MARC CANHAM HELD a press briefing in the FAI offices on 24 March, at which he was asked if he planned to be at the FAI medium-term.
“I don’t look too far,” he replied. “In terms of our [pathways] plan and our vision, it’s 12 years and there are loads of things to do but in terms of my own self, I don’t look too far in the future.”
Canham wasn’t kidding about not looking too far into the future. Less than a month into that future, and he has announced his decision to quit as the FAI’s chief football officer.
That press briefing was scored to background murmurings about Canham’s position. Multiple sources had told The 42 that Canham had become a less visible presence around the office across the last month, though he rejected claims he had in fact left Malahide to move back to England. He is also known to have applied for at least one role in English football during his time at the FAI.
He had also suffered a series of high-profile public kickings from significant Irish football figures as the Colin Healy controversy lingered on – most notably from James McClean and Stephen Bradley – and sources described him of looking “worn out” and “broken” by the deluge of negativity.
Canham, though, has insisted his FAI exit has nothing to do with the events of recent months, and he told senior football colleagues this morning his decision was predominately driven by personal reasons.
His exit statement arrived with a jolt to journalists’ email inboxes at 11.08am this morning, as there was no forewarning it was on its way. Some senior colleagues were informed of Canham’s exit less than 20 minutes before the news went public. The rest of the FAI staff were informed of the news by a circular email.
“After much consideration, I have made the decision to leave the Association and relocate back to England,” said Canham in his farewell statement. “This decision has not been an easy one to come to, but I believe that the time is right to explore new personal and professional opportunities for me and my family.”
Canham is due to fully finish at the FAI in three months’ time, and its unclear as of yet as to what his next job will be, though it’s expected to be in England.
Canham will continue for now in his role to facilitate a handover, though it is unclear to whom, as the FAI say there will be an interim appointment to cover the gap between Canham’s exit and the appointment of a full-time successor. Assistant director of football Shane Robinson or head of coach education and development Niall O’Regan are seen as the likeliest to step up on an interim basis.
After the initial bombshell impact of the news, The 42 sought reaction from across the game in Ireland to Canham’s exit.
The general response: this is a shock, but it’s not a surprise.
**********
Canham was hired as the FAI’s director of football in June 2022, succeeding Ruud Dokter.
Canham, then just 39, arrived to Ireland as a relative unknown. He worked with the English Football Association between 2007 and 2012, working in grassroots football with clubs and schools before spending a year as the head of academy coaching at Bristol City.
From there Canham joined the Premier League, initially working with clubs to implement their transformative elite player performance plan before ascending to the role of director of coaching.
The academy role with the Premier League theoretically stood him in good stead for what awaited in Irish football: the shift of developing players at local boys’ clubs to professional Premier League academies was analogous to what would happen in Irish football post-Brexit. (As it happened, the FAI’s pathways plan does not advocate using professional academies until U14 level, whereas Premier League set-ups kick in from U9s.)
Canham’s broader background was deemed an advantage in the recruitment process, with some candidates coming from a solely coaching background. He is understood to have been the unanimous choice of the recruitment panel, though former Irish underage national coach and Brighton academy head John Morling was installed as his deputy, primarily as an experienced hand to help guide Canham through the unique terrain of Irish football.
Morling has since left and taken up a role as technical director at the Hong Kong FA – he would be a strong candidate with support among some influential FAI figures should he decide to apply for the job again.
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Canham arrived with an impressive reputation, and one Abbottstown source recalls a conversation with Premier League CEO Richard Masters, who said they thought so highly of Canham that he “was only on loan” to the FAI.
Canham found himself working in a very different financial environment in Irish football when compared to the Premier League, but said he was attracted to the job by the opportunity to shape a whole country’s football system from top to bottom, in spite of the financial constraints.
He also found himself working in a very different political environment. Charlie McCreevey’s old line that he would teach any putative Fianna Fáil TD real politics by making them work at the FAI for six months still rings as true as ever.
To give an indication of the challenges the role brings, one prominent figure working in the Irish game, who would also fit the criteria for Canham’s successor, told The 42 that the current political sphere of the FAI makes it an unappealing job.
Canham was hired during the tenure of CEO Jonathan Hill, another Englishman who had worked with the FA. Canham, though, was eager to point out that he and Hill had not worked together at the FA, and he further differentiated himself from Hill by relocating his family to Malahide. The now former CEO earned constant criticism for his decision to stay at Castleknock Hotel and commute from his London home.
