The gospel according to John
AS HE LEAFED through the documents in his office in Abbotstown, John Delaney was once again confronted with troubling news from the League of Ireland.
Dundalk were looking for a salary cap because gate receipts weren’t high enough. Worse, after a director had blotted his copybook, Shelbourne had been turfed out of the league and, sensationally, were now applying to the IFA for permission to defect to the north.
Still, the FAI chief executive could afford to smile. After all, the date on the documents – part of an Irish football treasure trove currently in the process of being archived – was 1934.
“I was reading this stuff and thinking not a lot has changed in some ways,” says Delaney.
In fact, 75 years on, there are many who would argue that, if anything, things have gotten worse. But, coming to the end of a season disfigured by financial turmoil, points deductions and serious concerns about clubs going out of business altogether, John Delaney stoutly defends the FAI’s stewardship of the senior domestic game.
“We’re certainly positively discriminating in revenues and cash – the league this year cost us €5m,” he says. “And the truth of it is that someone had to take it over. The thing was in really, really bad shape. Self-regulation didn’t work. The only real negatives around the league this year have been club finances. And the clubs have to look into themselves. The FAI didn’t sign a player last year, you know. The clubs signed players which, in certain cases, they clearly couldn’t afford.
“There were three things there: historic debt coming forward, over-egged budgets and a downturn in the economy. So between the mix of the three certain clubs got themselves into difficulties. But not all of them. Again, the latest figures show that eight clubs after 10 months trading this year have made a profit and five have losses less than €50,000. So some are doing their business well, others not as well.”
And the FAI’s share of the responsibility? “We don’t get everything right but we get a lot more right and a lot less wrong than we did,” he says. “Maybe we relied too much on the club’s budgetary processes last year.”
As reported in yesterday’s Irish Examiner, the FAI plan to, in Delaney’s words, “aggressively health-check” budgets next season and are also considering much tougher sanctions for clubs who go into examinership. But to many who care about the state of League of Ireland football, there is a belief that such measures are little more than band-aids applied to a gaping and potentially fatal would. Is not the real core problem one of limited public appeal, a reflection of the fact that the vast majority of football fans in Ireland would rather watch Cristiano Ronaldo on television than Keith Fahey in the flesh?
“I think it’s a bit deeper than that,” the FAI boss responds. “A lot of the clubs lost their connection to the community. There are 450,000 people involved in soccer here annually. You only need to get 10% of those to go to league matches. But what the clubs did – and they know this – in certain cases they disenfranchised the schoolboys and the juniors and all the different strands of the game. What we’ve been trying to do with the club promotions officers is create that alliance again. And that doesn’t come easy, it’ll take a while.
“The first year that we did it last season, there were an extra 100,000 people who came to the games. And they’re the figures the clubs provided to us. So there was an increase. This year it has stabilised because I think there’s been a dip in attendances in all sports. But if the clubs got more into working with the football people in their community – maybe even organising their games so they don’t clash with junior and schoolboys game or brought schoolboys clubs to all their home matches, they can create a greater sense of occasion.’’
But is full time professional football actually sustainable in the League of Ireland? “Not for 22 clubs. It could be for maybe four clubs. And then the other clubs, they could have some full-time, some part-time, some scholarship. There’s more innovative ways of making sure a player can devote a lot of his time to playing football. Not just training twice a week and playing Sunday – that’s really part-time. There’s a quasi full time that can arise if you’re smart about how you put your business plan together.”
The Catch 22 here, of course, is that the pursuit of European success by some of Ireland’s bigger clubs has required the kind of financial investment in full-time football which, barring the not always reliable input of owners with deep pockets, the game here simply cannot support. Yet, the big wages and improved training have clearly paid dividends in terms of standards on the pitch, as witness the fine performances in Europe by some of the country’s elite sides in recent years. And there is a view here, often expressed by former Cork City boss Damien Richardson for example, that European football is the benchmark by which progress in the Irish game has to be judged.
“Coming from a manager, that’s a fair comment,” says John Delaney. “A manager wants to manage against the best, players want to play against the best. But I think the club administrators and owners need to understand that the development of a club isn’t just based on solely football success. Don’t throw all your money just at getting football success. Put it into administration, put it into community development, put it into infrastructure. If you do all those things you have a far better chance of having a stable club. If your litmus test is just European success then the year you don’t have it you’ve a real problem.”
ON THE international front, the picture is a lot rosier at season’s end. After the demoralising failure of the Steve Staunton experiment, the sensational arrival of one of the most experienced and successful managers in world football has once again raised expectations of a return to the good times for the boys in green. Not surprisingly, John Delaney says he has been deeply impressed in his dealings with Giovanni Trapattoni.
“He’s genial and very easy to work with,” he says. “I’ve seen this many times — hotels, planes, all those things, don’t bother him too much. Even kit and that sort of stuff, those things don’t bother him at all. But when it comes to football he’s deadly serious. I saw an example of that at half-time in the Champions League final (which the Irish squad watched at their training base on the Algarve last May) when he lectured the players about how Man United and Chelsea had played. Everybody was getting up and he jumped up in front of them and made them all sit down. I’ve actually never met anybody as serious about football.”
Yet the veteran Italian’s reign, though still its infancy, hasn’t been without its controversies. Would the FAI boss care to comment on reports that the manager had a falling-out with Andy Reid in the team hotel in Mainz after the win against Georgia?
“Without commenting on that, we make a lot out of nothing at times,” he replies. “How many journalists go away on trips. Forty? Fifty? I’m sure if we analysed things that go on there you could magnify them into big stories. From what I know of it that story has been exaggerated.”
