RUMMAGE THROUGH THE rich archive and tell us what has been the FAI’s single greatest historical mistake.
The failure to arrange football in Ireland on an all-island basis, as the IRFU do with rugby?
The failure to develop the League of Ireland?
Saipan?
John Delaney?
Okay, none of these should exactly be chalked down as successes, but this column has recently become convinced that the greatest error was something else, something foundational.
The FAI called themselves by the wrong name.
How many major tournaments might we have won by now had the first founders declared the constitution of the Football Industry of Ireland?
Would Croatia now be looking for inspiration to develop football and pointing at the State-funded template created by the FII in Ireland?
We ask the question as, across the last fortnight, the FAI has compared football in this country with horse and greyhound racing, following the emergence of details from their commissioned report into the State funding of those two spor-sorry, industries.
Horse and greyhound racing have collectively earned more than €1.5 billion from the State since the establishment of the Horse and Greyhound Fund in 2001, a pot of money that is funded by the national betting tax. That 2% levy is paid by bookmakers on every bet in Ireland, regardless of what sport it is placed on. The FAI argue that a substantial portion of bets are placed on football, so they either want a commensurate share of the fund or to see the tax bumped to 3% and a benefit that way.
What has been made clear in the response to the report is that, unlike football, horse and greyhound racing are not defined as mere sports, for they have transcended to the official status of Industry.
“I don’t think you should pit sport against the equestrian industry”, said Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in response to the FAI’s report. “The equestrian industry, Horse Sports Ireland, stud farms… employs tens of thousands of people. It’s worth around a billion euros per year. If you want to do them down, don’t pit them against sport, that’s not fair.”
A 2009 government-commissioned review of the Horse and Greyhound Fund took as its starting point the basis that the two activities are industries rather than sports. The report delineates them by stating that the primary beneficiary of an industry is “the economy as a whole”, while the primary beneficiary of a sport “are those who participate.”
This is a deeply flawed argument. The economy is the sum of production and consumption which flows from the activity of people and is maintained by people’s continued participation within it. Thus anything that benefits the economy should benefit the people participating in it. Rather like sport.
But leaving that aside for the moment, this deft act of classification has brought several benefits.
It means, for instance, that horse and greyhound racing are under the remit of the Department of Agriculture and are funded under the aforementioned Horse and Greyhound Fund, so don’t have to squabble with other sports for a cut of the State’s measly sports budget. (Sport made up 0.4% of the State’s total expenditure in 2019, which is half the EU average.)
And it is this status as an industry that has proved a bulwark against questions of the scale of funding to the two activities, as was seen when the Taoiseach reached for the familiar barricades a fortnight ago.
The basis for all these figures is a Deloitte report commissioned in 2017 by Horse Racing Ireland titled Economic Impact of Irish Breeding and Racing, which reported that horse racing returns €30 to the Irish economy for every €1 invested. (A 3,000% yield on investment: Forget horses – this industry is heading for unicorn status.)
But if only the FAI had only itself as overseeing an industry, it could have commissioned a similar report to show the economic impact of football.
If the League of Ireland could have be defined as a “shop window” for top talent – as racing provides for horses – the FAI could have included in the total yield for 2018 the €500,000 Manchester City paid to Shamrock Rovers for Gavin Bazunu, or in 2020 the €1.7 million Bohemians made in a sell-on clause when Spurs bought Matt Doherty from Wolves, or, in the future, whatever Bohs will bring in from their cut of Evan Ferguson’s inevitably lucrative transfer from Brighton.
They could also have totalled the number of jobs the football industry supports, as Deloitte did for the HRI. They could have included under that jobs total people whose jobs are a result of the “ripple effect” of their industry, as Deloitte did for the HRI. (Theirs came to circa 7,700 people, by the way.)
The FAI’s report could have found plenty of people who owe their livelihoods to the ripple effect of football. The people running the chip van at Dalymount Park, for instance. Or the sports shop selling Sligo Rovers jerseys. Or the bar staff at the Maldron Hotel opposite Tallaght Stadium. When you’re an industry, these figures all seem to add up pretty quickly.
To get to the first obvious point: horse racing is not just an industry, as sports and industries are not mutually exclusive. It’s possible to have a sport that operates an industry, as horse racing undoubtedly does. The scale of that industry has been questioned by the FAI’s betting tax report, but the fact that industry exists is beyond debate.
Equally, football is blatantly a sport, but it has the potential to develop an industry too. To do so is the FAI’s overarching ambition.
And to get to the second obvious point: horse racing is a sport.
The results and fixtures are printed in The Racing Post, not The Financial Times; Sky Sports Racing is listed among the sports channels. It is loved and admired because it shakes the soul and thrills the senses: it’s as rich a sporting canvas as any other in upsets, fairytales, improbabilities, and the breath-stabbing stuff of sporting excellence.
To say that it’s just an industry is patronising to those who love it, but the classification is used as a means of deflecting debate away from the outsized scale of its State funding in comparison to other sports in the country, of which horse and greyhound racing are two of many.
Plus, under the definition of sport as something for which you have to change your shoes…the horses have to do that too.
