In a wide-ranging interview, Gary Owens, the interim chief executive of the FAI discusses:

January seems like a terribly long time ago but it was back then, on the day that John Delaney left his position on the Executive Committee of Uefa, that the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) unveiled former Hibernian Insurance managing director Gary Owens as interim chief executive of the organisation.

Earlier that month, Roy Barrett had been appointed independent chairperson of the association. Barrett, managing director at Goodbody Stockbrokers, said he chose to take on the role as he believed the FAI had an important role to play in developing the game at every level in Ireland. 

Owens, 61, became the fourth person to occupy the CEO role since Delaney departed in acrimony in 2019. Owens spent six years at the top of Hibernian (now Aviva). He was chief executive of financial services group IFG for seven years, whilst he was also an independent director at AIG.

He is chairman of Diona, a mobile device technology firm. Having spent over half a year at the FAI helm, it is expected that he will try to stay on at an organisation that is still riddled with division and beholden to a Government which bailed it out in January.

Owens took over from Paul Cooke, the respected newspaper industry executive who assumed temporary command when John Foley decided at the last minute not to take it on following the return to Uefa of Noel Mooney. Before that, the association’s chief operating officer Rea Walshe had had a brief spell in the role.

It is understood that Owens — appointed interim chief executive in January — earns €8,500 per month with his deputy Niall Quinn on €6,500 per month.

It has been a tense time for the FAI, with reports that the 11-strong FAI board has become divided on the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed off with the Government as part of a rescue deal for the FAI last January. The board is to become a 12-member board, six of whom will be independent.

The Government has told the FAI that a great deal needs to be done to restore trust that it is fit for public funding and it has reminded the association it is expected to implement reforms agreed in January. Last Thursday, Minister for Sport Catherine Martin and Dara Calleary, then junior minister and Government chief whip overseeing the sport portfolio, sent a letter to the FAI outlining a range of concerns.

Meanwhile, clubs in the League of Ireland are becoming increasingly frustrated at the FAI, while public perception of the organisation is also low.

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One does not need to make many phone calls within League of Ireland circles to meet marked scepticism and wariness of what is happening in the post-Delaney FAI. Among the more energised has been the businessman and developer Garrett Kelleher, who has funded St Patrick’s Athletic for many years. In mid-June, Kelleher emailed a scathing account of the new regime to three board members – Paul Cooke, Dick Shakespeare and Martin Heraghty.

Contacted by The Currency, Kelleher accepted he was less than satisfied with how the FAI has evolved post-Delaney. “I don’t know what Gary Owens’ intentions are as of today: has he applied for the CEO position? Does Roy Barrett intend to have a role in the appointment of all six independent directors and the appointment of key executives through his position on the various nomination committees?

“I am unsure of Niall Quinn’s short- or long-term intentions vis-à-vis the FAI. The position of interim deputy CEO appears to be temporary.”

Kelleher, whose ambitions to move St Patrick’s Athletic to a new stadium have failed to meet approval at council level, says he is “optimistic and hopeful” for the future of the sport in Ireland. “From the perspective of the domestic league, the future is an independent Premier League as in many jurisdictions and ideally an all-island league. Recent events where amateur clubs dictated to nine out of 10 clubs regarding the resumption of football is a result of a flawed process that would not, in my view, pertain in any other jurisdiction.

“We all aspire for there to be a proper professional league here, watching Irish internationals playing at Dalymount or Richmond Park, where players want to stay here, where there are proper academies, where they see a future here, have the support of a family, receive local education and a plan for after football. I remember being in Milltown as a kid watching with 25,000 at a game; it is possible again.”

“I think the CEO must by his actions be able to instil confidence in all stakeholders and have a background working in football.”

Another top figure at a prominent Irish club said: “Where we had hoped to be placed at the top of the football pyramid the clubs once again feel let down and relegated to no more than bit-part players.”

Shelbourne co-owner Andrew Doyle, a former managing partner of Maples and Calder, emailed the FAI in June, expressing “serious questions on risk and governance” within the FAI.

James Kelly, the Leinster FA National Council Representative, wrote to council members to underline his concerns, including the “snail-like progress in the recruitment and appointment of a new CEO”.