By the time of his exit after a fiasco about payments wrongly made in lieu of holiday days not taken, Hill believed there had been an anti-English streak among some of the game’s stakeholders, and believed he and Canham had been targeted as a result.
Canham never gave any opinion on that topic, but one staffer recalls Canham being taken aback at a grassroots event when he was told, “be careful bringing your British ideas over here.”
Some of the other aspects of, er, feedback during his country-wide consultation sessions for the pathways plan was shocking, with one person at a session in Cork asking Canham if he knew what silage was. Another person said more directly, “F**k off back to England.”
Canham (right) at a press conference with John O'Shea, former interim senior boss. Ryan Byrne / INPHO
Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO
Crucially, though, this was not a case of someone being run out of town, but rather running out of steam for the challenge of the job, especially when he seemed to be the architect of his own missteps.
Canham’s biggest piece of work was the football pathways plan, an overall blueprint for the structure of the sport in Ireland. That plan was launched 18 months after he joined, with Canham writing in its introduction, “It is clear that football in Ireland is not maximising its potential.”
The pathways plan is a big document with a vast number of policies, with arguably its biggest proposal an alignment of the underage and adult amateur calendars with that of the professional League of Ireland season, which would end Ireland’s outlier status as the only country in Europe running different seasons for different levels of the game.
The move also had symbolic importance: never before had the various warring factions of the game been united in a single, unified pyramid.
Though the FAI board unanimously endorsed the pathways plan and the aligned calendar within it, they decided to get a mandate for it by putting it to a vote among the Association’s General Assembly. While its implementation was passed by narrow majority, there has been fierce opposition in recent weeks to its implementation among some in the schoolboy and adult amateur game.
Thirty-five of 69 leagues at adult and underage level have not yet committed to the move, with the SFAI secretary writing to affiliated leagues that the move has “uncorked overwhelming anger,” while the Leinster FA have written to the FAI board claiming the Assembly vote was “flawed”, and subject to undue staff influence lobbying the professional game to vote it through.
Canham (right) with former women's boss Eileen Gleeson. Ryan Byrne / INPHO
Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO
That such large affiliates are opposing the move when they have elected representatives on an FAI board who unanimously endorsed the very same move is indicative of the kind of political environment into which Canham waded.
As news broke of his departure, some staffers who have dedicated so much time to the project feared it would open the door for the plan to be decimated.
While Canham was handed a very difficult job, too often he did not do enough to make it any easier.
He was the face of the infamous men’s managerial search, which dragged on for 231 days. There were various mis-steps along the way.
Canham was not the sole voice involved in the recruitment process, with Hill, Packie Bonner, president Paul Cooke and latterly Hill’s replacement David Courell part of the recruitment panel.
Canham, though, was made the face of the search, and so it was he who sat down with FAI communications executive Cathal Dervan for an in-house interview when the FAI had to admit their long-mooted “April candidate” had not in fact materialised.
Heimir Hallgrimsson was the left-field appointment the following July, though after two windows and four friendly matches’ worth of potential preparation had been written off. Canham and the FAI have insisted both publicly and privately that Hallgrimsson was always their first-choice candidate, but its a a claim that didn’t take hold in the court of public opinion.
Marc Canham with Heimir Hallgrímsson Ryan Byrne / INPHO
Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO
Hallgrimsson is now looking like a shrewd appointment, but it is Canham’s misfortune that his first true introduction to the wider Irish public was a managerial search that descended to a PR farce.
“I don’t get too carried away with when people criticise me or when people get carried away with me, so I remain balanced,” said Canham after Hallgrimsson was announced and the search was ended.
“Throughout this process I maintained the things that were important to me; integrity and family, doing the right thing both professionally and at home.”
The episode did not appear to hurt his standing at the FAI: Canham was handed a new title, chief football officer, in September 2024. Speaking at the FAI AGM, Courell declined to say if it came with a pay rise, and denied it came about because Canham had an alternative job offer in the UK.
Hallgrimsson praised him for their dealings prior to taking the job, although it has been noted that in terms of influence around senior camps and dealings with the manager more recently, Canham’s understudy Shane Robinson has been doing a lot more of the heavy lifting, and that murmurs relating to Canham’s time in the role began to emerge at the back end of 2024.
Canham is widely acknowledged by the multiple sources we spoke to for this piece as a polite, professional and gentlemanly guy who occasionally found himself out of his depth, especially with regard to the various public controversies that arose during his tenure.
