Maybe now we will start to appreciate our own...
LAST Wednesday, Conan Byrne set out from Tolka Park, visiting every League of Ireland ground in the capital, before ending up at the Aviva Stadium. The former St Pat’s star, who now plies his trade with Glenavon in the Irish League, raised €14,000 for the Irish Cancer Society with his marathon walk challenge. He hit upon the idea when Daffodil Day was cancelled because of the Covid-19 outbreak and the domestic game rowed in behind him.
The following afternoon, Enda Stevens, James McClean and Kevin Long – Ireland internationals who had all graduated from the league – combined to donate €25,000 to a hardship fund set up for clubs struggling during the suspension of football.
Two examples that display the solidarity that often exists, even amid petty club squabbles, in the League of Ireland community.
They will need more of that solidarity and togetherness in the coming weeks and months.
At roughly the same time that three of the league’s alumni announced their donation, Sligo Rovers became the first Premier Division club to announce all their staff had been temporarily laid off because of the coronavirus crisis.
Other clubs (see below) are set to adopt similar measures and there are probably only a couple of clubs with the capability of paying wages until June 19, when the FAI ambitiously hope that this year’s SSE Airtricity League season will resume.
Most First Divisions clubs have already stopped paying players their wages or expenses.
With normal life on pause, there is an opportunity for everything to re-set. And the League of Ireland should be no different.
Summer football meant that the league was only cranking into life as this global public health crisis hit, as opposed to the majority of leagues across Europe who were heading into the closing stages.
Most clubs had only played four matches when everything was stopped.
And the League is one of the most reliant on gate receipts among the 55 member federations in UEFA, as well as the money generated on match-nights through bar-takings and lotto draws.
The dependency on match-day income across the league is stark and it’s the reason that the idea of staging matches without supporters wouldn’t have worked.
‘We don’t have lucrative TV deals to make up for having games behind closed doors,’ accepted Niall Quinn, the FAI’s deputy chief executive, earlier this week.
‘We need to be playing with crowds for the system to work. The effect of not playing from month to month is critical for us.
‘These are extraordinary times and who knows if life will ever be the same again.’
And the League might never be the same again.
The early weeks of this season were promising. Crowds were healthy.
Shamrock Rovers and Dundalk played out a fine game live on RTÉ 2, complete with Jordan Flores’ remarkable volley that was viewed across the world.
There were signs that, after years of neglect from the previous regime that led the FAI, that the league was feeling better about itself.
And in fairness, the new regime had been making the right moves about making the League a fuller part of the FAI family.
They abolished the exorbitant affiliation fees, such a sore point with the previous leadership, and have ensured that clubs are receiving their solidarity payments from UEFA as well as prize money from last year, which wasn’t always the case as we discovered in the recent past.
However, with Scottish clubs receiving £1.5 million from their Association and Football League clubs in England able to dip into a £50 million emergency fund, it illustrates the shallow pool that the League of Ireland is still swimming in. There have been great strides made in the past couple of years. My own local club, Bohemians, has done superb work to ingrain itself in the neighbourhoods around the Phibsboro area. But they aren’t the only club who have made themselves part of the community. It was the way forward for the league.
That way is now blocked by an unexpected and unprecedented challenge.
But if it is true that, once we come out the other side of this crisis, it will have changed the way we live and changed our entire society, maybe the wider public attitude to the League of Ireland will change, too.
Perhaps, more of us will get off the couch and go to our local game on a Friday night and feel part of that community who came out to support Conan Byrne last Wednesday.
If the league is able to largely survive this crisis, maybe there’s a chance that it can become a bigger part of the national sporting conversation.