PFAI general secretary Stephen McGuinness told The Currency: “This MoU is a big issue if it’s not passed. Roy Barrett and Gary Owens really need to outline the effects of the MoU not being passed.”

It is on the topic of the League of Ireland that we begin our interview with Gary Owens:

Johnny Ward (JW) Tell us about your dealings in getting the League of Ireland back up and running and where you see the league going?

Gary Owens (GO): We have a very clear strategy in what we want League of Ireland clubs to look like in five years’ time. They need to improve the proposition; if they don’t, they won’t get people attending the matches. 

We have a good opportunity now with Brexit and the ruling that minors cannot transfer from the EU to the UK clubs. We’re working on a strategy now, called Clubmark, with a representative of each club on it. The first few weeks were a little difficult, but we are starting to get some really good input. It’s basically all about what the League of Ireland would look like in 2025, 2026. We’ve broken it down into five steering groups. One is on the legal agreement between the FAI and the clubs, number two how do we monitise the whole commercial value of the league, in terms of how we make the competition structure much more interesting than it currently is.

Another is basically getting facilities up to European qualifying level, making it attractive for families to go to. If we’d ten Tallaght stadia we’d be in really good shape. It’s a really nice night in Tallaght, nice facilities, have a beer, bring your family or whatever. I’ve been to Tallaght a few times and it’s a really enjoyable experience.

It’s pretty sensible stuff. In terms of commercial value, the FAI would never have been fully open and honest with a profit and loss separately for the League of Ireland. Once you are dealing with full transparency, how do you improve the dial and monetise? The proposition has to improve. Once we have a road map with pathways, better players will go through that process. Rovers played Dundalk in Tallaght earlier this season and that 3-2 game had two of the best goals I’ve seen. It was a fantastic advertisement for the League of Ireland. The problem for us is ensuring those two clubs don’t move too far ahead of everyone else. We need intense competition across ten clubs. Whether or not some of them can make it financially remains to be seen.

“To be fair, on the football side some good things were done [under John Delaney]. The problems were on the non-football side.”

JW: You mentioned the Brexit situation – in theory this is a game-changer?

GO: The players are now going to stay here until they are 18. Even if there is a commercial value at 18 the League of Ireland and schoolboy clubs could benefit financially. In the past, the clubs would have gotten nothing out of it. I’m very confident about this. Ruud Dokter, our high-performance director, is good; he’s done some really good stuff. The under-15s beat England in December and Mick McCarthy said he’d never seen an under-15s team play so well. 

If you look at the 15s, 17s, 19s now, we are actually competing very well in Europe. It’s coming through the structures. If you translate that through the League of Ireland, you are going to have much better, quality players coming through and they are coming through the system now. 

On the international side now, we have some really good coaches and we are bringing back some old players getting their pro licenses and their badges, the whole coaching infrastructure has improved considerably. All of this is feeding into the system and the clubs, all have to get their pro license badge. The competency and the skill set you need to make it work is all coming through now and that will make a big difference.

JW: I realise Ruud isn’t universally popular across the country because of the various factions in the game, the feeder clubs and so on at underage level. But under Stephen Kenny’s guidance, given how well the underage sides are doing and with the law regarding Brexit, are we actually on the cusp of a major opportunity here?

GO: We are. I think we have all the people here. All the old senior managers with the exception of Brian Kerr lived overseas. We’ve Damien Duff, Keith Andrews, Ruaidhri Higgins and of course Stephen here now. At the 21s we have Jim Crawford, John O’Shea and Alan Reynolds. If you go down through the underage teams, a really good coaching structure in place. They are all learning from each other and working as a team. It’s never been as good in terms of the quality of players coming through. 

To be fair, on the football side some good things were done [under John Delaney]. The problems were on the non-football side. Some good decisions were made on the football side in terms of the quality you are seeing, with the exception of the League of Ireland, which has always been a challenge between the commercial interest of the owners versus creating a competitive structure and strategy that actually can make the game look much better.

“There was a huge suspicion between the clubs and the FAI”

Gary Owens: “We have more people playing the game than rugby but they have four times the income we have.”

