After 15-year run, Delaney’s FAI exit to be sealed today
JOHN DELANEY’S removal from the FAI payroll after 15 years is expected to be formally confirmed today – but he hasn’t given up his cushy €160,000-a-year number at UEFA.
Three weeks after stepping sideways from his position of FAI Chief Executive to take up a less lucrative role as the new FAI executive vice-president, Delaney has run out of titles at Abbotstown.
John O’Regan of the Kerry District League, a close political ally and FAI Council member, was on Radio Kerry yesterday to say he’d received a text from Delaney saying he was no longer the executive vice-president.
At a meeting with loyalists in Dublin earlier, Delaney is understood to have flagged his decision to stand down from a post especially created for him last month. It followed a summit with senior FAI figures on Friday night where he was told his time was up.
Delaney has been on the back-foot since his point-blank refusal, citing legal advice, to explain the circumstances surrounding his €100,000 dig-out to the FAI two years ago.
His employers shielded Delaney in the Dáil last Wednesday but the FAI blazers were forced into action after An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar made his feelings known on Friday.
It’s understood FAI chiefs were worried that state funding would be withheld, not just from Sport Ireland, but also from the government department which co-funds the cost of FAI regional development officers, unless Delaney was cut adrift. He accepted the inevitable and a statement is expected today once a severance package and legalities are agreed.
His current €360,000-a-year five-year contract is due to run its course in July.
While Delaney is set to step away from the FAI, as things stand he can still serve out his time on the UEFA Executive Committee, which would keep him in the public eye through the Euro 2020 finals. He was elected to the ExCo in April 2017 for a four-year term.
Delaney has told the FAI he will lobby UEFA for support for the joint FAI-IFA bid for the 2023 European Under 21 finals, and also for a women’s Champions League final at the Aviva.
He would continue to have a role in the exploratory 2030 World Cup bid, which involves Ireland and is being pushed by the English FA.
Whether UEFA chiefs feel comfortable with having an ExCo member in their ranks who has been effectively shunned by his own Association remains to be seen.
Delaney has been a central figure in the FAI since 2001 when, aged 33, he was elected the youngest treasurer of the Association. His father Joe, also a contentious figure in Irish football, had previously held the role. He was to the fore when the Saipan row erupted across the Irish sporting conscience in 2002 and became interim CEO in December 2004, before a full-time appointment in March 2005.
As ruler of Irish football, he combined a ruthless sense of politics nous in the boardroom with parish pump populism – he never missed a funeral, always had a spare match ticket for fans, and picked up bar tabs.
For all that the FAI needed modernising, Delaney marginalised those who didn’t agree with him and it’s an indictment of his rule that such figures of integrity as Brian Kerr, Packie Bonner and Eoin Hand were treated shabbily.
Many decent officials were also cast aside while his attitude towards Des Casey, the highly regarded former FAI president and UEFA ExCo member was cold and calculating.
At board level, Delaney deferred only to Michael Cody, the long-serving FAI honorary secretary.
Cody, 79, is due to stand down at the AGM, along with honorary treasurer, Eddie Murray, also 79, as winds of change finally blow through the FAI corridors. Many in Irish football will feel it is not before time.