Tommy Martin: A €3m milestone that finally puts a value on Irish football opportunity
OPPORTUNITY: Manager Jim Crawford and Mason Melia during a Republic of Ireland U21's training session at the FAI National Training Centre in Abbotstown. Pic: Tyler Miller/Sportsfile.
A mixed week for the toy department.
You had the implosion of the Jim Gavin presidential campaign, which had been drifting listlessly long before it was sunk by a torpedo from a disgruntled former tenant.
Before that, Gavin’s main problem had been a total personal unsuitability for the rough and tumble of the political hustings, which mainly involves bellowing plausibly on the airwaves and giving the impression of actually enjoying the experience of meeting members of the general public, neither strong points for the former Dublin boss.
Aside from that, Gavin’s doomed campaign was a reminder that stuff which people who are obsessed with sport think is really important doesn’t always fly on Main Street.
While people who follow GAA thought that Gavin was a solid candidate for first citizen because he won five in a row with the Dubs and completely reconstructed the monstrous carbuncle of modern Gaelic football in jig time (plus, you know, the army and planes and stuff), most others responded along the lines of the Alan Partridge shrug meme.
Sports fans were astonished to hear some from the wider world claim ignorance of Gavin’s entire existence, with one prominent political commentator saying that he had to Google him to find out what he was about. This is Jim Gavin, we cried! Behold the work of the FRC and bow down before him!
But no, the invention of the 40m arc and the three-up rule failed to move the needle with Joe Public. I was reminded of the time a crowd gathered to watch England play a World Cup match in the TV3 newsroom.
At a particularly tense moment in the latest Three Lions meltdown, the Head of News passed by on his way to the printer and asked how “the UK” were getting on, his brain clearly classifying the World Cup and Eurovision in the same pot of ephemeral nonsense.
No matter how seriously we take sport, how much data analytics we assign to it and how many Guardian think pieces we read about it, we are doomed to be seen as the little boys in short trousers by those who don’t follow it with quite the same ardour.
I suspect this was what caught out Micheál Martin, who appears to have torched whatever political capital he had left with his backbench foot soldiers by forcing through the Gavin candidacy.
An Taoiseach, whose son is an inter-county footballer and whose job involves a certain amount of glad-handling and schmoozing at big GAA matches, clearly spent the summer having thousands of micro-conversations about the brilliant job Jim Gavin had done with the football, sparking the worst political lightbulb moment since David Cameron reckoned he’d kill off Brexit once and for all by calling a referendum.
By all accounts, he and Jack Chambers were flat out in the month of August banging the phones to make sure the party faithful were on board with Jim for Prez.
Had Micheál given it a few more weeks of the split season he might have realised how little anyone else really cared about David Clifford being able to kick points without five angry Armagh men pulling out of him.
All of which made you worry for another campaign which saw sport interact with the political classes: the entirely more successful bid to get public funding for League of Ireland academies.
This came to partial fruition in Tuesday’s budget with the commitment to allocate €3 million per annum as seed money for some kind of half decent football industry.
The fear had been that for all the brilliant work done by the likes of Will Clarke in the League’s academy section in making those in power aware of just how far behind we were in youth soccer development compared to our peers, the politicians would simply pat them on the head and point to all the proper things they had to focus on, like taking VAT off McFlurries and giving tax incentives to developers for apartments they were already building.
Worse than that, the constant din of controversy coming from FAI towers had given the politicians ample reason to withhold Irish football’s pocket money. Some had already pleasured themselves with a bout of ritualistic scolding of the association when FAI brass were hauled in front of the recent Oireachtas hearing.
While the FAI had a lot to answer for, including their ill-advised plan to simply not turn up, there were plenty taking potshots that day who couldn’t give a flying fig about Irish soccer other than using it as a way to get their faces on telly.
So, while the €3m is less than what was sought, it does represent a milestone in that it was the political system recognising Irish soccer not just as a thing to be patronised, doled handouts to and occasionally scolded for boardroom shenanigans, but rather as an investment opportunity with huge potential for return. In effect, this was the toy department all grown up.
The achievement of those who argued for this money was in getting the politicians to see it as good business rather than good works.
The money being put into League of Ireland academies is not largesse, but rather in the same category as the millions dished out to host the NFL and the Ryder Cup for the purposes of extracting tourism dollars from Yanks for years to come.
And the thing is, you wonder why it took them so long to realise it. The Premier League spent €3.5bn on players this summer alone. We are literally right beside the nation that spends the most on buying footballers of any in the world. It would be like living next to the world’s biggest cider market and never thinking to plant a few apple trees.
The proof of concept is already there, in the sales of Mason Melia and Victor Ozhianvuna to Tottenham and Arsenal respectively.
St Patrick’s Athletic and Shamrock Rovers have pulled in nearly €4m between them operating out of an academy system with minimal external help. This is like someone selling a startup tech company for millions having had seed capital consisting of a flint axe and some mud tablets.
Basically, the government have gotten in on the ground floor of a mega-billion industry for the equivalent per annum of one of Florian Wirtz’s earlobes.
Even someone in the toy department will tell you that sounds like a good deal.