JW: Has it been a rude awakening? 

GO: I suppose from a cultural values viewpoint, it was a lot worse than I thought. The quality of staff was better than I thought and I think the progress they’ve made on the footballing side was more advanced than I thought. The League of Ireland was a lot worse than I thought.

JW: Why so?

GO: It’s completely fractured. All the clubs are trying to do their own thing. They have no coherent strategy… If they can get the proposition and can really improve it and the facilities, the commercial value of that will enhance significantly. But there was no strategic plan in place; there is no real buy-in from the clubs. It moves from one season to the next; many of them are very fragile financially, a lot needing more support than they should need given what they are running. Sometimes they just rush to put in a professional commercial structure without the solid foundation to make that work properly.

“The balance of debt was basically poorly managed in the association, so they just didn’t raise enough income to spend the money they were spending in the way that they were spending it.”

JW: To give them some dues they were so undervalued by the old regime, it’s probably inevitable they are not the most unified group.

GO: There was a huge suspicion between the clubs and the FAI. No matter when you step in you see that. It was never fully open and transparent. The FAI were making more money than they would share with the clubs on the back of the League of Ireland structure so there was no trust there. It is still very small compared to where it should be; you are talking hundreds of thousands. Look at the quality of the Dundalk-Rovers match, with seven million hits for a goal (by Jordan Flores), the atmosphere there. If you monetise that over a season and get that working…

JW: How do you do that?

GO: You have to build a clear vision of what you want to do, put in place what the strategy is. One thing about the FAI I feel: we have always supported the weakest link. We actually have to set very high criteria that people have to meet. If [the clubs] want more financially, then they have to put in place a foundation to deserve to get that. Then we need to give them every support we can. We need to improve facilities, get a women’s league in place, national underage teams for men and women, formal structures that are tied in and nurtured with former clubs.

We want schoolboy clubs to want to look up to the League of Ireland and be part of it. The schoolboy structure said to me they wouldn’t go near the League of Ireland with a bargepole; their assessment was the league was in a bit of a mess. If you want the people to nurture and develop on the ground to really aspire to be part of what they believe they should be, well then the whole standard needs to improve significantly.

JW: You called this plan ‘Clubmark’ entailing strict criteria if the clubs want to step up to the mark. Obviously you are pretty aware of the redundant licensing process that allowed clubs to get away with things; is that a thing on the past?

GO: I fundamentally believe we have too many clubs. We need to set the standard so the criteria decides: you are in a world of governance as well. In that world you have to have certain standards and responsibilities, welfare policies; you then need professional coaches, age-appropriate coaches, qualified coaches. There’s a lot we can do on the ground to improve all that. I’ve been very impressed with the volunteers at the clubs. The people on the ground, the grassroots, are great. That’s what keeps a lot of people going in the FAI, loads of volunteers week in, week out – about 700,000 involved in the game in some way or another, huge numbers. I think they are frustrated. We have more people playing the game than rugby but they have four times the income we have.

JW: Why?

GO: It’s to do with the brand and the confidence people would have in investing in it. Our stakeholders and sponsors would really need to have confidence that our governance reforms will work, that governance structures are fit and proper. When you did have a bad run with John … when you look at the debt that was there, it was €52.5 million. Of that, €28 million was due to the Aviva Stadium, which is fine as that is an asset and you can kind of pay for that. The balance was basically poorly managed in the association, so they just didn’t raise enough income to spend the money they were spending in the way that they were spending it.

“At the moment there is no Plan B. We need the money (laughing) – that is the bottom line.”

JW: Jack Charlton passed away last week. You think what the League of Ireland has become compared to what it was – very little progress since the football mania of that time. It’s almost as if we never latched onto that success, yet rugby became so big.

GO: We missed a huge opportunity. I was at Italia 90. What opportunity we had after that to turn it into a commercial, monetised product. I still think that potential is there. Fans love it. When things go well they do tend to forget things quickly. Stephen and the team now are going to play attractive football, I think they’ll be very committed to it, so if we could get a couple of results…? If we made the Euros next year, you could leave a lot of history behind you, playing a match in Dublin and so on. 

