Ireland rugby revolution and Irish football's slide highlights disastrous legacy of John Delaney

John Delaney ruled the FAI with an iron fist for nearly 15 years whereas the IRFU sacrificed their egos to grow Irish rugby. Those legacies are visible every time Ireland's football and rugby teams play.

On Sunday at the Etihad we saw a Middle Eastern production in an English setting with a cast drawn from 11 countries.

A Premier League drama that had a twist in the tale, with Ghanaian, Brazilian, English, Portuguese, Dutch, Swiss, Croat, Norwegian, Polish, German and Belgian voices to tell it.

It has been a while since any Irish player shone on this kind of stage. Yes, Caoimhin Kelleher makes the odd cameo appearance at Anfield, yet everyone knows he is Andrew Ridgeley, Alisson George Michael.

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And Kelleher isn’t alone playing the role of back-up. At Brighton, Evan Ferguson got only 14 minutes last weekend and has yet to make a Premier League start this season. Only nine Irishmen can make that claim — and six of those are on the books of the league’s bottom four teams.

That’s where Irish football resides right now, somewhere on the outskirts of hope.

Once it was different. This time 25 years ago there was another top of the table clash, Manchester United against Leeds, the teams who’d finish that season as champions and in third place. Five Irish players were involved as United prevailed 2-0.

Further south, that same autumn, 15 Irish players were involved in a debacle, when Ireland’s rugby team were humiliated by a team of amateurs from Argentina in the 1999 World Cup.

There and then the contrast between the two sports couldn’t have been greater, Irish football having won two underage European championship titles a year earlier, in a decade when the senior team appeared in two World Cups.

At one stage they were ranked sixth in the world. Now they are 62nd.

The Irish rugby team never dipped as low as No.62 in that sport’s world rankings, but in terms of stock, their share price sunk in the 1990s to its lowest ever point, just eight matches won in the Five Nations across the decade.

All their best players were based in England but unlike Ireland’s soccer players, none of them were at the best clubs. Amateurish in name and attitude, Irish rugby was a joke, Italy beating the national team three times in a row, Namibia twice, Samoa once.

Now look at them. This weekend they once again returned to the top of the world rankings. Six Nations champions for the second year in succession, and sixth time this century, they have also won three grand slams and become regular conquerors of New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.

Back in 1999, at their lowest ebb, they knew they had to change and that was when they got smart.

And that was also when the FAI got John Delaney.

To underline the difference the administrators had on those two sports, all you have to do is look at the respective world rankings and then the financial accounts.

In the case of the IRFU, their management committee became the turkeys who voted for Christmas, sacrificing their own egos to empower highly paid professionals to remodel their game.

They helped create two new competitions — the Heineken Cup and Celtic League (now the URC) and priced their premium tickets at a realistic enough level to allow their contribution to the Aviva Stadium rebuild be repaid in double quick time.

Across town, the FAI, under Delaney’s watch, pitched a bolder, more expensive option to Corporate Ireland and flopped in the marketplace, leaving the association with a crippling debt, standing at €43.2m at the end of 2023.

Games of football and rugby should always be won or lost on a team sheet rather than a balance sheet, but across the last quarter of a century, one has been linked to the other.

In rugby terms, the 1999 disaster against Argentina led to major change, the IRFU realising they needed to get their best players back home, resulting in the union effectively reaching the stage where they now underwrite the salaries of every professional rugby player in Ireland.

That type of structure doesn’t happen in the FAI and when it was put to Delaney as far back as 2008 that they should put players on a central contracting system, he stonewalled the question by suggesting their Emerging Talent Programme (ETP) was the model to persist with. That same ETP policy is being shut down.

Back in the IRFU’s offices, a different story has been told. They recruited good coaches from abroad — Joe Schmidt and Pat Lam from New Zealand, Rassie Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber from South Africa, Andy Friend and David Nucifora from Australia, Andy Farrell from England.

Each has left a lasting legacy, as did initially unpopular decisions, like the implementation of the project player rule, which gifted Ireland Bundee Aki, Jamison Gibson-Park and James Lowe.

In contrast, the FAI allowed Jack Grealish and Declan Rice to slip out of their system, and the manager who oversaw this, Martin O’Neill, continues, to this day, to defend his actions.

Yet we can’t blame O’Neill and Delaney for everything. It wasn’t their fault the Premier League’s global appeal led to a wider network of scouts scanning the planet for new recruits, thereby limiting the opportunities for Irish talent.

And whereas the IRFU have the ability to control their players gametime — the different structures within football prevents the FAI from doing something similar.

In football, the club game is the Golden Egg whereas in rugby, the opposite is true; international matches providing the oxygen for the club game to survive.

And yet despite these undeniable facts, you can’t ignore the fact that the IRFU have implemented better long-term strategies across the last 25 years and made better coaching appointments.

Even this week is another example of their forward-thinking, an Emerging Ireland squad being plucked away from the control of their provinces to go on a tour of South Africa.

This, three years ago, led to Shane Daly, Jack Crowley, Calvin Nash, Joe McCarthy and Ciaran Frawley coming from nowhere to begin the process of establishing themselves as stars.

It’s not as if the FAI don’t invest in their own youth programmes but imagine how much more they could do if they didn’t have a €40m legacy debt to pay off.

Imagine where they would be if all that money spent on interest payments to banks was instead invested in the salaries of young, Irish players who could benefit from spending their formative years at home.

Because the bottom line is if Irish rugby can afford to fund four professional teams over 25 years then the FAI should at least have had the ambition to fund four professional academies.

Had they done so then you can only imagine where Irish football would be now. Could they have produced a good enough player to get on the City or Arsenal teams yesterday?

Certainly the game should be in a better place than where it is, losing to Luxembourg, losing routinely to Greece.

The legacy of John Delaney continues to hurt.

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