THIS COLUMN HAS been accused of a miserable excess of pessimism about Irish football in recent weeks, so in the abiding sporting spirit of Answering The Critics, we put it to you that Ireland’s football achievements in the last 35 years are among the world’s greatest sporting miracles.
The State was born with an inherent hostility to football, and thus the sport spent a half-century labouring around the fringes of the Gaels’ fatwa. And though the walls of the old segregations have come tumbling down across the last few decades, football has continued to suffer for its place outside of the elite, now evident in the comparative poverty of the facilities paid for under the sports capital grants.
Advertisement The FAI have historically been a weak organisation: they’ve spent too much of their existence serving the tea and biscuits at the internecine wargames of its exquisitely sceptical affiliates. This factionalism and politicking has not been solely contained to the blazers’ entertainment, as it has given rise to Irish football’s absurdly gapped and discontinuous structure.
Add to this the fact that facilities are generally poor, too many games are called off because of rain, professional academies are receiving the same level of investment as Luxembourg and San Marino give theirs, and the domestic league has spent decades suffering the apathy of its governing body and the awesome cultural and commercial reach of Liverpool, United, Celtic, and Arsenal and…well, you can see we’re not working with much here.
And we have done all of this without, in the macro sense of things, even really trying. Nobody on earth would design our football structure from scratch: it is a patchwork of independent, underfunded republics held together by grievance and narrow-mindedness. We can also rely on a strong spirit of volunteerism – 9% of the population classed themselves as volunteers in Sport Ireland’s annual audit for 2022 – and we are an English-speaking nation in Western Europe, and so have ready access to the best ideas in every facet of the game.
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