I am very confident about the structures we put in on the football side. We are starting to put in the governance reforms required on the non-football side. Then you really start to work on what is the right structures on the ground to bring it all together as one association. It is deeply fractured; it needs to work as one, with the ultimate goal of monetising commercial value and all this goes back into the game. You can invest in significant more facilities, more coaching – all the things you need to be really good. We need to modernise how we think, the constitution, rationalise the league structures. I think we can make a lot of progress.

JW: Fixtures were announced Monday with a view to the league’s resumption.

GO: We were trying to find the balance. Some clubs couldn’t survive too many matches and other clubs wanted to play as many as they could. We decided to compromise; we felt most important was resumption. We didn’t want to be the only summer league in Europe not playing. It wouldn’t have looked good to Uefa or the key stakeholders. We also wanted to experiment with streaming, to see what that might do behind closed doors, and we still don’t know will a wave two come in. We really did need to have a product that could be tested under the current structure and environment that we are in. If we didn’t do that we could be back next January where we still have the same problems.

Media rights, streaming and an All Ireland league

JW: Where are you with media rights going forward for the League of Ireland and so on?

GO: We’ll assess that this year. To be honest we are not really sure what that will generate. Companies told us we would make millions (on streaming), others said we wouldn’t. We are really keen to experiment across a whole range to see what the value is. You could trial in the US to see if people would be interested in watching say Galway or Sligo, their home team, you wouldn’t know.

JW: You mentioned you are into racing. Are you conscious of a betting and streaming nexus, that obviously is potentially lucrative, or are you wary of that?

GO: I’d be wary. We want to test it with someone we can trust in a local partnership and see what will come out of that. We will learn a lot from that. Into next year we have a commercial steering group, some very good experts on the whole media rights stuff. They have had very good input to see what we can do for 2021.

JW: Were you smarting from St Patrick’s Athletic CEO Garrett Kelleher’s criticism?

GO: We’re a new regime: open, honest and transparent with him. We have set up steering groups, trying to work with them. He came to us, his first meeting, and basically started to really challenge us.

JW: He seems sceptical of your intentions.

GO: I don’t know why. He has a club representative every Thursday at 4pm at our meeting with League of Ireland clubs, and it is a very engaging process. People can say what they want to say, input whatever way they want to input, but he has not come to me with any solution. If he wants to we will listen. We are changing the participation agreement with the clubs, the legal agreement which to be fair was very biased towards the FAI. It’s a kind of partnership agreement with a working group on that: we want that to be in the best interests of the clubs.

JW: That will be tricky.

GO: One, you have to get the proposition right; secondly, commercialise it; thirdly, how it is going to be distributed and that is going to be a thorny issue. We need to make sure we are in the best interests of the game as well as reward the people who are contributing the most.

JW: That seems to be a key message you’re giving: a meritocracy-type system, rewarding those who are improving facilities and bettering the product.

GO: At the moment the UEFA agreement – the solidarity agreement – is split equally among the clubs. That makes no sense. You are not rewarding those investing in the game and making sure the proposition and facilities are getting better. With the clubs, we need to create a forum for engagement and let people come up with ideas. It is hard to get 19 business owners (there are 19 League of Ireland clubs) to agree, though.

JW: Where are you with a potential All-Ireland League?

GO: Yeah we are making good progress. We have opened healthy discussions with the guys in the North and have had some really positives meetings. We have a very good, healthy relationship with them.

Dealing with the banks, working with the government

JW: You’ve obviously read in the media about the board and the Memorandum of Understanding. I understand your position is: we have to do this. What happens if it is not passed at the FAI’s deferred EGM later this year; is there a Plan B? You need 75 per support at the EGM.

GO: At the moment there is no Plan B. We need the money (laughing) – that is the bottom line. To be fair to Bank of Ireland, they gave us money on the back of an agreement we made. The government agreed to give us the money on the back of an agreement that we made.

“Our brand has been damaged and we really need to change it and change people’s perception of it, particularly those open to helping us financially.”

