‘Name one popular chairman of a football club?’
The 40-year-old business man, who took control of the club after it came close to going to the wall last season, says that, “like most Cork people” he has always read the paper “from back to front.” As a northside youngster, he’d played hurling for Glen Rovers and Sarsfields and later played soccer in college but, while always keeping an eye on the football results, he confesses that he would only have ever attended a few games at Turner’s Cross before he took over Cork City following its emergence from examinership last season.
“I don’t know is that a negative or a positive but that’s where I’m coming from,” he says.
Coughlan presents his decision to get involved as being motivated in the main by a growing sense of social responsibility. The father of three young children says that, as a businessman, “you start off wanting to develop every piece of space you’ve ever seen in your life” but then parenthood and things like family outings to the park begin to change one’s perspective.
“These things are an important part of a community,” he says. “I personally have felt a very strong obligation in the last two years to pass the ball on in some shape to my kids. There’s a very rich history of people growing up going to Cork soccer. And it’s something that has to be passed on. I’m thrilled to be doing it. I’m probably very naive in my outlook as to what I want from it, in that I don’t want anything from it personally, but I would love to think that, ultimately, the people would own the club. I would love to see a system whereby they could come in and take it over, and run it just like Barcelona, and the city would see the value of it for its tourism potential, as a source of positive news, as an inspiration to young people in difficult times.”
If that could pass muster as a political speech, it’s probably no coincidence. A former election agent for Fianna Fáil Minister Billy Kelleher, Coughlan himself stood for the PDs in 1997 but failed to get a seat. After that brief flirtation with a rival party, he returned to the bosom of FF but, while he continues to play an active background role in politics, he sees his more immediate goal now as getting the vote out for Cork City FC.
“A live soccer match at the Cross is a fantastic experience,” he says. “You’re right there, you see the physicality of it. It’s a great bonding experience and a great night out. But there’s not enough people experiencing that. I feel that League of Ireland football is way too insular and my job is to sell the message outside of our soccer public. We are looking at this in a political campaign type of way. We are running a political campaign this year to up our bums on seats. The machine is already in action. We’re creating cells in every town in Cork, we’ve support networks set up in all the major towns. We’re getting our posters up, we’re getting in the media. Get out there and sell, sell, sell.”
ALL of which is well and good in the aspirational sense but Coughlan hardly need to be told that, for the staff and supporters of Cork City FC – still licking their wounds after previous owners Arkaga unceremoniously pulled the plug last year – the more pressing concern is that the club’s immediate future in the Premier Division of the League of Ireland is secure. Once bitten, twice shy, there are plenty of sceptics on Leeside and, indeed, throughout the league, who wonder if Coughlan is all promise and no substance.
“First thing, I promise nothing,” he responds. “I will be judged on my deeds. I’m from Cork, I was born here and I’ll die here. I won’t be flying off anywhere, end of story, regardless of what happens. My obligation is to create a sustainable football club. Now, I’ve put a substantial amount of money into it and have projections to put a certain amount in over the next two years. But it’s not a bottomless pit and, after a certain period of time if certain things haven’t happened, I can’t waste my life at something either. But I’m sincere in my endeavours and we’ll do our best.” And what are those things that have to happen?
“The club is a 25-year-old homeless person and that 25-year-old homeless person has to go into rehab and get himself sorted. It’s my job to help but I can’t solve all those problems myself. We employ 45 people in these days when jobs are being lost.
“We’re a full time professional outfit and people have to recognise that there are obligations with that. I’m trying to get the club to be a part of the community in every sense and that’s a job that’s going to take, I would imagine, three to five years.”
But before that, he accepts that “there will be a shortfall that needs to be matched in the next two years and that’s the commitment we’ve made in the short term.”
He describes this period following the “trauma” of examinership, as a tough, teething process. “I’d love to be able to wave a magic wand and it will all be sorted but it’s going to be a process,” he says. “From my perspective, it’s a start-up business that I don’t understand fully and I’m going to make a s**t load of mistakes anyway.”
It’s to those teething problems which he attributes last month’s late payment of players wages – something which, understandably, rang alarm bells about recent history repeating itself in Turner’s Cross.
“And there’s a lot more teething problems,” he says. “I just don’t have visualisation of all the data and that’s what really freaks me in terms of the costs. But we are working on that. If you’re doing a property deal you can see all your costs. I need to see all of them in two pages. But we’ll get there and they’ll all be sorted.”
Coughlan is a big, ebullient, man with a ready laugh who could talk for Cork — and does. But, last December, he exhibited a tougher streak in his decision to sack Alan Mathews at the end of a season in which, despite all the financial turmoil, the manager had helped deliver the Setanta Cup to Leeside.
At the time he took over, the new owner had hailed Mathews as a hero but barely a month after the end of the season had sacked him. It’s a subject on which Coughlan is, uncharacteristically reticent.
“I haven’t really done any commenting on the relationship with Alan Mathews,” he says, hesitantly. “I suppose we just had different views as to the sustainability of the club. The onerous contracts that were on the club were not sustainable and the money Alan was on was utterly unsustainable.
“I could go into all the detail but there’s no point, I have to focus on the future. There’s three versions to every story – your version, my version and the truth. The reality is, it happened and the ultimate reason for it is the sustainability of the club. I think we’ve got a fantastic man in now and the salary figures just weren’t comparable.”
The new man is Paul Doolin and while Coughlan insists that the former Drogheda manager is entirely in charge of football matters – “he’s the boss” – he concedes that Doolin might sometimes find the chairman’s presence intrusive.
“I’m new to this and I’d say Paul probably finds me frustrating at times. Why? Because I’m not used to the game, you know I mean. I ask stupid questions. I ask how much things cost. But if people are serious about sustainability, you’re either at this or you’re not. What I want is a football club that can stand on its own and drive off into the sunset for the next 100 years. But the employees have to realise they have a corporate social responsibility to the company they’re working for.”
COUGHLAN describes last season’s wage bill as “ridiculous” and, by the sound of things, doesn’t rule out further belt-tightening in these recessionary times. “Our budget is still high. Everybody needs the money but the problem is the economy we are now in is reducing by the hour so we have to cut our cloth to measure. And the question is whether people are up for that or not. That’s something we’ll have to review, like any business. But as I said earlier I need to get a vision of all the data first.
“Everything is fluid and has to be reviewed on a weekly and daily basis. We’ll continue to do that and we’ll smoke out insincere people involved in what we’re doing. You have to be with the cause and the cause is Cork. Success for the club on the field and off the field. Full stop.”
The businessman, the sports enthusiast and the Cork native all seem to come together in Coughlan’s dream of a major 20,000-seater stadium plus convention centre and hotel for the city although, once again, he insists “there will be no financial return in this for me.”
Ask him then, if this is all an act of philanthropy and he reverts to his starting position – in the process, offering up a candidate for quote of the year.
“Look,” he says. “I genuinely feel an obligation as a Cork man to do things for Cork. I was in Thomond Park recently and someone said ‘isn’t Thomond Park great?’ And I said yeah, it is great but it’s in f**kin’ Limerick!”
So is Tom Coughlan the man on the white horse for Cork City? Or just the harbinger of another false dawn? He may be new to this game, but he is under no illusion about how quickly the top man in the boardroom can go from hero to villain.
“Name one popular chairman of a football club in the world,” he suggests. “Chairmen, generally, are slightly fatter than I am – but I’m getting there – and they generally are not popular, they’re a necessary evil. So I’ve no notions about how I’ll be treated. I just want to do my best.”
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