A simple question then: should Trapattoni be playing Andy Reid?
Delaney grins: “Well, I don’t think he’d tell me who my Finance Director should be.”
But is he satisfied that all Trapattoni’s selection decisions are football-based and not personality-driven?
“Absolutely. Where’s the evidence that he’s been personality-driven? I know that all he and Marco and Liam want is the best for Irish football. No-one is going to cut off his nose to spite his face. He will do everything in his power to make sure that Ireland qualify for the World Cup in 2010 and I think very little if anything will get in his way of trying to achieve his objective.”
Delaney also dismisses criticism that the manager is not seeing enough Irish players in action with their clubs.
“Well, first of all, he’s been to games and I know he’s going to games the next couple of weekends. He also trusts the people he has in place to look at other games and, between him, Marco (Tardelli), Liam (Brady), Mick Martin, Frank Stapleton and Alan Kelly – and Ashley Grimes who’s involved a bit as well — they’ve watched close to 100 games pertaining to Irish football this year already. He has a good network in place.”
THE FAI man professes himself bemused by the growing volume of criticism of Trapattoni’s squad and team selection.
“It’s puzzling because we’ve got seven points out of nine. When I walk the streets, all the public cares is that we win. We’re getting the results. And we were told for the last four or five years that results were all that mattered. And if we can get to a play-off or we can qualify automatically for the World Cup in South Africa well then, in terms of the teams Giovanni picks, no-one will look back on who he played or who he didn’t play.”
And how would the man in Irish football’s other hot seat quantify the value of qualifying for the finals?
“It’s important for the promotion of the game, for the supporters and for the national mood,” he says. “Financially, fine, there’s always big headlines about the money you get. But I’ve always said that if Kilkenny play Waterford in a hurling final or Kerry play Tyrone in the All Ireland football final, there’s a big level of interest. When Ireland play in the rugby World Cup, there’s a greater level of interest. But when we qualify for a World Cup or European finals in soccer, the country shuts down. It really does. I don’t think there’s any other sport that captivates this country as much as when we qualify for the finals of a tournament. Everyone wants those moments back.”
Not least an association which has grown all too accustomed to shipping heavy knocks in the press. But while Delaney suggests that such criticism inevitably comes with the territory, he’s not above delivering a mild rebuke in the other direction.
“I think the public are a bit confused sometimes,” is how he puts it. “I mean, they saw 20 different names coming to manage Ireland. They read that Denis O’Brien’s contribution was going to affect the eircom sponsorship of the FAI. It didn’t. The gave us 25% more. They read the stadium wouldn’t be built. We wouldn’t get planning. We hadn’t the money. So I meet a lot of people who say well, everything we read isn’t true. I get that a lot now. But there’s balance in the media too. We’re not beyond criticism but once we get balance I’m happy.”
And by balance, he also means the concentration of interest on the apex of the Irish football pyramid at the expense of what he would see as the vital daily work the FAI is doing across the broad base of the game in Ireland.
“It’s understandable but I don’t think it’s right,” he says. “I’ve always said that the Charlton era masked the underdevelopment of the game whereas over the last five or six years the lack of success, as people would want it, has masked the development. These actually are the best years ever for the development of the game and I think it will see the benefits in years to come.
“If you’re building a house,” Delaney concludes, “you build the foundations first.”
“THE FIRST time I met Marco (Tardelli) was in the famous garage in Milan,” recounts John Delaney. “We were doing Giovanni’s contract and I was on the phone to him. I asked him who his assistant was going to be — we’d heard Gentile and all sorts — and he said it’s going to be Tardelli and he’ll be with you there in 15 minutes. So 15 minutes later, Marco Tardelli, World Cup winner with Italy in 1982, walks in. He had not a word of English so we spoke for an hour through an interpreter. All football, about this game and that game, brilliant stuff.
“So when the agreement was done, he said he wanted to learn English. And I said, well, ring Michel Platini because I got Michel Platini over to Ireland to learn his English and, of course Michel and Marco played in the same Juventus side.
“So that was grand. Marco came over for a month to learn his English. When he arrived I said to him, look there’s no point in us meeting up for a meal until you can speak a bit of English and he agreed, saying he’d let me know when he was ready. A couple of weeks later, I got a text message saying, I am ready. I sent back a text suggesting Thursday at a particular restaurant and then I got this text back (Delaney holds up phone with text message reading, in capital letters): “YES. NO BOTHER. THURSDAY IS GRAND”.
“The guy hadn’t just learned English, he’d learned Dublin!
“So we brought him to Mick Wallace’s, because of course Mick’s a big Italian football fan. So the night went on and we’re talking about football again and he asked me what my favourite game was.
“And I said that, not because you’re here, but it was Italy 3, Brazil 2 in the 1982 World Cup. I’d watched it as a kid. It was the most spectacular team on the planet in Brazil and the most organised team in Italy and I actually told him that I’d cried at the end because I so much wanted Brazil to win.
“We were talking through the teams — Zico, Socrates, Falcao, Zoff and all the rest — but neither of us could remember who was in goal for Brazil. And I knew this was starting to bug him. Then he says, hold on a minute, takes out his mobile and rings... Paolo Rossi. And he says, ‘I’m with my boss. Paolo, you scored the three goals, you must know who you scored three goals against.’ And the next thing he hands the phone to me.
“And it just struck me at that second that, here I was, in an Irishman’s Italian restaurant, sitting opposite a World Cup medal winner, talking to a World Cup Golden Boot winner.”
(For the record, and to ensure readers get a good night’s sleep, Brazil’s ‘keeper in ‘82 was Waldir Perez).
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