JW: Do you see where concerns are coming from regarding a six and six board split or are you along the lines of beggars can’t be choosers on this situation?

GO: People are isolating it a little bit. The board is basically reportable to council. So if the six and six split doesn’t work, ultimately the council can change that. The six and six, where would you get the benefit of that? You’d get some credibility in government. You’d meet the requirements of the stakeholders who have put all the money in. Ultimately council is the overarching hierarchy in the whole structure. That is not changing. In terms of any board, you are trying to get a division of skill sets and competencies that will make the board operate as best you can.

JW: It might be pointed out that football has not done so well at government level, that the League of Ireland has had very little love at that level. Perhaps with the government having set this, there will be a better relationship?

GO: It was fractured. The football suffered as a result. To be fair on the Covid-19 situation, they did announce a support as well, even though they just gave us the money recently, that was because there was a government commitment structure or roadmap in place. I think that, whatever way you define it, good governance is really important to attract investment from stakeholders and sponsors. Our guys can’t argue what happened in the past is good enough. It’s not. We’ve a poor brand for a while. It’s hard to get money from sponsors unless they are confident of a return. We’ve a lot of debt to get rid of. The guys can’t argue that what was working historically was working in the benefits of football or the people on the ground.

I am very positive on the football people on our board. I know we are having this sort of debate at the moment. The board has worked well even though the media is focussing on one thing. The independent people will say the football people know their game and the football people will say the independent people are clearly adding value.

JW: The process of these independent directors being appointed; how is that going to work?

GO: I don’t know, probably similar to what we used in the past. It seems to be fair, honest and transparent. You apply and get appointed through a nominations committee and then approved by the board and ultimately approved by council. My strong view would be that we need the best governance structures in place in order to attract the optimum amount of money. If we don’t do that… at the moment we have a bit of work to do to convince people to do that. The council is the overarching control and it has the opportunity to change that. It has a really good opportunity to make this work. At the moment we are a €30 million business when we should be possibly an €80 million business. We should be as big if not bigger than rugby.

JW: That seems a self-explanatory comment. There is a lot of upside in terms of soccer development.

GO: It’s huge. Let’s divide it into two or three parts: the international structure now is really good and strong, with everyone working as a team. In terms of sponsors and stakeholders, best-practise governance will mean everyone will want to invest: for UEFA and FIFA, this is a big positive message. If you get the League of Ireland and the players’ pathway right, that’s another big positive. We will achieve a hell of a lot of we get those things right.

New faces, new structures, new brand, new outcomes?

JW:  Mark Scanlon is appointed as the new director of the Airtricity League and Rea Walshe retains her position as chief operating officer. High-performance director Ruud Dokter has also agreed a new 18-month deal with the association.

GO: We have been working with the team since March, went into the system and asked them a very simple question with their own teams, look like if they were perfect, and they had to come back and make a presentation to the board. We started everyone from scratch, we basically assessed their abilities and competencies as part of that. I put in someone externally, Yvonne Clancy, to help us with that process to establish what the talent pool was like internally. Where the roles changed significantly, we advertised those jobs.

We appointed Stephen early as Mick wasn’t due to go till the end of July. We extended Ruud’s contract and created two new roles – we wanted two new jobs in grassroots and the League of Ireland.

In the non-football side, we’d the COO and marketing. As part of that process, we evaluated the existing people and we assessed the talent of anyone else in the organisation. It was an open process in which anyone could apply. It was pretty rigorous. We decided then the best candidates for the job.

JW: Can you talk to me about the appointment of Mark Scanlon? Some people see this as an internal appointment. Are you happy with the appointment?

GO: Mark has done a great job with the schools and universities so I was really impressed with the way he developed the whole strategy for that. Now he takes on the bigger challenge which is the League of Ireland – different stakeholders involved in that. We need someone on the internal side actually driving the whole agenda for the League of Ireland. We never really had someone doing that from a commercial, football and strategic perspective. Someone driving it. That is what he is going to do. I think he could be good, very good.

Maybe it could (have gone to someone with a better CV) but the first thing we wanted to do was see if the talent pool were there internally. One of the things Yvonne tried to look at was competency and if we were not happy with what was internal we would have gone external.