His communication in the media was clinical but lacking in excitement or zeal or, frankly, the sense of improvisation; of saying anything that wasn’t part of a pre-prepared script. This unfairly led to questions about his passion for the job, though some of his public deliveries were unconvincing.
The 42 recall prior to that press briefing a month ago, he prefaced the Q and A by listing off the FAI’s achievements and advancements for which he believed the FAI did not get public credit. Striking about this was the fact he was reading these off a list while hardly making any eye contact with any of the journalists around the table. Surely, if one was so proud of these achievements, they would have them off the top of their head?
League of Ireland clubs found fault with communication around a centralised coaching plan for their academy players, details of which emerged in the Irish Examiner at the start of March last year.
Marc Canham (right) with FAI CEO David Courell at Tolka Park. Morgan Treacy / INPHO
Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO
Canham and Shane Robinson subsequently met clubs over Zoom to further explain the plan, but the clubs reacted by writing a letter to the FAI to say their players would not be participating in the plan, describing it as “poorly conceived” and criticising its communication as “poor at best.”
Canham and CEO David Courell were accused of a lack of compassion and empathy in their public reaction to Colin Healy’s statement in the wake of his exit from the FAI, one of the most unseemly episodes of “he said, he said” in the recent history of Irish football.
That Healy’s statement drew attention to an apparent disconnect between Canham’s view of things – that Healy’s contract was not renewed – and Courell’s – that he has decided to move on – did not speak well of the quality of the FAI’s internal communications.
That the statement announcing Eileen Gleeson’s exit did not even mention Healy is an abject indictment of their external comms.
There also lingers doubt about Gleeson’s position. Formerly the head of women’s and girl’s football, Gleeson took the WNT head coach role on an agreement she would return to the FAI in a staff position after her involvement with the team ended. Canham repeatedly refused to comment when this was raised at the press briefing last month, and the FAI have refused to be drawn at any other point.
This was the backdrop to Canham’s press briefing a month ago, at which he gave the impression he was, as ever, keeping calm and carrying on.
In reality, an exit was lingering at least at the back of his mind.
Questions will now turn to whether the pathways plan survives in Canham’s absence, though he appears confident it will endure and be driven on by those he leaves behind. To that end, it is significant that Courell and Cooke both mentioned the pathways plan in their valedictory quotes in today’s press release.
If the FAI stick by the pathways plan, that at least offers us in the years to come a chance to assess the legacy Marc Canham leaves to Irish football.
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What legacy will Marc Canham leave Irish football?
MARC CANHAM HELD a press briefing in the FAI offices on 24 March, at which he was asked if he planned to be at the FAI medium-term.
“I don’t look too far,” he replied. “In terms of our [pathways] plan and our vision, it’s 12 years and there are loads of things to do but in terms of my own self, I don’t look too far in the future.”
Canham wasn’t kidding about not looking too far into the future. Less than a month into that future, and he has announced his decision to quit as the FAI’s chief football officer.
That press briefing was scored to background murmurings about Canham’s position. Multiple sources had told The 42 that Canham had become a less visible presence around the office across the last month, though he rejected claims he had in fact left Malahide to move back to England. He is also known to have applied for at least one role in English football during his time at the FAI.
He had also suffered a series of high-profile public kickings from significant Irish football figures as the Colin Healy controversy lingered on – most notably from James McClean and Stephen Bradley – and sources described him of looking “worn out” and “broken” by the deluge of negativity.
Canham, though, has insisted his FAI exit has nothing to do with the events of recent months, and he told senior football colleagues this morning his decision was predominately driven by personal reasons.
His exit statement arrived with a jolt to journalists’ email inboxes at 11.08am this morning, as there was no forewarning it was on its way. Some senior colleagues were informed of Canham’s exit less than 20 minutes before the news went public. The rest of the FAI staff were informed of the news by a circular email.
“After much consideration, I have made the decision to leave the Association and relocate back to England,” said Canham in his farewell statement. “This decision has not been an easy one to come to, but I believe that the time is right to explore new personal and professional opportunities for me and my family.”
Canham is due to fully finish at the FAI in three months’ time, and its unclear as of yet as to what his next job will be, though it’s expected to be in England.
Canham will continue for now in his role to facilitate a handover, though it is unclear to whom, as the FAI say there will be an interim appointment to cover the gap between Canham’s exit and the appointment of a full-time successor. Assistant director of football Shane Robinson or head of coach education and development Niall O’Regan are seen as the likeliest to step up on an interim basis.
