdated, as we are now missing out on qualification to the countries who did invest in their infrastructure and are now reaping the rewards of blooming football industries. Given the feckless FAI administrations of the past didn’t direct their energy and focus in the right directions, perhaps it’s no surprise that there has been a lack of State investment across the last quarter-century.
But the FAI have now finally got their priorities right. The front of their infrastructure plan reads This is football’s time but it might well have read It’s about time.
Negotiating the PR of asking the taxpayer for more than €35 million a year three years after they were given €30 million as a bailout for financial mismanagement is, admittedly, tricky, but the FAI have been subject to a very high level of financial and governance oversight across the last four years and it doesn’t diminish the realities this infrastructure report sets out.
“The Association is in a very different place than it was and what happened prior to 2019 will never happen again”, said Hill today.
The FAI’s case is coherent and compelling, and there is no strong argument against its being backed.
