In November 2011, the Republic of Ireland team travelled to Tallinn for the first leg of a European Championship play-off against Estonia. Ireland were on the verge of qualifying for a major tournament for the first time in ten years. Two years earlier, in Paris, Ireland had been denied a place in the World Cup when, in extra time, Thierry Henry handled the ball twice to set up William Gallas for a goal that sent France to the finals. It seemed an even greater injustice given the daring with which Ireland had approached the game.

For those within the FAI who were aware of the association’s financial situation, it was an even greater blow. There might have been a great romantic imperative to qualify for the World Cup, but the financial imperative was even greater.

In 2009, the FAI had delayed releasing its annual report until the day of the AGM, which was unconventional, to say the least.

“We met the board membership and they’re fully supportive of the action we took. In fairness, even at that meeting, it was suggested that we change the rule completely and hand out accounts on the day of the AGM,” John Delaney was quoted as saying. “But the broad feeling within the game is that we acted responsibly with what we had to do. We didn’t want two weeks of our accounts being trawled through the media.”

The accounts that year showed a €16 million deficit compared to a surplus of €4 million the previous year. They included one item billed as an “exceptional costs” of €5.2 million which was described as  “arising from its funding and commitments to the Aviva Stadium development project”.

This payment and the sale of Vantage Club tickets which the FAI had launched in September 2008, with a price of €32,000 for a ten-year ticket on the halfway line and €12,000 for a ticket behind the goal. It was hugely ambitious – the most expensive tickets were 2.5 times the price of the IRFU equivalent – even without the financial crash. But there was a financial crash. Lehman Brothers had collapsed a few days earlier and the bank guarantee was less than a fortnight away.

In that context, the scheme was unworkable but Delaney pursued it until it became all-consuming.

One person involved in the sale once told me that he would regularly be making progress with a sale until the prospective buyer asked, “and does this include the rugby matches as well?” When he explained they did not, enthusiasm invariably waned.

“If you want a free drink, get to that bar fucking quick”

Delaney, in 2009, was not waning. “We’ve huge support from within the game in terms of ticket sales – a lot of the members who were here have bought tickets,” he was quoted as saying at the 2009 AGM.

“The two grassroots schemes are going really, really well. But I’m not going to comment on the figures, you know that. I don’t talk about managers’ contracts and I don’t talk about the sales to date because we have a confidentiality agreement in place with (sales partners) ISG and IMG. But we’ll be okay, we’ll be fine.”

How fine they really were could probably be judged from the reaction to the Henry handball a few months later. Ireland was outraged and the FAI’s outrage was fuelled by the need for the money that came with qualification which at a minimum was $9 million.

When Sepp Blatter joked about Ireland asking to be “team 33”, the FAI – never slow to take offence under John Delaney – saw their opportunity and looked for – and received – compensation. This remained confidential until the summer of 2014 when The Sun broke the story on the morning of the World Cup final. It remained largely unremarked upon until the following year when, in the wake of the FIFA scandal and the fall of Sepp Blatter, Delaney talked about the payment on the Ray D’arcy Show.

*****

In Tallinn, Ireland felt confident that there would be no injustice. Delaney had embraced his position as a man of the people during the campaign, greeting fans off the train in the Slovakia town of Zilina when they arrived from Bratislava and going into the crowd and throwing his tie among them when Ireland held out for an unlikely draw in Moscow.

Similar scenes were part of the build-up to the game. On the night before the game, Delaney arrived at the Nimeta Bar (The bar with no name) and conducted a raffle for some tickets. He then announced that €2,000 had been put behind the bar. “If you want a free drink, get to that bar fucking quick,” Delaney said, as one grateful supporter remarked, “Hell of a gesture”.

The same day, the FAI had announced a new round of redundancies at Abbotstown so it was soon clarified that the money put behind the bar had been Delaney’s own and not from the associations.

24 hours later, things were looking up for Ireland after a 4-0 win in the first leg. Trapattoni remained cautious, rolling out a phrase that illustrated once more that the colour in the Irish team came more often from the manager than the football his team set out to play: “Be careful the cat, no say the cat is in the sack when you have no the cat in the sack.”

Delaney, meanwhile, was also providing his own colour. Just before the Ireland manager gave his press conference, Delaney went out to the Ireland fans still in the stadium. He walked down to where they were behind the goal and started bowing as some cheered and others laughed. He then gave a Jurgen Klopp-style chest bump which was greeted with more laughter from those who might have wondered what the CEO of a football association was doing celebrating so wildly on the pitch.

When myself and Paul Rowan talked to Delaney later that evening, he said the boost from qualification went far beyond the FAI.

“I think genuinely it is bigger than that. I think for the country, the public… I go round the country now as you know with the grassroots and everybody was saying ‘for God’s sake get us there’ because we need a lift. I genuinely believe the public will respond enormously to this,” he said.

