Irish football deserves better than ‘same old FAI’ deja vu dance

The sense of deja vu has been overwhelming of late. FAI board meetings descending into chaos. Directors fuming to discover they were kept in the dark on governance issues.

Stories leaking out in the media revealing Sport Ireland have halted funding, with the CEO’s remuneration under the spotlight.

SIPTU issuing statements on behalf of FAI staff calling out double standards, ‘a practice of “one rule for those at the top and another for the rest of the staff”.’

FAI statements follow, expressing ‘regret’ over the issues; they are ‘committed to ensuring the lessons learned are fully adopted’.

Great. But did they not adopt the lessons that were learned in 2019?

As Thomas Byrne, the junior minister with responsibility for sport, said this week: ‘I think in light of what happened under the previous regime, it is absolutely right that every “t” is crossed and every “i” is dotted.’

No one is for a second suggesting that what has unfolded over the past 10 days is in any way comparable to the scale of the ‘Champagne Football’ revelations as the John Delaney era unravelled.

The last permanent CEO was in receipt of an enormous salary, with the association paying huge sums for his rent and other expenses.

In comparison, Hill being found to have received €12,500 in lieu of holidays not taken and €8,500 in benefit in kind payments related to commuting expenses, is small beer.

But it’s more about how this looks, the fact that yet again, people can roll their eyes and say, whether justified or not, ‘same old FAI’.

All this at a time when they can’t even enact the changes necessary to reach a 40% gender quota on the board as mandated by Government.

At Irish football’s showpiece event last Sunday, the FAI Cup final, photographers had their lenses trained on the President’s Box, waiting to snap pictures of the Association’s under-fire chief executive. It brought back memories of the days when Delaney was as much a focus of attention as what was happening on the pitch, no doubt an uncomfortable and unwanted comparison for the FAI.

This Association wants €690million of funding from the public purse to go towards badly-needed infrastructure projects. But you have to wonder whether there would be such a dire need if the FAI hadn’t been so inept at managing its finances in the past.

And recent events won’t have bolstered confidence in their ability to oversee overall spending of €863m on their ‘facility investment vision and strategy’.

Irish football deserves better; it needs better.

Let’s hope that lessons really have been learned this time; we can all agree that nobody wants to be back here in another few years.