'Our system has been fractured since the boat to Holyhead': Niall Quinn’s grand vision for Irish football

Niall Quinn’s new blueprint for Irish football is in the process of being drafted.

The man himself would cringe at that suggestion but then he is actually grabbing a pencil and undertaking initial drawings on the back of public utterances pre-Christmas when he criticised the current structures and voiced a grander vision for the future.

“Our system is fractured. It has been since the boat was going to Holyhead,” he reiterated yesterday.

These aren’t just grenades launched from the safety of a bunker in Ballymount, or his home in rural Kildare. The former Republic of Ireland international is committed to act. He has been spurred on by those who have reached out to him ‘on the QT’ in recent weeks.

High-flyers from the worlds of business, politics and education have been in touch. People whose interest in football and appreciation for what it can achieve as an industry have taken him by surprise and convinced him that there is more wind to generate in this sail.

It’s 18 months since he stopped attending Premier League games on a regular basis and he has used some of the time since to take his first real look under the engine of Irish football. No-one asked, and he has “101 other things to do”, but he feels an obligation to do it. It’s not that he has all the answers. Quinn’s hope is that he can bring the right people together – as with the Drumaville consortium that purchased Sunderland back in the day – and maybe produce a type of White Paper that can unlock the potential he sees in the game here.

“And if it all goes over to the FAI, fine, but it’s time now football got a fair deal.” He has spoken to people in, or about, successful football movements in countries as diverse as Australia, the USA, Iceland, South Africa and Vietnam. Suggestions are plentiful but not all of them will find soft landings.

Among them is the idea that the existing Immigration Investor Programme, whereby long-term residency rights are offered to non-EU persons willing to invest €1m here, be used to fund the arrival of foreign footballers in the League of Ireland - and maybe even play for the Republic.

Other offerings are easier to digest.

For Quinn, that priority lies in bringing to an end the procession of teenagers moving to English clubs by investing in academies and coaches here.

And doing it by approaching the Government to provide funds and instigate tax incentives that can attract big business to play its part.

“Sending a kid off to England, leaving his education behind to try to make it at a first or second division club in England now, it’s for the birds. If we can put something in place that keeps the best young kids at clubs, League of Ireland clubs, that may be through an academy status when they are 15, 16 or 17, that they are tied to the club...

“If they turn out to be good pros and it looks like they are going to be good footballers, that they automatically stay for another three years and if they don’t that their college fees are automatically paid for three years, so they are guaranteed an education, that’s the bit at the bottom of (the pyramid) that makes sense to me.”

Quinn knows how English football chews kids up and spits them out. Sunderland were given awards for their education initiatives during his time as chairman there yet players left with nothing more concrete than tourism certificates and lifesaving badges.

A state-of-the-art computer room was used mainly for players to engage in online gambling but the vision for Ireland is that the balance between football and education would be more pronounced and that there would be a culture of acceptance that the two should go hand in-hand.

The plan, loose though it is still, is to approach Government and lobby for tax breaks for multinational companies who would divert some of the money currently paid to revenue towards academies for anything up to 20 league clubs around the country.

“Cabinteely have as much right as Shamrock Rovers to an academy,” he said.

It was reported last year that Quinn was among the advisors to a project aiming to develop a new central football academy for the FAI based on the English FA’s at St George’s Park but he stressed yesterday that his interest in shaking up the structures here was not commercial.

He estimates that the vast majority of coaches who hold the Uefa Pro Licence in this country right now are not in full-time employment, which would mean that the expertise is ready and waiting to be utilised if the will is forthcoming. And the wallets.

“It needs to be appropriate for someone outside of Government to get involved so a tax break (is needed). Look at all the multinationals that pay their tax here. Give them some impetus to invest in our game and grow it.”

The first question he will be asked is how much money this all involves.

“I don’t care what it costs. If it cost a couple of million per club, €40 million, people laugh. But have a look at what these people are paying in taxes. Get eight of them to pay €5m instead of giving it to government and you’re there. It’s a shot to nothing for these people. Am I mad? Maybe.”

This isn’t a power play. He stated emphatically that “I don’t want to be the chief executive of the FAI and change the world” and he has turned down offers to work with clubs here. But he knows that all this goodwill is nothing without an open door from John Delaney.

“I feel I’ve other people to start asking the question with me and if we can get something solid at all in feedback I’d love to knock on John Delaney’s door and say, ‘come on, let’s see this’. And I know John, he’d entertain me.”

- Niall Quinn was speaking at Virgin Media Television’s spring schedule launch in Dublin yesterday