It was an evening meeting in autumn 2006. Platinum One, the sports agency, was in its pomp. We had a strong player portfolio, we had just completed a long-term contract as advisers to that September’s Ryder Cup. We had also done the original Dublin Arnotts deal in Gaelic games and advised Bank of Ireland in its negotiations with the GAA to become the first sponsor of the All Ireland Football Championships. With the exception of that bastion of professionalism, the FAI, the brand had ‘currency’, so offering to advise sports organisations on commercial issues was generally welcomed. 

The office for this discussion was that of Leinster rugby CEO, Mick Dawson, who had left the world of financial services in 2001 to take the helm at the then emerging new force in Irish professional sport. I was more used to visiting professional football clubs in England, the magnificence of the European Tour/Ryder Cup headquarters in Wentworth or even IRFU HQ on Lansdowne Road. Generally meetings about Leinster players whom I represented took place in the relative comfort of the club’s training base at Riverview in Dublin 4. 

Leinster’s home then was a small upstairs office across from Donnybrook stadium in south Dublin. The office was a kip; the staircase to Mick Dawson’s office was so narrow that, on match days, there were traffic lights, top and bottom, to ensure the accident-free movement of fans collecting tickets. Dawson, who’d have been used to the plush surroundings of Davy Stockbrokers, didn’t seem to care and, as I was touting for business, I was happy to sit on whatever storage boxes were handy.   

The sole agenda item was sponsorship and creating a more robust model that would generate the kind of returns needed to grow the club. It was a speculative piece of work – we were using our status to try and encourage interest in our services and what we could do – but the conversation became focused on one issue: success in Europe.

It wasn’t at all contentious; Leinster and Platinum One were ad idem that generating substantive commercial value for the brand was dependent on signs of success. There were blue shoots but they were just that; the backdrop was Munster’s first European title that year but, more tellingly, the consistency with which Leinster’s great foe was involved at the latter stages of the Heineken Cup. 

*****

That was then, this is now. 

On this, the last weekend of May 2022, Leinster will compete for its fifth European title. While the narrowness of rugby’s base and the hopelessness of Scottish and Welsh clubs at this level, makes the achievement less than those of multiple winners in football (as a lifetime Manchester City fan, I know!), what Leinster has achieved in the last 15 years is still remarkable. What’s more so, as Mick Dawson exits pitch-left, is that the club appears poised to continue to be one of the most powerful franchises in professional rugby and, commercially, one of the most attractive sports properties in Ireland. Professional sport is an uncertain business but the portents, on and off the pitch, are uniformly positive. 

Leinster has its own facilities – its own training centre and academy with smart offices – but, fortuitously circumstance means not a stadium, so often the ‘trophy’ that cripples a professional sports club. It may rankle with some that it has to rent from the RDS and pay for its occasional use of the Aviva but ownership of a stadium is never a sign of sporting success. It’s not the club’s only good fortune; I’ve written before of the enormous value it and, to a lesser extent, Ulster and Munster, extract from the strength of the Irish schools’ game as a source of almost ‘good to go’ playing talent. Yet, for all these circumstantial benefits, Leinster has earned its place as one of Irish sport’s most admired organisations. It has happened because dedicated people – with as singular a focus as its players consistently demonstrate in battle – set a course and have quietly navigated it to its position as the best club in European rugby.   

*****

Irish professional football, in contrast, has been through as tumultuous and dispiriting a time as Leinster’s has been invigorating and inspiring. The reasons are many but while any comparison between Irish club football and how our four professional rugby clubs operate is problematic there are some lessons to be learned, starting with the critical need for only proper adults to be in the room. Meaning? 

My experience of Leinster is of a club that grew in stature because it was allowed to do so, however grudgingly at first, by some of the more traditional elements within the sport. The IRFU, its principal shareholder, may have been overly protective for a period but, in time, it changed as it recognised the need for independent thinking and management. Many of the bad habits (there are some positives too) of the amateur era needed to be shed and however disruptive it was for the aspirations of clutches of erstwhile ‘alicadoos’, attitudes had to change to facilitate growth in the professional era.  

