Gavin Cooney

THE FAI’S NIGHTMARE Nations League outcome has come to pass, with Ireland drawn into the same group as Israel, Austria and Kosovo. 

We don’t yet know precisely when the games will be – Uefa will publish the dates on Friday morning, while venues can be confirmed up to 120 days in advance of the game – but we know that Ireland will be turning up to play. 

It means Irish football finds itself in an extraordinary situation, as they are now set to play an opponent whom both the FAI membership and the Irish manager have called to be banned. 

The FAI’s communications department was ready for the draw’s outcome, publishing a statement within minutes of the draw to confirm that they would be fulfilling the games against Israel.

While the FAI acknowledged they acted as they were mandated by their members in submitting a motion to Uefa last year calling for Israel to be banned from competition, they also said they’d be fulfilling the fixtures because they’d risk being disqualified from the Nations League if they didn’t play the games. 

The FAI’s statement carries echoes of the reaction of Basketball Ireland when they resisted calls here to boycott a 2024 women’s qualifier against Israel: that effectively Israel’s participation was a matter for the overall governing body, and they would not harm themselves or their sport by refusing to play them. (John Feehan, the CEO of Basketball Ireland, put it bluntly in saying that he was “not prepared to destroy my sport for a gesture that will have no impact”.)

The FAI’s commitment to playing Israel in this evening’s statement was no grand departure or change of mind from Abbotstown, but instead the transition of their stance from hypothetical to real. 

At an FAI EGM last year, a motion tabled by Bohemians calling for Israel to be banned from Uefa competitions was passed by a significant majority – 74 votes in favour, with seven against and two abstentions – but that very day, FAI president Paul Cooke told the media that Ireland would play Israel if drawn together in a Uefa competition. He also revealed he had contacted the Israel FA earlier that day in advance of the vote “out of courtesy and respect”.

And so the FAI carried out the demands of their members and wrote to Uefa on 20 November last year, addressing their letter to Uefa president, Alexander Ceferin. With the sending of this letter, the FAI became the first and only Uefa member association to formally request that Uefa ban Israel from competition. (It earned them a condemnation from the Hungarian FA, communicated to the FAI in advance of Ireland’s 3-2 World Cup qualifier win in Budapest.)

Bohemians’ motion alleged the violation of two statutes of Uefa and Fifa’s rules, accusing the Israel FA of organising games on illegal Palestinian settlements and of failing to implement an effective anti-racism and anti-discrimination policy, which is mandated by Uefa and Fifa.

These were the same grounds as the Palestine FA brought to Fifa Congress in May 2024 when they called for Israel to be banned, a decision Fifa kicked to a couple of committees and on which they have still not returned an actual decision, more than 20 months on. 

Uefa replied to the FAI acknowledging receipt of their letter on 27 November, and replied on 16 December to tell the FAI their motion had been “duly noted”, and pointed to their decision on 19 October 2023 stating that no games would be played in Israel owing to security concerns. That appears to have been the end of the FAI’s formal objections to Israel’s participation, because no motion on Israel’s continued participation was introduced at the Uefa Congress that preceded the draw. 

Whatever about relations with the Israeli FA and Uefa, the FAI are likely to face political pressure among their own constituencies. We understand some of those who voted in favour of the EGM motion last year were unimpressed by the tone of Cooke’s comments to the media after the vote, and it is worth monitoring the reaction of those who voted in favour of the motion, and whether they feel the FAI leadership was sufficiently forceful in communicating Irish football’s message on the matter to Uefa. 

They will also face conventional political pressure: Sinn Féin have quickly called for a boycott and the Taoiseach is sure to be asked about it at a scheduled media appearance on Friday morning.

But while we know the games will be played, we don’t yet know where they will be played. 

Israel have been playing their home games in neutral venues since October 2023, and held their World Cup qualifiers last year in Hungary. A limited number of tickets for these games have been made available to home and away fans. 

As it stands, their home game against Ireland will have to be held in a neutral location, although the Israel FA posted on social media after the draw that, “While we prepare for the challenge on the pitch, our biggest hope is to bring the game back HOME. There is no feeling like playing in front of our fans in Israel”. 

Whether Uefa and Fifa would sanction this in time remains doubtful, but some high-level international sport has returned to Israel: EuroLeague basketball games returned to Israel, initially in Jerusalem, in December. 

Meanwhile, teams have generally hosted Israel as normal, although Belgium cited security concerns in deciding not to host their 2024 Nations League game with Israel in Brussels: they instead staged it behind closed doors in Hungary. 

Hosting the game in Dublin would throw up significant security concerns, and it is an open question at this point as to whether Israel would agree to travel here: after all, they closed their embassy here at the end of 2024, accusing the Irish government of “extreme anti-Israel policies”. 

This will be one set of fixtures around which nobody will be asking about the significance of the Nations League.