Irish Daily Star - Inside Sport
A WHOLE NEW
EOIN Doyle was once a million-pound player who holds the record for transfer deadline-day moves. Now he works with toddlers and reckons there is more maturity in childcare than football clubs. A NERVOUS 26-year-old footballer called Eoin Doyle pulled in on the hard shoulder on an English motorway and wondered what to do. The year was 2015.
Up until then, the state of his career was reflected in his living situation. His first club, Shamrock Rovers, paid him €100-aweek, enough to hand over a few quid to his mother to help with her grocery bill, not much to spend on anything else.
So, he stayed in his childhood home, spending his days as an apprentice electrician, and his nights as an apprentice footballer.
Then the recession hit and the electrical work dried up. Lucky for him Sligo Rovers needed a spark up front and took him west, where he shared a gaff with two other players, Alan Keane and Matthew Blinkhorn, living next door to their manager, Paul Cook.
“He popped his head around the door so often that he ended up being part of our food kitty,” says Doyle. “Monday nights he’d rap on the door and suggest heading out to the pub.
“But on one condition,” he always said. “Don’t tell Gerry (Carr, Sligo’s assistant manager) we are going for a pint. You see Cookie had this weird thing where he could be a disciplinarian but also your best mate.
Character
“I know this sounds like a mad comparison but he reminds me of Jurgen Klopp the way he goes on, where you know he’ll kill you if you cross him, but you’d also run through a wall for him. He was that type of character.”
Not much had changed between the Sligo days and those ones in 2015. Cook was still his manager, Doyle was still scoring goals, and people were still knocking on his door.
That was why he was nervous. One of those people interested in talking to him was called Tony Pulis, manager of West Brom, then in the Premier League.
A day earlier Cook had told him that New York City wanted to sign him and partner him with David Silva.
At the time Doyle had 25 goals to his name for the season. The salary and the houses had gotten a little bigger. From renting a one-bedroom apartment in Edinburgh, where he played for Hibs, to buying a three bedroom townhouse in Chesterfield, he was on the property ladder but not quite rolling in the cash.
“No lower league player ever gets enough to see out their days on the back of football earnings,” he says.
Future
“You might get a nice lifestyle but you are always worrying about the future.you are forever tormenting yourself with questions like ‘will I get another year out of this (career)?’‘what will I do when it’s over?’
“At no stage did you ever come close to earning enough money to not work again post football. You always knew you needed a plan B.”
And that was why on this dank
February day in 2015, the nerves had kicked in.
It was an afternoon like the one we had this week, as we sat over a coffee in the Yellow House, Rathfarnham.
The cloudy weather reminded him of another winter morning, when he was a 26-year-old man about to turn a corner.
“I was heading to Cardiff to sign when my agent called. ‘West Brom are interested. Stop driving, pull in on the hard shoulder’.”
Picture this. A player who had been used to €100-weekly wages, who had worked his way up to get deals from Sligo, Hibs, Chesterfield, was now on the verge of becoming a €1m footballer.
A few months earlier he had
‘No lower league player ever gets to see out their days on the back of football earnings’
become a father, so sentimental reasons for staying with the club he had scored 25 goals for was not an issue.
“All the decisions I made in football were purely business ones,” Doyle says.
“Like, I played for 12 clubs in my career. I never supported any of them as a kid. I had no prior emotional attachment to them.
“I’m not saying you don’t buy into the culture of a place when you go there because that did happen. When fans sing your name, there is no other feeling in the world like it. But you have to be honest too.
“I had never been to Edinburgh before I signed for Hibs. I’d never been to many of the towns of other clubs I signed for either: Chesterfield, Car