YEATS WAS AT least in his early sixties when he was writing about this being no country for old men. Nowadays, there are League of Ireland footballers not even in their thirties who are thinking the same.
The average age in the league has plummeted in recent years, and Uefa’s most recent benchmarking report calculated the League of Ireland Premier Division as the second-youngest top-flight across Europe. 57% of league minutes in 2022 were played by guys under the age of 23 – only Latvia had a higher proportion.
There are myriad reasons behind this drop – the presence of UCD in the Premier Division definitely skewed the stats a bit – but, as with most things, Brexit has played a part. Players who would once have gone abroad at 16 have stayed at home and broken into their LOI first-teams instead. Some have done so because of outrageous talent; others because the FAI are so broke that they have yet to offer an underage league beyond U19 level.
The now characteristic youth of the league was evident in yesterday’s FAI Cup final.
Bohemians started with 18-year-old James McManus in midfield and 20-year-old Cian Byrne at centre-half, while Pat’s played three teenagers across the 90 minutes. Sixteen-year-old Mason Melia came on early in the second half to become the youngest player ever to play in the FAI Cup final, with 18-year-old Adam Murphy brought on later, too and, while he shows few signs of it, Sam Curtis is only 17.
Substitutes Tommy Lonergan and Alex Nolan, meanwhile, were teenagers at the start of the season, while starting duo Kian Leavy and Conor Carty are both 21. The captain Joe Redmond is only 23, and Pat’s oldest outfield player still on the pitch to hear the final whistle was left-back Anto Breslin. He is a comparatively crepuscular 26.
“I don’t necessarily see it as risks as I see them every day and the way they train and the way they have grown over the season”, said Pat’s manager Jon Daly about his trusting youth.
He did debate introducing Melia as quickly as he did, however, ultimately bringing him on when Mark Doyle got injured on the 56-minute mark.
“I actually wasn’t going to make that change first”, admitted Daly. “When Mark Doyle was down, I was talking to Anto Breslin about what I was going to do. I said it was probably too early for Mason but Anto looked at me like I had 10 heads and said ‘No, it’s not’. I was like ‘You’re right, let’s do it.’
“It was probably me overthinking the occasion. Can a 16-year-old go on and deal with that? But I thought he was excellent. Before the game you are in the hotel speaking about people finishing the game, not necessarily substitutes but finishers coming on and impact the game and every sub today was excellent. Alan Nolan was different class, Tommy Lonergan scoring a fantastic goal to seal it and knock the wind from Bohs sails.”
Melia signed a three-year professional contract with Pat’s earlier this week, but has been heralded for great things for a while now. He starred for Ireland’s U17s in their run to the quarter-finals of this year’s European Championships, and all of Chelsea, Manchester City and Brighton have expressed an interest.
A couple of years ago, Melia sat in a room at St Joseph’s Boys listening to a presentation given by Joe Redmond, who was then at Birmingham and telling the audience of young footballers in front of him what was expected of players at an academy. Now Melia will be learning from Redmond in more direct ways at Pat’s.
“He is playing against the best centre-back in the league every day in training so he is going to develop”, said Daly of Melia and Redmond. “He is going to learn and has to understand if he’s not going to physically outmuscle defenders, he has to find ways around it.
“We have a good backroom staff and coaching staff who are helping him on a daily basis, along with the rest of the players. I think he will grow and grow. He has the raw materials to be an exceptional player. Making the decision to stay, I think, is a really good one as he will be exposed to first-team football. If he goes somewhere else, he would have been looking at Europe had he gone now, would he be playing first-team football? Who knows. First-team football at his age will be a massive help to him going forward.”
It has certainly been a help to Curtis. He made his first-team bow at an abnormally young age even for the LOI, appearing as a 14-year-old for Shamrock Rovers II before he joined Pat’s. He has made 60 senior appearances: a remarkable amount of first-team football for a guy who won’t turn 18 until the first day of next month. The Cup final is expected to be the final Pat’s appearance of his career, but there is little clarity on his next step. Manchester City have long been billed as Curtis’ stronger suitor, but he may choose somewhere with a faster – if not instant – route to first-team football. A move to City and a loan to one of their feeder clubs is a possibility, though nothing appears to be set in stone.
“I knew he would take to it like a duck to water and he would be walking out there believing it’s the occasion he is supposed to be in”, said Daly of Curtis. “And it is, to be fair. He is going to have a big career wherever he goes. We will try and convince him tonight to stay on for a few years, we will see what happens with that.
“I think you can play him anywhere along the back four, he’s played everywhere along the back four and put in the same performance every time, he’s very consistent. If he makes a mistake, he very rarely makes the same mistake again, he learns from it. I’ve said it numerous times before that he’s the best I’ve ever seen in terms of taking on information and applying information, he’s done exceptionally well, it’s been a good experience for him playing first team football and hopefully the other young lads can follow in his footsteps and get experience under their belt.”
Even in a game as fickle and random as football, that Curtis will soon return to the Aviva Stadium as a senior Irish international looks a pretty solid bet.
And if he does so, it will further strengthen the League’s reputation as being the place to watch those who will soon be the country’s best players. Gavin Bazunu, Evan Ferguson, Andrew Moran…the list is being updated annually. And it’s one of the reasons behind the league’s surge in support, and why yesterday’s Cup final was the best-attended for 78 years.
An acned league is moving on from some of its more hackneyed detractors.