THIS IS THE world in which we live: the FAI would rather take on the rain than some of their own people.
Amid all that’s been happening of late, you may have missed the FAI quietly condemning their published vision of summer soccer and an aligned calendar to the scrapheap of ideas.
Director of Football John Martin held a media briefing last week, at which he belatedly introduced himself to the Irish public while outlining the new structures and priorities at the new, slimmed-down, post-redundancies FAI.
Martin is an impressive communicator: he didn’t shy away from some of the challenges facing the game here – specifically the development of elite women’s players – while he has a vast experience on which to draw, having been an underage team-mate of Robbie Keane’s to a League of Ireland first-team player to the CEO of Shamrock Rovers, all buttressed by the perspective of some time spent working in the private sector and away from football.
And like all serious-thinking FAI administrators before him, Martin is aware that the Irish football family is fractured and squabbling and would be infinitely better off if they could all just get along. One of his tasks, he said, is to rebuild trust, and this awareness has led to some clever means of family counselling. Included in the FAI’s new employee structures, for example, are four dedicated liaisons with each of the provincial football associations, there to improve communication and relations with some of our biggest beasts of amateur football.
Martin had a pithy line to sum up his outreach to Irish football’s eternally sceptical grassroots, saying he rejects the perception that anyone with an acronym in Irish football is demonised. This is all good stuff, but there is a point at which outreach becomes a paralysing kind of compromise.
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Martin’s predecessor was Marc Canham, made infamous by a couple of farcical managerial search processes but whose singular piece of work was the football pathways plan, a blueprint for the organisation of the whole of the game here through to 2036. Among its main proposals – and certainly its most contentious – was to implement an aligned calendar, whereby all of Ireland’s adult amateur and underage leagues would move to the single calendar season like the League of Ireland’s.
The motivation behind it was obvious: at the moment, a majority of leagues play the traditional winter season, with which our ever-wetter weather is continually wreaking havoc and forcing postponements and cancellations. As Canham’s plan made clear, footballers at all levels in Ireland are simply not given enough games to play, with the national football calendar lasting an average of 30 weeks.
Scenes from an Irish winter. Ryan Byrne / INPHO
Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO
And with so many ramshackle, underfunded football facilities across the country deprived of 4G pitches that are immune to the weather, swapping to arranging games in better weather was the quickest and cheapest means to ensure more people played more football more regularly. Plus, we are the only one of Uefa’s 55 members running different calendars at different levels of the game here: if it was such a good idea, you’d think someone else would have copied the Irish system to this point.
Moreover, Canham and co. stressed that this recommendation was not his, but a product of the 11,000 hours of consultations between the FAI and its stakeholders on various roadshows around the country. Many of said stakeholders nonetheless said they felt ignored, and there was fierce resistance to the move among some grassroots leagues, who argued that a move to summer football would pit football against the GAA and therefore lead to the loss of players, with potentially dire consequences for some clubs.
Amid these outcries, the calendar alignment was carried by a slim majority vote at an FAI EGM, with president Paul Cooke praising delegates for “changing the face of Irish football”.
Soon, however, Canham was out, and the same Paul Cooke who had told everyone they had changed the face of football was writing a letter to leagues explaining they could apply for an exemption and delay their adoption of the aligned calendar until 1 January 2028.
Speaking last week, however, Martin said he would not be mandating anything regarding the aligned calendar, adding that its initial consultation process may not have been as wide-ranging as it needed to be, particularly when it came to talking to parents and their kids. My job, said Martin, is to mend the fractures caused by the aligned calendar.
We can take this as the quiet eulogy for the aligned calendar, for that which is not fiercely mandated in Irish football will definitely not happen. The FAI may publicly say they are committed to the aligned calendar and would encourage every league in the country to move in that direction, without fiercely demanding it from the top, then it will not be implemented right across the country. Our present gapped and federalised system will go on and on and on.
Martin may be entirely fair in saying Canham’s consultation wasn’t up to snuff, and, for sure, its sceptics expressed many good-faith concerns and objections to its adoption. Plus, it should be in Martin’s remit to ensure good relations with all parts of the game here: Canham, having taken an unfair amount of the PR flak over the marathon hiring of Heimir Hallgrimsson, had become wildly unpopular and left within 14 months of the unveiling of his pathways plan, going on to chase high performance roles and swearing to himself to avoid grassroots politicking forever more. Martin appears cannier than Canham in this respect, and we can expect the latter’s pathways plan to be pulped in favour of an updated – and diluted – version of the plan bearing Martin’s signature.
But the result of all of this is that the rest of us are left to reflect on a profound, years-long waste of everybody’s time, far exceeding 11,000 hours.
The FAI remain the Irish sporting organisation unable to agree with itself.
Having proposed a bold and drastic move to alter its own fundamentals, the FAI have now bottled it.
The sport has instead decided to stick with its inhibiting status quo, content to merely tinker at its own edges rather than take ownership of its limitations.
This is how Irish football is condemned to limp eternally on, utterly disinterested in harnessing its collective potential, addicted to the power to tell anyone who will listen that, around here, our primary concern is that we retain control of our own mediocrity.