Club management changed: Dawson in Leinster and the late Garrett Fitzgerald in Munster knew their shareholder, but understood too the need to nudge the Irish rugby world of chaps and blazers (no, not ‘in’, as they’re separate cohorts entirely!) towards an acceptance that the professional era would herald something radically different; exciting yes but also threatening to what had gone before. Therein lay one part of the challenge. 

Another was knowing when and where to get out of the way. My exposure to Munster was limited, but it was Thomond Park that set the early standard. It was from its greatest rivals that Leinster had most to learn. And learn they did. Both CEOs were uninterested in the profile that could attach to their positions as leaders within the professional game, preferring to get on with the job, leaving public engagement to those – coaches and team managers – for whom it’s, properly, part of their work. 

Mick Dawson. Photo: Seb Daly/Sportsfile

There was a great deal more to that in how these men, and Philip Browne in the Union, facilitated the growth of their sport through drawing on the wider expertise of their senior coaching staff. Michael Cheika, who was the surprise choice to succeed Declan Kidney (former Irish coach Gerry Murphy had been an interim) in 2005, guided the club to its first European trophy but he also used, and was allowed to do so, his considerable business experience to help shape the organisation across a range of areas. Joe Schmidt who followed him and sparked a run of exceptional success with two European Championships was a school teacher, consumed as much with the building of a winning but respectful culture something that’s made as lasting an impression on the Leinster brand as the amount of silverware accumulated in his three years in charge. 

Leinster, and rugby generally, inherited a similar committee structure to that which still bedevils Irish football but over time its influence has become less pervasive. With time and experience, more of the individuals involved appreciated that the professional era demands levels of separation to allow those paid to do the work to get on with it.

That’s a marked change from twenty years ago when Garrett Fitzgerald was first driving the Munster bus and Mick Dawson was assuming control in Leinster. Put simply, there are now a great deal more grown ups in the room than would have been the case in the early years of the professional game. It is, I believe, the single biggest cultural change and the one that has facilitated its spectacular growth in popularity. 

*****

Football in Ireland remains – as it is across most of the planet – the most popular sport but for a variety of reasons it is beset by a range of challenges that are as acute as they are deep and difficult to address. Addressing it starts with cultural change where the biggest task is to cauterise the entitlement-tumour, the sickness that, for generations, had allowed committee men (always bloody men) believe that because they were on some committee or other across its labyrinthine structure they should have a say in how the sport was run. When I first became involved with professional football in Ireland in 1990, then Secretary General (CEO) Tony O’Neill, was trying to address this very issue but the blowback was immense. A decade later, Brendan Menton attempted the same but it was in 2004 – with the appointment of John Delaney – that the under-threat committee men were to experience a fresh start.

Delaney was only 37 but the FAI chose to put the ultimate control of football in the hands of someone, though young, who believed absolutely, in the power of the old way of doing things. At the very point, in the mid-noughties, at which Irish rugby was shedding the layers of amateur bureaucracy to facilitate more streamlined, necessarily less democratic, systems geared towards maximising success, the FAI was heading in the opposite direction. There’s a tipping point with just such a transition; rugby moved on, the committee-collective got over itself and allowed professional managers to do what needed to be done while Irish football went into reverse. The committee men were critical to Delaney’s mission to make football his personal fiefdom. Decades were lost in the process. The FAI’s fall – financial and otherwise – was cataclysmic but there are now emerging signs of progress. It’s fascinating to see how important it was to Irish rugby to diminish the power of the committee men while, over the same period, a rogue CEO was propping up his regime by strengthening their role.

*****

That was then and this is, it’s to be hoped, now.

The FAI has a proper board chaired by someone, Roy Barrett, who loves the game and has no need for kudos. Importantly, former Technical Director, Packie Bonner, unceremoniously removed by the previous CEO has returned as a non executive director. The new CEO, Jonathan Hill, is English, experienced, balanced and uninterested in celebrity which might mean travelling fans have to buy their own drink.

But that would be a small sacrifice if he was to deliver reform. The extent of any ire he’s drawn so far is around his decision not to relocate his family (shorthand for not liking that he’s a Brit). As the previous incumbent was one of ours, chose to live among us and was utterly incompetent, this represents hope that Hill can get on with being a lowkey, hard working CEO, happy to leave the limelight to players and the likes of Vera Pauw and Stephen Kenny. 

