FAI bins another grand plan and reminds us the football family is still dysfunctional

The fog of Gianni Infantino’s war was still thick last Friday when the FAI decided to release a statement to announce they were highlighting “key priorities to further boost the development of Irish football”. They made various commitments to things they are already doing and the main newsline was buried halfway down the statement, beneath a haze of corporate obfuscation.

Plans to align all levels of football in Ireland along the same calendar have been binned.

Or, to put it in the LinkedIn idiom in which Abbotstown is fluent these days: “Following the strategic planning process, the Aligned Football Calendar has been reprioritised and will not be considered a deliverable within the Football Pathways Plan or the FAI’s current 2026–2029 Strategic Plan.”

It is the luxury of the executive in football to indulge in such circuitous language. The football manager can’t drop a player and tell him he is merely being reprioritised. That said, Ireland’s many route-one managers would admire the directness with which the FAI have booted this latest political football.

A brief recap. The Football Pathways Plan was the blueprint of the FAI’s former director of football Marc Canham, he of the Odyssean epic to pick the right managerial suitor to succeed Stephen Kenny. The FAI said the final plan was the product of 11,000 hours of consultation, conducted largely via roadshows around the country.

Canham had arrived with a polished CV from the Premier League and English football but some of those tending to Ireland’s grassroots were not impressed. This column recalls a story from a roadshow in Cork when Canham was asked whether he knew anything about silage.

The central idea in Canham’s finished plan was to move the entire football calendar to silage season. Ireland is the only one of Uefa’s 55 member nations running different calendars for different levels of the game, and so it was proposed that everyone move to the same schedule as the League of Ireland by 2028.

The explanation stemmed from Canham’s overall deduction that Irish football was not maximising its potential. One of the primary issues is that kids do not play enough football, with seasons lasting only 30 weeks per year on average. This was largely down to the ramshackle state of facilities across the country, with vast tracts of pitches rendered unplayable by the winter rain. So, better to play some more under the sun, right?

Wrong. The aligned calendar plan was hit by a furious backlash by some grassroots leagues, who complained of a lack of consultation. The FAI board unanimously endorsed Canham’s blueprint but sought a mandate anyway, putting the pathways plan – including the aligned calendar – to a vote among their members at a General Assembly.

It squeaked through by a slim majority but was deemed to have done so largely on partisan lines, with the professional/League of Ireland caucus whipped into line. Still, a vote is a vote and FAI president Paul Cooke praised those before him for “changing the face of Irish football”.

The rebellion continued and left a few elected directors shifting uneasily in their blazers. Canham left in April last year, vowing never to work in grassroots football again. The FAI then allowed leagues to apply for a two-year delay to shifting their season. Canham’s successor, John Martin, used his first media briefing earlier this year to signal he wouldn’t be mandating anything and the plan was officially buried last week.

Much of the opposition to the aligned calendar was of good faith and primarily fretted about losing players to Gaelic games. This ignored the fact, however, that these concerns can be alleviated through good co-operation across local clubs, while 22 of 69 FAI-affiliated leagues were already playing a calendar season without the sky falling in. Leagues would also be given flexibility to pause leagues and arrange substitute formats and competitions to deal with summer holidays. These growing pains may not have been easy, but they were surely worth enduring for the sake of offering more opportunities to play.

There were also worries raised about messing with the ancient rhythm of soccer returning alongside the school year. That ignores the fact that some of the present winter leagues were played during the summer before the GAA ended the Ban.

But where once Irish football could pin its troubles on the cultural imperialism exercised via the GAA, it must now accept responsibility for its benighted state. The aligned calendar was sunk because of the FAI’s enduring factionalism. In this instance, the amateur side of the family screamed objection because the plan was deemed to have been pushed by that lot in the League of Ireland. (The Leinster FA, for instance, wrote a letter to the FAI board decrying a “flawed voting procedure”, saying it was carried by the LOI side of the house, who are not directly impacted by the change. This, despite the fact their elected representative to the FAI board endorsed the plan.)

Regardless of your views on the rights and wrongs of the aligned calendar, this has been an abject episode for the FAI. Having commissioned and unanimously backed a plan for which they received a mandate from their membership to implement, the FAI has now abandoned its key recommendation. This is a governing body still unable to agree with itself. This also undermines the whole mechanism of the General Assembly vote, recently used as proof that Irish football endorses the FAI’s decision not to boycott fixtures against Israel.

Meanwhile, when your kids spend the forthcoming winter weekends sitting inside watching the rain lashing against the window, know that this is what Irish football has decided is in their best interests. Better for nobody to play at all than risk some deciding they would prefer to play something else.

email: gavin.cooney@irishtimes.com

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