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FAI’s botched summer soccer move another missed opportunity for Irish football
THIS IS THE world in which we live: the FAI would rather take on the rain than some of their own people.
Amid all that’s been happening of late, you may have missed the FAI quietly condemning their published vision of summer soccer and an aligned calendar to the scrapheap of ideas.
Director of Football John Martin held a media briefing last week, at which he belatedly introduced himself to the Irish public while outlining the new structures and priorities at the new, slimmed-down, post-redundancies FAI.
Martin is an impressive communicator: he didn’t shy away from some of the challenges facing the game here – specifically the development of elite women’s players – while he has a vast experience on which to draw, having been an underage team-mate of Robbie Keane’s to a League of Ireland first-team player to the CEO of Shamrock Rovers, all buttressed by the perspective of some time spent working in the private sector and away from football.
And like all serious-thinking FAI administrators before him, Martin is aware that the Irish football family is fractured and squabbling and would be infinitely better off if they could all just get along. One of his tasks, he said, is to rebuild trust, and this awareness has led to some clever means of family counselling. Included in the FAI’s new employee structures, for example, are four dedicated liaisons with each of the provincial football associations, there to improve communication and relations with some of our biggest beasts of amateur football.
Martin had a pithy line to sum up his outreach to Irish football’s eternally sceptical grassroots, saying he rejects the perception that anyone with an acronym in Irish football is demonised. This is all good stuff, but there is a point at which outreach becomes a paralysing kind of compromise.
Martin’s predecessor was Marc Canham, made infamous by a couple of farcical managerial search processes but whose singular piece of work was the football pathways plan, a blueprint for the organisation of the whole of the game here through to 2036. Among its main proposals – and certainly its most contentious – was to implement an aligned calendar, whereby all of Ireland’s adult amateur and underage leagues would move to the single calendar season like the League of Ireland’s.
The motivation behind it was obvious: at the moment, a majority of leagues play the traditional winter season, with which our ever-wetter weather is continually wreaking havoc and forcing postponements and cancellations. As Canham’s plan made clear, footballers at all levels in Ireland are simply not given enough games to play, with the national football calendar lasting an average of 30 weeks.
And with so many ramshackle, underfunded football facilities across the country deprived of 4G pitches that are immune to the weather, swapping to arranging games in better weather was the quickest and cheapest means to ensure more people played more football more regularly. Plus, we are the only one of Uefa’s 55 members running different calendars at different levels of the game here: if it was such a good idea, you’d think someone else would have copied the Irish system to this point.
Moreover, Canham and co. stressed that this recommendation was not his, but a product of the 11,000 hours of consultations between the FAI and its stakeholders on various roadshows around the country. Many of said stakeholders nonetheless said they felt ignored, and there was fierce resistance to the move among some grassroots leagues, who argued that a move to summer football would pit football against the GAA and therefore lead to the loss of players, with potentially dire consequences for some clubs.
Amid these outcries, the calendar alignment was carried by a slim majority vote at an FAI EGM, with president Paul Cooke praising delegates for “changing the face of Irish football”.
Soon, however, Canham was out, and the same Paul Cooke who had told everyone they had changed the face of football was writing a letter to leagues explaining they could apply for an exemption and delay their adoption of the aligned calendar until 1 January 2028.
Speaking last week, however, Martin said he would not be mandating anything regarding the aligned calendar, adding that its initial consultation process may not have been as wide-ranging as it needed to be, particularly when it came to talking to parents and their kids. My job, said Martin, is to mend the fractures caused by the aligned calendar.
We can take this as the quiet eulogy for the aligned calendar, for that which is not fiercely mandated in Irish football will definitely not happen. The FAI may publicly say they are committed to the aligned calendar and would encourage every league in the country to move in that direction, without fiercely demanding it from the top, then it will not be implemented right across the country. Our present gapped and federalised system will go on and on and on.
Martin may be entirely fair in saying Canham’s consultation wasn’t up to snuff, and, for sure, its sceptics expressed many good-faith concerns and objections to its adoption. Plus, it should be in Martin’s remit to ensure good relations with all parts of the game here: Canham, having taken an unfair amount of the PR flak over the marathon hiring of Heimir Hallgrimsson, had become wildly unpopular and left within 14 months of the unveiling of his pathways plan, going on to chase high performance roles and swearing to himself to avoid grassroots politicking forever more. Martin appears cannier than Canham in this respect, and we can expect the latter’s pathways plan to be pulped in favour of an updated – and diluted – version of the plan bearing Martin’s signature.
But the result of all of this is that the rest of us are left to reflect on a profound, years-long waste of everybody’s time, far exceeding 11,000 hours.
The FAI remain the Irish sporting organisation unable to agree with itself.
Having proposed a bold and drastic move to alter its own fundamentals, the FAI have now bottled it.
The sport has instead decided to stick with its inhibiting status quo, content to merely tinker at its own edges rather than take ownership of its limitations.
This is how Irish football is condemned to limp eternally on, utterly disinterested in harnessing its collective potential, addicted to the power to tell anyone who will listen that, around here, our primary concern is that we retain control of our own mediocrity.
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