After the initial bombshell impact of the news, The 42 sought reaction from across the game in Ireland to Canham’s exit.
The general response: this is a shock, but it’s not a surprise.
**********
Canham was hired as the FAI’s director of football in June 2022, succeeding Ruud Dokter.
Canham, then just 39, arrived to Ireland as a relative unknown. He worked with the English Football Association between 2007 and 2012, working in grassroots football with clubs and schools before spending a year as the head of academy coaching at Bristol City.
From there Canham joined the Premier League, initially working with clubs to implement their transformative elite player performance plan before ascending to the role of director of coaching.
The academy role with the Premier League theoretically stood him in good stead for what awaited in Irish football: the shift of developing players at local boys’ clubs to professional Premier League academies was analogous to what would happen in Irish football post-Brexit. (As it happened, the FAI’s pathways plan does not advocate using professional academies until U14 level, whereas Premier League set-ups kick in from U9s.)
Canham’s broader background was deemed an advantage in the recruitment process, with some candidates coming from a solely coaching background. He is understood to have been the unanimous choice of the recruitment panel, though former Irish underage national coach and Brighton academy head John Morling was installed as his deputy, primarily as an experienced hand to help guide Canham through the unique terrain of Irish football.
Morling has since left and taken up a role as technical director at the Hong Kong FA – he would be a strong candidate with support among some influential FAI figures should he decide to apply for the job again.
Canham arrived with an impressive reputation, and one Abbottstown source recalls a conversation with Premier League CEO Richard Masters, who said they thought so highly of Canham that he “was only on loan” to the FAI.
Canham found himself working in a very different financial environment in Irish football when compared to the Premier League, but said he was attracted to the job by the opportunity to shape a whole country’s football system from top to bottom, in spite of the financial constraints.
He also found himself working in a very different political environment. Charlie McCreevey’s old line that he would teach any putative Fianna Fáil TD real politics by making them work at the FAI for six months still rings as true as ever.
To give an indication of the challenges the role brings, one prominent figure working in the Irish game, who would also fit the criteria for Canham’s successor, told The 42 that the current political sphere of the FAI makes it an unappealing job.
Canham was hired during the tenure of CEO Jonathan Hill, another Englishman who had worked with the FA. Canham, though, was eager to point out that he and Hill had not worked together at the FA, and he further differentiated himself from Hill by relocating his family to Malahide. The now former CEO earned constant criticism for his decision to stay at Castleknock Hotel and commute from his London home.
By the time of his exit after a fiasco about payments wrongly made in lieu of holiday days not taken, Hill believed there had been an anti-English streak among some of the game’s stakeholders, and believed he and Canham had been targeted as a result.
Canham never gave any opinion on that topic, but one staffer recalls Canham being taken aback at a grassroots event when he was told, “be careful bringing your British ideas over here.”
Some of the other aspects of, er, feedback during his country-wide consultation sessions for the pathways plan was shocking, with one person at a session in Cork asking Canham if he knew what silage was. Another person said more directly, “F**k off back to England.”
Crucially, though, this was not a case of someone being run out of town, but rather running out of steam for the challenge of the job, especially when he seemed to be the architect of his own missteps.
Canham’s biggest piece of work was the football pathways plan, an overall blueprint for the structure of the sport in Ireland. That plan was launched 18 months after he joined, with Canham writing in its introduction, “It is clear that football in Ireland is not maximising its potential.”
The pathways plan is a big document with a vast number of policies, with arguably its biggest proposal an alignment of the underage and adult amateur calendars with that of the professional League of Ireland season, which would end Ireland’s outlier status as the only country in Europe running different seasons for different levels of the game.
The move also had symbolic importance: never before had the various warring factions of the game been united in a single, unified pyramid.
Though the FAI board unanimously endorsed the pathways plan and the aligned calendar within it, they decided to get a mandate for it by putting it to a vote among the Association’s General Assembly. While its implementation was passed by narrow majority, there has been fierce opposition in recent weeks to its implementation among some in the schoolboy and adult amateur game.
Thirty-five of 69 leagues at adult and underage level have not yet committed to the move, with the SFAI secretary writing to affiliated leagues that the move has “uncorked overwhelming anger,” while the Leinster FA have written to the FAI board claiming the Assembly vote was “flawed”, and subject to undue staff influence lobbying the professional game to vote it through.
That such large affiliates are opposing the move when they have elected representatives on an FAI board who unanimously endorsed the very same move is indicative of the kind of political environment into which Canham waded.