The latter is someone I know. Stephen shares qualities of Brian Kerr, the most profound of which is an obsession with the well-being of Irish football. That and an unbelievable work ethic so, if we’re patient and allow the emergence, however gradual, of new talent there’s every reason to be confident about progress in competitive action. The women’s game, about which I know less than I should, also shows signs of growth, vital to the evolution of the professional game in Ireland. 

There’s another reason for hope though it remains, I suspect, where the cobwebs of cronyism cling to the walls of Irish football, the domestic club game both at senior and schoolboy level. Nonetheless there are more positive signs as the fresh air enemating from HQ in Abbotstown loosens threads spun by the old boys’ network. The well-known outstanding schoolboy clubs are outnumbered by mediocrity but now must face a changed environment courtesy of UEFA’s policy that senior clubs had to have teams competing at underage levels.

The senior league’s geographic imbalance is chronic, depriving the larger, well supported, clubs of a virtuous economic model based on consistent gate receipts and the higher financial returns in other areas that follow. Still, glimmers of a new dawn can be seen with more serious-minded people committing their time, expertise and capital toward its realisation. It’s good that Dermot Desmond’s investment in Shamrock Rovers is business-led, that remarkably, in the midst of phenomenal financial pressures, Garrett Kelleher has stayed the course at St. Patrick’s Athletic and that Derry City has, in Philip O’Doherty, someone of equal commitment, financially and spiritually. Equally, the emergence of young coaches in many of these clubs, is cause for greater optimism. 

Still, it’s here in our own club game that many of those associated with football for their own ego and status need to be rooted out. Often, their presumptions about their own or their club’s importance blinds them to how their protectionism is inhibiting progress but what’s marked is how persistent some remain. It’s here the investors and owners, but also respected influencers, need to push an agenda that is predicated only on the betterment of the game. Let’s hear more too from Ruaidhri Higgins, Stephen Bradley, Tim Clancy, Damien Duff et al as the coaches who want the league to develop and grow; they’re the people who should be most impatient for change, least tolerant of the wasters who have little to contribute.

*****

I’m not an Aviva regular but in the past few weeks I attended the FAI’s centenary match with Belgium and Leinster’s semi-final triumph over Toulouse. I’d the good fortune to be a VIP guest at the football and was struck by the number of people, long banished under the Delaney dictatorship, in attendance. There too were some of the men who’d propped him up as, in the spirit of glasnost, they should have been, as much to see how better things are when the overwhelming majority in the room are proper grownups. 

As it happens, my host for Leinster’s exhibition a fortnight ago was a friend and teammate from the first UCD team in the League of Ireland, when Noah was finishing the ark. As we waited for our DART home, we chatted about the wonder of what we’d just experienced, a ‘rocking stadium’, a phenomenal performance by a club that is bringing credit to its city, to its place; in short, the excitement and energy around what Leinster has come to represent. I referenced the positivity I’d felt a few weeks before in and around that FAI centenary match and we talked about what it would mean for Dublin, for Irish football, for Ireland, if the new dawn was to prove not to be false. 

*****

It’s to be hoped that Leinster achieve that coveted fifth European crown this weekend but whatever the outcome, its continuing presence at the very top table of European club rugby is assured. The office Mick Dawson will vacate presently is a far cry from that cramped space in the middle of Donnybrook village where players were at greater risk of injury finding their way through the debris than on the pitch, but the Clonskeagh base is purely emblematic of how change came about. Attitudes changed, pettiness was challenged, later scorned, amidst the emergence of a unified view of what success meant. Gradually, those in charge found that with encouragement those who felt threatened by what real professionalism heralded could be made to appreciate that the sport as they knew it could live alongside the elite professional game.  

With courage, private and public sector support, those to the fore in the leadership of Irish football can set about the same journey knowing the sport’s unique popularity means that with momentum and UEFA’s backing, progress can be relatively quick. The rider is this; if your instinct is to preserve the status quo, for your club, your league or, worst of all, for yourself then please recognise, that was then and this is…..now.