JW: What about Rea Walsh? She is seen as part of the old regime.

GO: To be fair I found nothing in any of the reports that would in any way question her competency or what she had been doing in the past. She was appointed by the board last year as an interim CEO, by Sport Ireland to do an internal review. She’s a talented person. She knows all the reforms that are required. She is a qualified solicitor. She has a lot of experience. I was obviously testing all that over the past few months. I wouldn’t be recommending someone not up to it.

JW: Marketing is a bit of a blank canvass.

GO: That’s the one I’ve most confidence in if we get everything right, we can really monetise it.

JW: I think Niall Quinn mentioned about potential rebranding, even I remember putting it out there on social media about what people thought of changing the FAI crest back to the old shamrock as an example – to get rid of the remnants of the old regime. Do you accept that there’s still an image issue there?

GO: Yes there is. We did research on it. It is very clear we need to change it. That’s my message to council members and everyone – our brand has been damaged and we really need to change it and change people’s perception of it, particularly those open to helping us financially. That’s no disrespect to people working on the ground.

JW: I didn’t get the impression from talking to people within the FAI that staff morale was especially high. Do you feel you’ve liaised enough with them? It was sad that the fine people within the FAI were probably afraid to admit where they were working over the past while.

“The day Leo Varadkar announced the lockdown was the day the money was transferred – and it was transferred – but literally we were €10 million down straight away.”

GO: Their confidence was shattered. I never met a group that was quite talented but with no goals, objectives, KPIs; they had no understanding of job roles, two people doing the same job; no consistency in what people did, with very poor communication. It’ll take a while to do that but we’ve engaged with them all on the strategy, they’ve fed up through the system and have had an input. 

There are people that don’t like change but with the new leadership team in place, I would say it’s a strong message to them. The international guys are all very motivated. In grassroots, it’s very mixed. In the League of Ireland it’s not good. 

Within the FAI, they are absolutely bruised: report after report, reviews after reviews, up to their neck trying to get the process changed. They are tired and lack a bit of confidence. When we came in it was one out of ten and it’s probably about four now. We asked them when we came in what would it look like if it were perfect in your area. The quality went from being relatively poor to very good at the end. 

We are launching an output now of what they were all involved in, the first time they were involved in a strategy engagement. It is harder on the League of Ireland side. 

One of the things that is amazing for me is the amount of focus the media have. Every day they seem to have something that is a complete surprise. The amount of interest in the FAI surprises me; maybe that was my naivety.

JW: Well, I guess, how much interest is there in the IRFU? It must have a lot to do with the FAI’s past and that they were denied access to what was going on.

GO: Probably – we have a lot of stories to tell. To be fair, Roy and I came in with no agenda; we’d both been in business a long time and we wanted to see could we put it right.

Corporate coups and future plans

JW: It is put to me that there’s a coup going on. Many have dealt with you and think you are doing your best, is it frustrating your motives are being questioned?

GO: It is. Niall, Roy and I had a visionary group set up a year and a half ago for Irish football; it had two meetings and we just said ‘this is going nowhere’ and we never met again. I had done some work before for Sport Ireland, athletics (previously chairman of Athletics Ireland’s board) and boxing (as a consultant with the High Performance Unit of the Irish Amateur Boxing Association). I was well known to them. Roy came through the process and he knew me; he wanted me to help put the structures in place – he would know me. We’ve no agenda other than trying to do the right thing, to make sure we put it right – that’s all.

JW: Out of ten, are you happy with where you’ve gotten?

GO: Let me put it this way: I had to do the refinancing when I came in. Getting that over the line was critical to the organisation. That was a key objective; otherwise we were insolvent. The second was getting the restructure in place. We will have the new senior leadership team; I would be very happy that it will be a very good, vibrant team that will drive the association forward. 

The governance reform was a little more complicated and still not there, but we’ve made a lot of progress with both Sport Ireland and indeed the department in terms of the things we had to deliver on. We had deadlines for June 30, we met them all; they were crucial because if we did not do that, we would not get the funding that we need for Sport Ireland. 

