John Fallon: No time for Courell to waste in prioritising key areas for Irish football
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It's done now so the Irish public ought to get behind him. No, not Heimir Hallgrimsson but the person who’ll likely outstay the senior men’s team manager, David Courell.
John Delaney’s 15-year iron grip on the chief executive’s position in the FAI only slipped after a brave whistleblower exposed a 2019 deal but since then there have been two bouts of suspense about who’d land the vacancy.
Common sense dictated that the new broom plumped for a fresh pair of eyes and ears by recruiting ex-English FA commercial director Jonathan Hill in late 2020. His self-inflicted demise created another headhunting crusade and they’ve shopped closer to home by upgrading chief operations officer Courell, via a five-month temporary residency, as permanent spearhead.
Unlike Hallgrimsson, Courell enjoys a long-term contract, but, similar to the Icelander’s remit, there are pressing matters which not only require his attention but demand success.
Cynics may question whether the FAI really are modernised after they stuck with a man when Olympic Federation of Ireland president and Swim Ireland chief executive Sarah Keane was again available, and if they reverted to type by employing an insider.
In the absence of an immediate outcry, any doubts might only manifest publicly when the inevitable next crisis engulfs the FAI, but such are their frequency that the only mystique revolves around the gaps in between.
Courell is at the tiller whatever people feel about the appointment. His virtual in-tray is overflowing with blazes to contain, fences for mending, and opportunities to be grasped. Unlocking the potential of Irish football, as the Castlebar native describes his mission, hinges primarily on gaining trust from the public. That’s essential as decisions in the near future carry with them intergenerational impact.
Here we look at six priority areas in his first 12 months:
Ignore the legalistic mouthful to see this as a contract between the FAI and Government. In return for a cash bailout in 2020, a raft of clauses were heaped upon the organisation in a bid to engineer cultural change.
Debt levels have reduced to €43m, still a hefty albatross to service and at least another seven years smothering their balance sheet.
Once that pact expired in January, all bets were off but it didn’t trigger free-for-all, illustrated by the continuation of 50% independent director presence and gender balance cascading through the structure.
This successor, in exchange for at least the enhanced €5.8m core annual funding, is understood to carry broader reforms, including amalgamation in the grassroots leagues sector.
That’s one for the 145-strong general assembly to chew on.
Connected to the aforementioned MoU is the dishing out of grants to fund the nascent national league system for developing talent. Put simply, without urgent investment to pay coaches and players, among other costs, we can forget about creating a professional industry to hothouse players in the post-Brexit era.
Of course, the €10m estimated cost cannot be fully subsidised by the taxpayer but Uefa have quadrupled their solidarity grant to almost €4m, albeit First Division clubs are aghast at their equal status in the handouts perishing.
Nothing stirs the nation like a summer tournament, like it or lump it, and a decade will have passed in 2026 without Ireland involved in a men’s event.
The team ranked 62 in the world, 28th in Europe, is a remote outsider to feature among the expanded set of 16 qualifiers from Uefa’s confederation and the draw, to be held in December, will portray the degree of difficulty.
Before then, both the men’s U21s and women’s team will discover if they’ve reached their Euros finals next year; nothing on the financial scale of the senior men’s team but landmark firsts to cherish. While Courell can’t kick the ball in the net, his job is to make the appropriate calls around staff and environment, a tricky balance against budgetary pressures.
Sooner rather than later the talkshops will have to cease and directions settled upon. No matter how much the FAI’s PR advisers try to broaden the debate beyond summer football, it’s a futile exercise.
The notion of aligning the season because the League of Ireland switched 20 years ago isn’t washing with those administering games for the majority of the 220,000 registered players nationwide.
Dress it up whatever way one wants and the resistance remains firm. And that’s before the powerful Dublin District Schoolboys/girls’ League eventually cast their vote.
State paymasters increasingly relied upon to fund football have observed with interest the expansion of workforce and salary commitments.
The sole question posed from the floor at the recent AGM under the finance heading gleaned a fudged response. Average headcount in last year’s accounts is secondary to the current figure. A voluntary redundancy package cannot be dismissed.
Election fever will coincide with the disbursal from the public purse of whopper grants towards League of Ireland grounds of Bohemians, Sligo Rovers, Wexford, and possibly Drogheda United. It’s long overdue.
Still, there’s been little mention of the Irish Football Facilities Fund (IFFF) since Courell was instrumental in producing their investment wishlist. That’s a separate foundation arm from the FAI designed to convince high-net-worth individuals to part with their wealth for the good of the game.
The FAI’s projected contribution through their own means, including this venture, is €11.5m-per-annum, If this is supposedly “football’s time”, according to the glossy brochure, Courell already has ground to make up.
Football is nothing without opinions and Stephen Bradley has a point about suppressing them being tantamount to censorship.
Weekly, if not daily, the entertainment value of alternative views rises. Bradley feels this year’s league standard is inferior to previous whereas Damien Duff, in charge of the leaders, considers that disrespectful.
This one will linger beyond the campaign conclusion on November 1 and may never be solved, but that’s the beauty of subjectivity.
Where Bradley recently ran into trouble was by offering his opinion on a certain referee, incurring a sideline suspension. Anybody, bar the officials, could see in real time there was no contact on Patrick McEleney to send him sprawling in the box, manufacturing a penalty which Derry City converted to deny Shamrock Rovers a vital win at the Ryan McBride Brandywell.
It wasn’t just that blunder that prompted Bradley to brand Damien McGraith the worst referee in the league, rather a litany of perceived injustices.
McGraith’s umbrella society swiftly decried the “personalisation” of Bradley’s barb but this is about individual accountability.
McEleney’s reputation will continue to ship a battering for his theatrics while the game-changer still carries the potential to derail Bradley’s trajectory of becoming the first manager in history to lead a team to five successive titles.
No wonder he’s eager to establish a league managers association for solidarity purposes.