But the boost for the association was more tangible. Making the Irish team appealing was still a struggle, even with qualification. For those who had bought ten-year tickets, in 2012, they could watch Ireland play Bosnia and the Czech Republic in pre-tournament friendlies, another friendly against Oman, before Germany came to town for an enticing game, made less attractive by Ireland losing it 6-1.

*****

This was after the European Championships which promised much of the excitement of previous tournaments but instead became notable primarily for the enthusiastic mingling of John Delaney with supporters on the main square of the Ireland base in Sopot.

All this was a distraction. Ireland lost every game at the European Championships with Trapattoni dismissive of the idea that there were players who could make a difference to his side. He announced his team for the first match a week beforehand and made one change to the starting lineup over the course of three matches.

From Trapattoni’s point of view, this reflected the talent he had at his disposal. He watched Ireland’s players via DVDs sent to his home outside Milan and he refused to believe that there were alternatives that were any better.

The three defeats at the European Championships appeared to signal the need for drastic change but the FAI became defensive at any suggestion that the approach needed to change radically. There was a reason for their defensiveness: the association couldn’t afford to do anymore.

The investment that might have gone into development went instead to funding the FAI’s part of the Aviva development.

FAI’s development officers were told to try to sell tickets when they went to visit clubs while, following the sale of their building on Parnell Square for €1.125 million, the Leinster Football Association promised to spend close to €600,000 on tickets.

This was not the clientele Delaney had envisaged. “There are 33,000 millionaires in this country, and we have a database of 80,000 people we’re chasing. We only need 3,000 to say yes because the average sale is three to four seats. We’ll do it. We’ll be fine,” he had said on that September day in 2008 when the Vantage Club was launched, but the reality was the football family was asked to find a way.

Delaney was also promoting a top-down version of Irish football. If the 33,000 millionaires were being targeted, it was possible to wonder what Irish football would be.

It may be that Delaney felt he knew the audience. The criticism of Irish football fans – and sports fans in this country more broadly – is that they are attracted to big events. On the other hand, that might simply be a response to living in a country where most of the events are small.

Delaney worked the grassroots too but the room for investment was limited because of the FAI’s needs elsewhere. This had a direct impact on the development of talented players who began programmes later than would have been the case in other European countries and then spent fewer hours than in other countries. In 2020, Will Clarke, the FAI’s League of Ireland Academy development manager told The42 that young Irish players at U-15, U-17, and U-19 levels were getting on average six hours of contact a week, compared to 15 in the UK.

*****

Trapattoni was never going to be a manager to encourage that and it wasn’t his job. The FAI too felt that the identity of the Irish manager tapped into that part of the Irish psyche that liked the big event. With Denis O’Brien paying half the manager’s salary then they could afford someone with a big reputation, even if that reputation allowed him to do no more than fearlessly decide that Ireland were no good.

Trapattoni limped on after the Euros but the 6-1 defeat against Germany seemed to be the end. Well-sourced reports said Trapattoni would be sacked whatever happened in the next match against the Faroe Islands. Trapattoni then demonstrated again why most of the entertainment during his time as manager came from his own performances, not his team’s.

The story suggesting he would be sacked had led to some sympathy for the manager. “Can you not defend him? Can one of you not defend him,” one member of his party asked journalists at the end of a press conference in Torshavn where Ireland had travelled to play the Faroe Islands.

Trap needed no help. He explained how he’d only ever had one president who understood football – that was Giampiero Boniperti, who Trapattoni played with, before Boniperti became chairman of Juventus. “The rest,” Trapattoni said, “change like the wind.”

It was an insight into the fundamental weakness of the Delaney regime that Trapattoni was right. The media had run with a story but the FAI was in full defensive mode and when RTE made one reference they insisted on an apology which illustrated the disconnect within the FAI.

“On our Morning Ireland sports bulletin just after 8.30am on Thursday, we featured a piece between Darren Frehill and our soccer correspondent Tony O’Donoghue in which we stated that it was generally believed that mixed messages had been given to the media about the future of the Senior Manager’s position and that the Chief Executive of the FAI John Delaney was the Senior FAI Source responsible for these rumours,” the statement said.

“RTÉ and Tony O’Donoghue would like to unreservedly apologise to the CEO John Delaney for these statements made on our programme which were untrue.

“We would also like to apologise for the general tone of that particular exchange.”

The FAI were getting apologies for tone at this point as if a culture of deference was required.

By the end of the week, the media were being blamed while Trap was promising to travel to England to watch matches. This uneasy peace held for a year until Ireland lost to Austria and Trapattoni was gone.

*****

Martin O’Neill believes the assessment of his time as Ireland manager has been “coloured by revisionism”.

“My remit was to qualify for the Euros, not to see how the youth team was going to be run”

In his interview on the Experience podcast this weekend, he talked about what was expected of him when he became manager in 2013. “When John Delaney gave me the job, my remit was to qualify for the Euros. The only guarantee I could get a second contract after two years, was to qualify for the Euros.”

