SHANE McGRATH:
...so why don’t they do what Irish rugby did when it happened to them?
LOOMING catastrophe can bring remarkable clarity to a business. When its sport turned professional in 1995, the Irish Rugby Football Union was left floundering. There was institutional resistance to the move, summed up in the statement made by the IRFU, with the advent of professionalism only weeks away, that it would oppose anyone involved in rugby getting paid because ‘the game is a leisure activity played on a voluntary basis’.
The language was Victorian, the mindset almost as dated. But opposition was futile.
The sport was changing, and Ireland had to find a way to adapt.
That it did explains the remarkable success now enjoyed by the national team, capped in glorious style with a thrilling win over reigning world champions New Zealand eight days ago.
Rugby has never enjoyed the popularity in Ireland it does today, producing players who are heroes in communities where the sport barely registered in earlier generations.
And that adaptability, the capacity to recognise that times had changed and so its administrators must too, is an important lesson for the Football Association of Ireland as they teeter on the lip of fresh catastrophe.
The differences between how rugby and soccer are organised in Ireland are significant. The most important is this: a professional rugby player can stay in this country and still play for teams that are among the world’s best.
Elite rugby is a much smaller world than the soccer universe, and Ireland are among its leading exponents. A talented player never has to leave this island and they can still become a star of the game with the salary to match.
There is no comparable professional outlet for the child who dreams of playing soccer for a living.
Yet there are vital lessons the FAI can learn from rugby if they wish to transform the fortunes of the national team – and they are badly in need of rejuvenation.
The most important one is this: never waste a crisis. When even rugby’s stuffy blazers realised that change was washing over them, they made shrewd organisational decisions that laid the foundations for the riches of today.
Rather than let the country’s leading clubs turn professional, as some of them wished to at a time when the club game in Ireland was attracting attendances that ran into the thousands, the IRFU chose a different structure.
They turned the provinces into four professional teams, and contracted the best players centrally. The system has undergone some refinements, but from that base the Irish union could introduce the practices that endure today.
The leading players are tied to centralised deals, which means their wages are paid by the IRFU directly, with the provinces funding the contracts of everyone else.
This gives the IRFU control over how many games their stars play, allowing them to manage their fitness and medical needs and, consequently, strengthening the position of the national coach.
This is in contrast to England and France, where the clubs hold the power and are in constant friction with the unions over the fitness and workload of the players.
As a result, England have struggled through their matches this month because of a ruinous injury list.
That could never become an issue in Ireland, where the interests of the national side trump everything else.
In short, the Irish rugby environment has been shaped specifically to the needs of this country.
Twenty-three years ago, a sport seen as hidebound and helplessly out of date was plunged into Year Zero. By its responses, Irish rugby saved itself and laid down the conditions for the unprecedented glories that are beguiling the nation today.
In time, 2018 could come to be known as Irish soccer’s Year Zero – but that is only if the maligned administrators of the sport recognise that this latest crisis is one that should not be wasted.
The relationship between the wellbeing of the national soccer side – once the most loved representation of Ireland on the global stage – and the levels below it is more complicated than the sleek structure that supports Joe Schmidt’s rugby equivalent.
The domestic game in this country is a minority sport that has no resonance with the great majority of the population.
For its professional players, the resource from which Jack Charlton, Giovanni Trapattoni and Martin O’Neill once picked teams that shocked the world, Ireland relies on a haphazard game of chance that has been going on for decades.
The brightest young Irish talents are identified as teenagers, taken over to clubs in England and Scotland on trials, and the few that make it through go on to enjoy professional careers in the British leagues.
It was always a hazardous route to success, with failure more likely than success for most of those who travelled.
And in the past two decades, their chances of success have diminished even further. English soccer has been swamped by billions of pounds thanks to lucrative TV rights’ deals and a global audience hungry to see its best clubs in action.
This has allowed its leading teams, like Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and now Manchester City, to trawl the world for the best young players.
Once, English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish stars backboned England’s great teams. That is no longer the case; now, the aspiring Irish teen must compete with young talent from Africa, South America and all over Europe for their chance. That is why there is no Irish player in the starting teams of England’s biggest six clubs. And the Irish national team is suffering accordingly.
With opportunities disappearing at England’s best clubs, players scramble for places at teams in the country’s lower leagues, but even then chances can be fleeting. The old way of producing Irish professionals is, then, in grave
A talented rugby player never has to leave this island and can still become a star
peril – and it has been for years. That problem is not going to ease, so a priority for the FAI must be finding a way to develop the best young Irish talent.
Despite claims to the contrary, this is not a straightforward task, and some steps have already been taken, including introducing national underage leagues organised through the existing club structure.
But more urgent proposals have been suggested, including more financial support for the League of Ireland, and upgrading facilities and resources for coaches, thereby raising the standard and allowing players to remain here while still improving their skills.
Then, in their late teens or 20s, they could stand a better chance of forging a professional career at a standard that would benefit Ireland internationally.
The old reliance on Britain must be addressed, too: if budding Irish stars cannot make a living there, perhaps there are continental leagues where they might.
A refrain in the days since the departures of O’Neill and Roy Keane has been that their exit should not be the end of the change.
John Delaney, chief executive of the FAI, has come in for trenchant criticism, and his tenure has been blighted by controversy.
The debt accrued by the FAI in redeveloping Lansdowne Road has been punitive, and the relationship between Delaney and the domestic game has been fractious.
He is accused of favouring the generation of big crowds in the Aviva Stadium over meaningful reform of soccer in this country.
Also, soccer’s governors have been slow in innovating compared to rugby and Gaelic games. Liam Brady spoke this week of welcoming Dublin and Limerick GAA teams over to Arsenal when he was head of the club’s academy.
They were hungry for information on how talent was nurtured. There were no equivalent missions from the FAI, he said, not since the time when Brian Kerr was masterminding Ireland’s underage talent.
Delaney also oversaw the payment of huge salaries to Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane – and the renewal of those contracts even after Ireland’s dispiriting defeat to Denmark in a World Cup play-off game 12 months ago. Those pay levels have now been maintained with Mick McCarthy, who is to receive €2.4m for a two-year deal.
Change must now be twin-tracked, involving the national side in the short-term and the sources that nourish it in the long term.
It is possible to believe that a new manager can give the national side a significant boost, and at the same time one can demand the start of changes that the Irish game now desperately needs for survival.
And it is that grave. The national side has been slipping into irrelevance throughout 2018, and this in a sporting culture where rugby grows in popularity and where hurling has just enjoyed its most exciting season ever.
Supporters want to be entertained. Old allegiances to a particular code no longer apply; fans will unapologetically shift their interest from sport to sport. The purist or the traditionalist may find that distasteful, but this is the prevailing culture.
For too long, the FAI have pegged their fortunes to a British game that has little interest in, or need for, any but the most exceptional of their talents. They need to be brave and imaginative in what they do next. Few expect them to be, but there really is no alternative.
This is the latest manifestation of a deepening crisis. It could well be the FAI’s Year Zero.
Irish rugby was confronted with an existential menace and the decisions it made in response continue to pay off today. The FAI must be as willing to take a chance now as the IRFU were in 1995.
The alternative is inaction, and the consequences of that could do irreparable damage.
Delaney oversaw the payment of huge wages to O’Neill and Keane