£4.5M DILEMMA
Scots face battle of tempting O’Neill from lavish Irish offer
SFA CHIEF EXECUTIVE Stewart Regan faces the challenge of his life persuading Michael O’Neill to turn his back on the security of a cool £4.5million deal with Northern Ireland to become the new Scotland boss.
The Irish Football Association have granted permission for Scotland to commence negotiations with their manager after the SFA agreed to meet a release clause in his current contract but, as he prepares to commence talks this week, Regan is far from complacent about landing his preferred choice.
The IFA have tabled a new six-year £750,000 per annum package, a gesture that reflects the financial benefits brought to Northern Irish football from O’Neill’s success in ending a 30-year wait for tournament football at Euro 2016. It is understood Scotland are only prepared to offer O’Neill (left) a four-year deal to succeed Gordon Strachan. Although willing to make him the highest-paid manager in the nation’s history, any improvement on his £500,000 salary is likely to be at least partly dependent on performance bonuses relating to Scotland making it to a major competition for the first time since 1998. Confident they have given it their best shot in trying to keep O’Neill, the IFA are equally nervous that the Edinburgh resident may feel he cannot take his ageing squad any further.
It will be up to Regan to reinforce the impression Scotland’s prospects are on an upswing ahead of the Euro 2020 preliminaries — and convince O’Neill the challenge of making history with Scotland offers a greater prospect of career enhancement than staying put.
THIS is not just about money. It is about adventure, legend, galvanising an army of footsoldiers unlike any other, biblical movements of people, taking the opportunity to place yourself at the centre of what, undoubtedly, has the potential to become a cultural phenomenon that will consume an entire nation like nothing before.
That the Scottish FA have done the right thing in approaching Michael O’Neill to become the next manager of the national team is beyond question. And when it comes to sitting down for face-toface talks in the coming week, there is little doubt about what should form the centrepiece of the sales pitch.
SFA chief executive Stewart Regan is unlikely to be in a position to match the six-year deal reportedly lying on the table back in Belfast for O’Neill. But that’s not to say what will be placed in front of him will not be attractive, particularly when the bonuses are factored in.
Will it be attractive enough? Well, it depends what O’Neill is looking for in life. It depends what he thinks he is capable of. What his acceptable level of risk is.
Staying with Northern Ireland is, arguably, the safer bet. The easier option. Possibly the more lucrative one.
He is loved there by fans and players alike. It’s his country. The sense of unity developed there might just be enough to eke one last successful campaign out of an ageing, limited squad. Even if he fails, he is hardly going to be sacked.
Northern Ireland cannot offer O’Neill the incredible possibilities available with Scotland, though. They just can’t. Not with everything that comes with Euro 2020 taking place at Hampden, a group containing England guaranteed if we both qualify and a public, which still lives and breathes football despite everything, aching with every fibre of their being to make it back to a major finals.
Great things await the man who ends our 20-year absence from such a stage. Wonderful things. Experiences that will make money seem almost irrelevant. He will wake a nation and take them with him in their tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands through the summer to end all summers.
That we have a much broader pool of talent is only part of it. For all the disappointments and decline, this is a real football nation. Football matters here. More than most of us know or appreciate. There are few other countries in which the game guides so much of the cultural narrative. Few other countries in which it shapes lives — where the SNP are concerned, even the law — so dramatically.
There are few other populations so ready and willing to up sticks and cross countries, sometimes even continents, to watch 22 guys kicking a ball around a park.
An estimated 200,000 in Manchester with Rangers. Maybe 70,000 or more in Seville with Celtic. Over 25,000 in the Parc des Princes for
that James McFadden goal, leaving then France manager Raymond Domenech asking publicly how there could be more away fans in the ground than home ones.
These were more than just sporting events. They were tribal gatherings. Transcendental. Otherworldly. Certainly, astonishing to be around.
Euro 2020, if we make it there, could be something else again when you consider how we have yearned for these moments and that they will be staged, at least in part, on home soil.
Regan has the ability to spirit O’Neill inside this new, exciting, perhaps a little frightening, reality. Take the green pill and O’Neill will wake up in his bed, still cherished as manager of Northern Ireland and cocooned in a matrix created by the adoration of his own people and the comfort of that generous contract provided by the IFA.
Take the dark blue pill and Wonderland awaits. For make no mistake, that is what Glasgow and Scotland, in general, will be should we qualify for the Euros.
Failure could expose O’Neill to some brutal truths, but he knows that.
If he really trusts his own ability, this, despite the negative noises from those who seem to want to take potshots at Regan, is the opportunity of a lifetime.
A generation of Scots do not know what it is to have the national team at a World Cup or a European Championship. Their hunger is palpable.
The man who takes them there will become a figure of national historical importance.
Those of us fortunate enough to have attended major finals still savour those golden times, living in what is almost a parallel universe. Bowling around France on the overnight trains, marching through foreign cities with the locals hanging out their windows, pulling all sorts of strokes to get every man, woman and child into the Parc Lescure for that game with Norway in Bordeaux.
These were times of escapism, of feeling alive and proud and together.
We also remember the hype that surrounded the England game in Euro 96. That sunny afternoon behind the goals, almost suffering a cardiac arrest when David Seaman saved that penalty from Gary McAllister.
We still need proper revenge for that. We might get it at Euro 2020 with Wembley’s extra quota of matches meaning the Auld Enemy will be paired in Group D.
Scotland will have two games at home, for sure. For the duration of the group stage, Glasgow will be something to behold. It comes out in force for big events. Consider the Commonwealth Games, the 2002 Champions League final between Real Madrid and Bayer Leverkusen, the Europa League final between Sevilla and Espanyol five years later.
There are those of us who even remember over 50,000 at Hampden for the final of the World Under-16 Championship in 1989, when the nation wept with a team of schoolboys after a penalty shootout loss to the moustachioed hulks of Saudi Arabia.
What bedlam it will be with the senior team playing there in a major finals, perhaps in the old stadium’s last hurrah. What scenes for the ages. What tales for the grandchildren.
O’Neill, living in Edinburgh, of course, has been in Scotland as a player, manager and citizen long enough to remember all that. He watched us ride the emotional rollercoaster from the sidelines. Now, he has the chance to climb into the front seat, to feel all that with us.
Peer deep down into the rabbithole, Michael. We’re waiting for you. And we’re ready to have such fun.