He added: “My remit was to qualify for the Euros, not to see how the youth team was going to be run. If that was the job, fine.”

His potential availability as Ireland manager following his dismissal by Sunderland ensured that nobody mourned Trapattoni. O’Neill was the manager Ireland wanted and when it became known that he wanted Roy Keane as his assistant, Ireland crackled with the energy that occurs when there is a big event in the offing

When he arrived in Dublin for his first press conference, O’Neill made a point about how he needed to win quickly. The youth coaches had told him that there were a number of promising players under-16 and he replied that was “a fat lot of good to me”.

O’Neill would have to wait nearly a year for a competitive game but he appeared at that first press conference behind a banner advertising tickets for Ireland’s friendly the next week against Latvia as if he had been hired to promote one match.

“Winning is the only thing that ever matters,” O’Neill writes in his new book, On Days Like These. Ireland would be competitive and look to win and qualification would bring the good times back to Irish football.

O’Neill writes extensively about his uneasy relationship with the Irish press, but at the beginning there was an excitement in the media about a manager who had achieved what O’Neill had.

The sense of excitement was tempered by exposure to the Ireland game the next week against Latvia which was a reminder that O’Neill and Keane would simply be in the dugout and the players would be the same as people had watched under Trapattoni.

*****

A few months before O’Neill’s appointment, The Sunday Times broke the story that the exceptional costs in the 2008 accounts had been a €4 million payment to Goldman Sachs. The company had been approached to provide “mezzanine debt” after the FAI had identified a principal lender for their share of the Aviva construction. The mezzanine debt would make up the shortfall.

That deal collapsed but soon the FAI went back to Goldman again. This time Goldman Sachs included a break clause if the deal didn’t go through. The FAI, then, got a loan from Danske Bank that covered almost all the costs and Goldman Sachs were again not required, at which point a €4 million break clause was required, and that made up the bulk of the exceptional cost.

When this story broke, it had, to many people who had been aware of the outline without being able to confirm it, surprisingly little impact.

The FAI’s policing of the media’s tone and much more meant the media was reluctant to pick up on FAI stories in other publications without their own sources. Another Sunday Times story, four years later, would be different.

*****

O’Neill achieved his objective and qualified for the European Championships, a journey which included a win against Germany when the Aviva rocked like Lansdowne Road once did. When O’Neill complains about revisionism, it may be because a night like that has never achieved the mythical status of, say, Ireland’s win against Holland in 2001 and he may have a point. But it may be too that the recollections are affected by dramas in Irish football which had nothing to do with O’Neill.

*****

During the course of O’Neill’s tenure, John Delaney’s time as CEO became increasingly populated with ridiculous stories. Whether it was the John the Baptist video, the singing of an IRA song in the pub, or the interview with Ray D”Arcy, Delaney seemed to be becoming more absurd. But also any hint of protest – as when fans raised a banner against him at a game against the USA in 2014 – was clamped down on immediately.

Ireland had an enjoyable Euros, even if in retrospect (more revisionism), a victory against a second-string Italy, was a limited enough return. Ireland achieved maybe no more than they could have been expected to achieve.

Ireland ended 2016 on top of their World Cup qualification group but over 2017, results went south and culminated in the play-off defeat to Denmark. It was, as O’Neill points out, a World Cup playoff so Ireland should maybe have been applauded for getting that far, but there was the sense with O’Neill’s sides that if they didn’t win, there was nothing much else to be excited about.

Martin O’Neill. Photo: Bryan Meade

“It was always as if they were waiting for that result to happen,” O’Neill says in this week’s Experience about the media reaction following that defeat. “I live or die by the results,” he said on his first day in the Ireland job and now it seemed if that philosophy would be observed to an extreme degree.

O’Neill and Keane left and the sense was that Ireland were starting all over again. In March 2019, when the FAI began to unravel following The Sunday Times story, the sense was of an even more profound disconnect and it was something that had nothing to do with O’Neill and Keane.

The extent of the FAI’s financial dysfunction underlined how impossible it was for anything to be created in those conditions.

The Mick McCarthy return did little in terms of a solution and Stephen Kenny took over promising to do everything differently.

“There is a huge demographic between players aged 29, 30, and aged 20 and very little in between,” Stephen Kenny said in 2021. His Ireland lost again on Thursday night and there would be those who wonder how long Ireland can get away without winning matches.

O’Neill’s philosophy has always been winning gives you freedom and permanence. Yet for reasons beyond his control, it was hard to build anything sustainable. If Stephen Kenny continues to lose matches, it will become unsustainable too, albeit in a different way. But some might feel that, at this moment time, it has been as necessary as O’Neill’s victories were in his. Ireland needs the impression of longevity after the Delaney era which pursued instant gratification. It was necessary and may have helped created a sense of permanence.