I didn’t envisage Covid-19 – that was a complete shock, a diversion. The day Leo Varadkar announced the lockdown was the day the money was transferred – and it was transferred – but literally we were €10 million down straight away. We need a sort of a Plan B and C and you needed all the stuff around the resumption of the League of Ireland. There were a lot of different views but I felt quite strongly we needed to resume. I stuck rigidly to that or I think we’d have lost the infrastructure. Some clubs did not want us to get there but I am pleased we got there. Do I regret that? No. I think we have done OK.

JW: What’s with Stephen Kenny’s new role at Executive level?

GO: It’s no real change. People made a bit of an issue of that. I was keen for him to sit down, given they are all working together, keen he had opportunity to say we he need this report or that report. He reported to me on the financial side and Ruud on the football side – so no real change. He deserves to have a voice at the top table if he needs that and he has that.

JW: Are the underage managers tied down?

GO: They’ve done a great job. I’d be very positive on them. That whole team will be launched in the next few weeks which will demonstrate the quality and depth we have. As a CEO my job is to put the right people in the right boxes. On the international team we have done that and I think on the senior management team we have done that as well. You really want to drive the association forward, you need high-quality coaching staff on the football side and a very strong leadership in the organisation.

“If I get the five things over the line, I would have been happy that at least I’ve added value to the association in the six months I was there.”

JW: No fans in the stadium this year: what would that mean?

GO: A big blow. For loads of reasons. Stephen Kenny starting off would have huge interest. Fingers crossed, things are changing quickly. Hopefully, we can get in 18,000 cluster fans if we don’t get a full stadium. We are still working on the fact we can probably get some in. Autumn is so important: nine matches in theory. We could do well in the Nations League and if we could magically qualify for the Euros, that is a game-changer. Firstly it validates what we have been doing, with the international competency structures we have put in place, and secondly it would be so financially, given the predicament we are in.

JW: As a going concern, is it secure with the help you’ve gotten; can you see a light at the end of the tunnel?

GO: I can if we get the reforms through. If we went into 2021 without any fans that would be a big problem. It would be serious enough. We’d need to go back to Plan B, sponsors, media rights, streaming, looking for money. Ticket sales, Club Ireland seats which would have been significant. Our main income apart from the stakeholders came from three areas: international football matches, summer camps and sponsors. That’s why governance reform is so important. You really can increase the sponsorship values if people are comfortable. And you need it wider, it was quite narrow in terms of sponsorship partnerships; they are loads you can work on – but they are a lot more valuable if you have fans in the stadium.

JW: Will the League of Ireland and the international games be tied together, as they were, going forward in terms of media rights?

GO: No. We are going a different route. That was a problem for the League of Ireland: the money coming out of it was being invested elsewhere. The league needs to be a value proposition in its own right and the money needs to go back to the clubs.

JW: What has Roy Barrett done in terms of his role?

GO: Roy is great. He is a very experienced businessman. He has a very high intellect, a great engager with people who will bring people with him; a good listener; he does not suffer fools easy and he will always do the right thing. I know him for a couple of years. We would have been competing against each other: I was running a wealth management team in Willis Towers Watson and he was running Goodbody, so we would have been looking for the same clients. I am very busy, it’s been 12-hour days since January.

JW: Would Ireland football benefit from Niall Quinn being involved going forward?

GO: Niall is a fantastic brand. It is very hard not to like Niall. He approaches everything with enthusiasm, to do the right thing; there is not a bad bone in his body. The FAI should be looking to try to keep Niall onside. From his viewpoint, he has definitely re-energised the staff; they all say they love working for him. A great personality. He won’t always agree with people who don’t want to do the right thing. I would reverse that question and the FAI should make sure it uses Niall to the best of his ability to help them.

JW: Have you enjoyed it?

GO: (Laughs) Different than I thought it was, Covid made it different. I love football, I was brought up in it. Joey’s really shaped my whole life, how I think about things; this made me really strong as a person. As a result of giving something back, I think I have enjoyed it. I was delighted to get involved to see if we could get it back on the right track. Whatever happens, it is on a better track; people need to be very strong to make sure that it does not go back to its old ways.