Cathal Dervan, Editor
Somewhere around 7.30pm tonight, protests permitting, the great and the good will begin to make their way from the Green Room to the President’s Box at the Aviva Stadium, swapping finger food for the comfy seats.
Somewhere around 7.45pm, protests permitting, a football match will break out between the Republic of Ireland and Austria. This, in case you don’t know amidst all the other noise, is a fixture in the Nations League tournament that means one thing to those who play in it - money.
They will tell you, as we heard in the real corridors of power yesterday, that failing to play a Nations League match will cost multiples of €10million but we can take €10million as the base figure for tonight’s ‘big’ fixture. Nice money when you can get it.
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Rough & tumble…
There’s always talk around these things of ranking points as well and seedings for tournament but the reality is that ranking points and seedings existed long before the Nations League was ever heard of as a money making alternative to meaningless friendlies.
And the suits in Switzerland will always find a way to work out who should play who in the qualifying rounds of the real major tournaments - the World Cup and the Euros - whether or not the Nations League ever existed.
This League was introduced in 2018 and has been a Godsend for the accounts departments across Europe’s football associations. Competitive games rather than meaningless friendlies, against Poland or Qatar in all probability, means more TV and commercial partner revenue.
More TV money from games against the likes of England, Scotland, Wales and Denmark in this competition should mean more money for real Irish football.
It should mean more money for the grassroots, for the kids who play in the rain every November because summer football was abandoned after the vote was passed.
It should equate to more money for the League of Ireland clubs to bring female toilets up to standard up and down the country, to improve their pitches, to add some wattage to their Friday night lights.
It should mean having enough money in the bank to construct a purpose built arena for Football For All, to ensure that all those who love our game can play it in the best possible surroundings.
They’re some of the things the Nations League should do, some of the reasons why the €5.5million and €4.8million and a ‘potential multiplier’ of those figures were so important to the Tesco suits in the Oireachtas yesterday.
Sadly, they are not the main reason the Nations League means so much right now because most of the profit on that €10million plus will go to the FAI debtors - to one of the big banks, to UEFA, to FIFA and to the Government, the very people who bailed out the FAI in its 2019 hour of need that is now stretching to years of need.
We are all responsible for that including the government that failed to take a decisive stand on Israel other than for Ministers to say they won’t go to the games, the same Government that has swapped the FAI’s definition of conflict for genocide.
Those 68 per cent who voted in favour of playing Israel at the July EGM of the General Assembly - and those who didn’t bother to turn up - are party to this current mess.
Those of us with Irish football in our DNA who didn’t shout loud enough when the emperor had no clothes and allowed Shane Ross to impose independent emperors on us and our board, are complicit in all of this.
And those of us, myself included on the inside ‘p*****g’ out as Mick McCarthy would say, who worked bloody hard to keep the FAI afloat post the 2019 Oireachtas shambles, are all guilty of trying to fix a problem that, in hindsight, should have been consigned to the scrap yard and relaunched under a fresh start and under a new organisation, a federal organisation.
Still somewhere around 7.45pm tonight, protests permitting, a football match will break out in Dublin 4. When that football match stops, when Monday comes and Israel is already a memory, Irish football needs to break free.
Free of those living in fear of the debt and the Oireachtas, free of those subservient to the banks and the government, free of those saddled with the past. Free to concentrate on what matters - football for all the people on this island.
It’s time to start again.
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