Andrew Omobamidele traces hometown club's route in from the margins

Both the Norwich City player and Leixlip United have experienced meteoric rises, but what next for clubs around the country as they lose their best young players to League of Ireland academies?

Former Leixlip United star, Andrew Omobamidele has progressed onto the Republic of Ireland squad. Picture: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile

Ask Robbie Martin to explain what Andrew Omobamidele’s graduation to the senior Republic of Ireland squad this summer meant for Leixlip United and he sums it up as both the end and the beginning of a journey the club has taken.

“It’s something 10, 15 years ago we couldn’t dream of, having a full Irish international,” he explains. “Or an Irish international in the making.”

The club secretary and former League of Ireland player is, by his own admission, a bit of a talker but that snippet, cut from a long and informative chat at the club’s grounds last week, says plenty about where they have come from and where they go to now. It also raises familiar questions about the Irish game’s pathways, most of which remain unanswered.

But more on that later.

Leixlip United was never a powerbroker in the Dublin District Schoolboy League when it came to elite players or teams. Success for them was a side keeping its head afloat in the DDSL Premier Division or waving a young talent off to bigger and better things with a St Kevin’s Boys or a Home Farm.

“They are the clubs we aspire to,” says Martin. “Always have.”

A burgeoning ambition fed into an exploding population in and around Leixlip and the neighbouring towns on the Kildare side of the Dublin border. All of which allowed the club to start throwing some shapes in the same division as Dublin’s traditional heavyweights and others further afield.

Reaching for the stars was one thing but first priority was, and remains, being the best they can be for the local community. That required a solid footing: The boring, behind-the-scenes stuff that provides for the right facilities, attracts the right people, and harnesses finances in the best possible way.

At the centre of it all: Football, and players.

Giving kids the basic tools to prosper in their own academy was the starting point. Balance, movement, speed, ball work, technical ability - these are the foundation stones. Leixlip could have 200 children just between the ages of two and four taking their first steps on a Sunday morning. The working principle is that no-one is left behind.

“Any kid who wants to play football will find a team in Leixlip,” says Martin. “We will not just concentrate on our elite teams but we are clear that as a club we will support any team or coaches that want to try and be the best at a particular age group.”

It’s here that Omobamidele and a stellar supporting cast enter the picture.

Now 18, it’s almost 10 years since he first walked through the gates and into an environment where half of his new teammates already had two seasons together under their belt. It was a crop good enough and bountiful enough to spawn two sides at the same grade and the new boy started off on what was effectively the ‘B’ team.

“He wasn’t delighted about that,” says a smiling Kenny Molloy, who coached Omobamidele throughout his years with United. Along with the likes of Robbie Fay and Kevin Mooney, he was responsible for a group that amalgamated at U12s and benefited from an initial failure to make what Molloy calls the “cauldron” of the DDSL Premier Division. That gave them time and space to gel as one before kicking on.

By the time they graduated to the Premier and the 11-a-side ranks a year later they were blossoming and, for everything they achieved as a side on the pitch, the very fact that they stayed together long enough to claim the club’s first All-Ireland (SFAI) title as 16-year-olds in 2018 may well stand as an achievement to outstrip any trophy.

Fay drilled them incessantly on the technical side of the game and they started travelling to England for tournaments from U11s on. Some they won but every journey strengthened their bonds. Then they started to receive call-ups for the DDSL representative sides.

“That was a big thing, for me,” says Molloy.

Others took notice. Usual suspects from the usual capital clubs began to sniff around their patch of the Pale and offer players the sun, the moon and the stars. Molloy and the other coaches continued to bang the drum for the status quo, certain that their charges could launch careers in the game from where they stood.

It wasn’t an easy sell. There was no real trace of a trail from Leixlip to England for the likes of Molloy to offer up as evidence that these kids were on the right track. That changed when one of Omobamidele’s teammates, Josh Giurgi, signed for Norwich City at 16 after two years spent going over and back to East Anglia.

Andrew Omobamidele, Josh Giurgi and Harry Halwax with the SFAI Cup in 2018. Omobamidele and Giurgi are now with Norwich City, Halwax is on the books at Derby County. Picture: Courtesy of Leixlip United

“When you got Josh away you were able to say, ‘There you are now, you don’t have to play for so-and-so cos Joshy has got trials away’, says Molloy. “Parents can be fickle, understandably, and when they see some of your own players going to England they think they don’t have to go (to the Dublin clubs first).”

Omobamidele never made a DDSL squad and had to bide his time to wear a green jersey. His loyalty to Leixlip remains watertight but he has acknowledged that being overlooked likely had something to do with his club affiliation. “To be honest,” Molloy adds at another point, “I was under pressure because it looked like we were holding these lads back.”

Close to a dozen of that 2002-born team has since moved on to various League of Ireland clubs. Molloy never doubted that that would happen but he had a feeling in his bones that there were four or five more among their number who held legitimate hopes of a crack at the professional game in England.

He was right. Giurgi was followed across the water by goalkeeper Harry Halwax. He signed for Derby County. Gabriel Adebambo agreed terms with Stoke City. Omobamidele is long past playing catch-up having broken through to the Norwich City first team and shot up the pecking order at international level.

He was, in all probability, the biggest Irish success story in English football last term.

The demographics of the senior men’s Republic of Ireland squad has changed. Dublin and England no longer provide the vast majority of the players as other counties and, as is being seen at underage levels, countries are doing their bit.

Info compiled by Brendan O'Brien.

Completing the set is the winger Deji Sotana, the Waterford-born winger who spent a handful of seasons with Leixlip before moving on to Manchester United. He has since joined Ligue 1 side Nice. Providing players to continental clubs now, too? Reality has outstripped their most outlandish of ambitions.

“We wanted to win an All-Ireland and that was the dream here from day one,” Molloy explains. “Maybe get some players to (a few Irish trials).

I’ll be honest, we’ve gone beyond our dreams. We wanted to hang a DDSL cap on the wall. That’s the truth of it. But when you get that you want more.

Leixlip United will continue to produce players. Martin’s U13 side won an SFAI Cup in 2019, and the strides made in the last decade have been especially evident in the success of the girls’ section, but the wider landscape has changed even since Omobamidele’s time in terms of how all these kids are funnelled through the system.

The contested decision to divert the best underage talent through the hands of the League of Ireland clubs rather than the traditional schoolboy route is a decade down the line but still raw. Molloy looks back now and thinks that his crop maybe benefited from the fact that the new ways weren’t as embedded at the time.

Andrew Omobamidele training with the Ireland squad in Andorra earlier this month. Picture: INPHO/Bagu Blanco

And now? Leixlip have delivered four players into the current ranks of the St Patrick’s Athletic U15s. Another three are involved with their Shamrock Rovers counterparts. These are players who are effectively lost to the club now, youngsters hoping to make it up the footballing ladder like generations before but doing it via different rungs.

Is that better, or worse? Or just different? The jury remains out.

Add Brexit into the mix and the known unknowns for the Irish game only multiply with the rule that Irish players aged under 18 will no longer be able to join English clubs. It’s an uncertain road ahead but it would be a shame if a club like Leixlip United was shunted off the elite pathway having only just worked their way onto it.

“Personally, I think the club will not suffer,” says Molloy of the Brexit shift. “Obviously you will get one or two that move on to League of Ireland but we are community-based first and foremost.

We have far more elite teams but we have that balance now. We will always have a conveyor belt of young footballers coming in.