As news broke of his departure, some staffers who have dedicated so much time to the project feared it would open the door for the plan to be decimated.
While Canham was handed a very difficult job, too often he did not do enough to make it any easier.
He was the face of the infamous men’s managerial search, which dragged on for 231 days. There were various mis-steps along the way.
Canham was not the sole voice involved in the recruitment process, with Hill, Packie Bonner, president Paul Cooke and latterly Hill’s replacement David Courell part of the recruitment panel.
Canham, though, was made the face of the search, and so it was he who sat down with FAI communications executive Cathal Dervan for an in-house interview when the FAI had to admit their long-mooted “April candidate” had not in fact materialised.
Heimir Hallgrimsson was the left-field appointment the following July, though after two windows and four friendly matches’ worth of potential preparation had been written off. Canham and the FAI have insisted both publicly and privately that Hallgrimsson was always their first-choice candidate, but its a a claim that didn’t take hold in the court of public opinion.
Hallgrimsson is now looking like a shrewd appointment, but it is Canham’s misfortune that his first true introduction to the wider Irish public was a managerial search that descended to a PR farce.
“I don’t get too carried away with when people criticise me or when people get carried away with me, so I remain balanced,” said Canham after Hallgrimsson was announced and the search was ended.
“Throughout this process I maintained the things that were important to me; integrity and family, doing the right thing both professionally and at home.”
The episode did not appear to hurt his standing at the FAI: Canham was handed a new title, chief football officer, in September 2024. Speaking at the FAI AGM, Courell declined to say if it came with a pay rise, and denied it came about because Canham had an alternative job offer in the UK.
Hallgrimsson praised him for their dealings prior to taking the job, although it has been noted that in terms of influence around senior camps and dealings with the manager more recently, Canham’s understudy Shane Robinson has been doing a lot more of the heavy lifting, and that murmurs relating to Canham’s time in the role began to emerge at the back end of 2024.
Canham is widely acknowledged by the multiple sources we spoke to for this piece as a polite, professional and gentlemanly guy who occasionally found himself out of his depth, especially with regard to the various public controversies that arose during his tenure.
His communication in the media was clinical but lacking in excitement or zeal or, frankly, the sense of improvisation; of saying anything that wasn’t part of a pre-prepared script. This unfairly led to questions about his passion for the job, though some of his public deliveries were unconvincing.
The 42 recall prior to that press briefing a month ago, he prefaced the Q and A by listing off the FAI’s achievements and advancements for which he believed the FAI did not get public credit. Striking about this was the fact he was reading these off a list while hardly making any eye contact with any of the journalists around the table. Surely, if one was so proud of these achievements, they would have them off the top of their head?
League of Ireland clubs found fault with communication around a centralised coaching plan for their academy players, details of which emerged in the Irish Examiner at the start of March last year.
Canham and Shane Robinson subsequently met clubs over Zoom to further explain the plan, but the clubs reacted by writing a letter to the FAI to say their players would not be participating in the plan, describing it as “poorly conceived” and criticising its communication as “poor at best.”
Canham and CEO David Courell were accused of a lack of compassion and empathy in their public reaction to Colin Healy’s statement in the wake of his exit from the FAI, one of the most unseemly episodes of “he said, he said” in the recent history of Irish football.
That Healy’s statement drew attention to an apparent disconnect between Canham’s view of things – that Healy’s contract was not renewed – and Courell’s – that he has decided to move on – did not speak well of the quality of the FAI’s internal communications.
That the statement announcing Eileen Gleeson’s exit did not even mention Healy is an abject indictment of their external comms.
There also lingers doubt about Gleeson’s position. Formerly the head of women’s and girl’s football, Gleeson took the WNT head coach role on an agreement she would return to the FAI in a staff position after her involvement with the team ended. Canham repeatedly refused to comment when this was raised at the press briefing last month, and the FAI have refused to be drawn at any other point.
This was the backdrop to Canham’s press briefing a month ago, at which he gave the impression he was, as ever, keeping calm and carrying on.
In reality, an exit was lingering at least at the back of his mind.
Questions will now turn to whether the pathways plan survives in Canham’s absence, though he appears confident it will endure and be driven on by those he leaves behind. To that end, it is significant that Courell and Cooke both mentioned the pathways plan in their valedictory quotes in today’s press release.
If the FAI stick by the pathways plan, that at least offers us in the years to come a chance to assess the legacy Marc Canham leaves to Irish football.
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