The Pitch: Why Irish players are so devalued on global transfer markets

Today’s best U14s are not eligible for the Kennedy Cup and instead play into the FAI’s EA Sports National Underage Leagues, created to identify and develop the future stars of the game into a still evolving elite playing system.

This national league is in the middle of a competitive break for exams with a first phase of competition ended, establishing formal seeding for the remainder of the season’s U14, U15, U17 and U20 leagues – a disrupted pathway with no U16, U18 or U19 age-groups.

The Pitch estimates that the cost of training and fielding the country’s 1,800 elite footballers across the four current age groups can be anything from €1,000 - €4,000 per player, per season, depending on the club.

All 20 League of Ireland sides receive UEFA solidarity payments of €75,000 towards this cost with a €10,500 payment going to all clubs, including the four without senior LOI teams.

Ireland’s late arrival to the player pathway system is evolving slowly – some 13 years after an U19 league was announced by the FAI, and as a result of shoddy initial planning, is suffering from being a sub-standard system when compared to our European peers.

For the 20+ clubs who play within the elite structure, Ireland lags far behind its European rivals and still has nothing near the benchmark of elite football academies run through more progressive footballing nations.

This lack of facilities is having a devastating impact on the football economy through player values and transfer activity into overseas markets, even despite the emergence of clear talents such as Evan Ferguson and Gavin Bazunu.

For Ferguson, Bohemians will have received a modest compensation return for the striker from Brighton, but the real value for the Dublin club will come from any future sales – it received approximately €1.5m for Matt Doherty’s sale to Tottenham.

Typically bonus payments back to clubs here will sit between 10 and 25 per cent of ‘next transfers’, and while Ferguson’s next move will not be as high as a quarter of any future fees Brighton may realise, it will represent a multi-million euro windfall for Bohs.

The Bazunu deal is worth approximately €3m to Shamrock Rovers so far – where there was an initial transfer fee from Manchester City and various sell-on clauses covering his move to Southampton, as well as international and club appearance bonuses, along with potential future moves.

But why are clubs here reliant on future values and not able to set current valuations on players who move overseas?

The key reason is due to training factors which set the parameters of what is known as the Development Environment Market, which relates not only on the player but on the standard of his early journey into the professional game.

This is influenced by the quality of the academy system here.

Despite the best efforts of all 20 league of Ireland clubs, and four who don’t have senior men’s teams, the facilities are not good enough to convince overseas clubs Irish players have evolved through a perfect system.

Indeed by English standards, Irish underage academies do not even rate at CAT3 level, yet alone aspire to be at CAT1, the gold standard in player development.

If you look at the underage structure and how it is exploited here it is similar to a distressed company on the verge of bankruptcy, where corporate raiders come in and strip the most promising assets for a negligible cost.

These raiders, or international clubs, do not deal in transfer fees by way of exchange and instead use a currency based on compensation payments and built-in bonuses.

This may seem like a strange kind of economy but until matters improve in our player development structures the future value of Irish exports will hover at around €2-3m in total each year.

According to the FIFA Global Transfer Report 2023, Irish players created $7.2m (€6.8m) in sales revenue – a figure which just so happened to be three times more than the average Irish rate due to various historical payments returning.

Even in a ‘good year’ we still lag behind Azerbaijan ($7.3m) and Latvia ($9m) in revenue generated from sales of domestic players – with that money made up almost entirely of compensation and solidarity payments.

This compares dreadfully to similar football nations, like Scotland ($76m) and Wales ($41m) but where academy and league structures are more advanced and where players can move to England far freer – due to Brexit, Irish children cannot go to the UK until they turn 18.

For countries outside of the top five leagues, the likes of the Netherlands and Norway are streets ahead each with transfer profits sitting at approximately $120m in both – demonstrating an enormous gulf in values.

This is nothing new, particularly when you compare the leading Irish footballers by Premier League appearance with one of the giants of the international transfer market, France.

The top 10 players (by appearances) from France compared to their Irish equivalent shows a difference of more than €40m in transfer costs into England.

The combined total fees for Distin, Anelka, Lloris, Malbranque, Clichy, Gallas, Vieira, Sissoko, Saha and N’Zogbia sits at €42.3m, compared to the €800,000 that clubs paid for Given, O’Shea, Dunne, Duff, Carr, Coleman, Cunningham, Long, Robbie and Roy Keane.

This rock bottom valuation of Irish talent will not improve unless the issue is treated like the business it must be, by a political system unable to appreciate football for its financial value and obsessed with its PR worth.

The Departments of Sport and Agriculture certainly know the reinvestment values of horseracing and golf as financial assets returning rich rewards.

Sport Ireland is not doing its job either, failing to spot such an enormous economic opportunity, where a bank of evidence on the large rates of return for those nations which invest in football development is available.

If you take the top five performing European nations in the international export transfer market, you will see that player values are influenced by the budget of each academy and the amount of full-time staff working within the system.

If you take Ireland’s international opponents this week, Portugal, which received €750m in gross profit returned over a three year period – 2020-2022 – it has an average Academy Budget of €1-2m, with a fulltime staff of 315 across its academies.

Even if we go down the table to number 10, Poland achieved profit of more than €100m by having an average budget of between €500,000 and €1m, with a fulltime staff 376 employees across coaching, S&C, diet, physio and other disciplines.

Croatia, a similar sized nation but one which achieves greatly on the European and world stages, made a profit of €160m by having a budget of up to €1m, managed by a staff of 190.

Irish clubs will spend between €100k and €500k on their underage structures, still nothing close to the average European level, with nowhere near the same amount of full-time staff – there are just 10 within the entire system here.

If you look at rugby, for example, and the number of academies and schools throughout the country which receive government funding, you get environments where the best young talent are given the opportunity to exist in an elite bubble, with clear results.

The FAI is not to blame for this shortfall – yet an incredible lack of vision from the association and repeat financial controversies over the past 20 years has certainly contributed to such a nil value marketplace.

LOI Development manager Will Clarke – who works into LOI Director Mark Scanlon - recently pleaded with politicians for greater investment in a pre-election presentation at Leinster House, but with little action so-far by the political class.

Without any investment in this area, the value of Irish footballers will not only continue to stagnate, but will deteriorate further down the economic table as other nations pass us out and the longer football continues to be treated as an untradeable stock.