Niall Quinn has a story from 1983 about a knock on the door at his house on Hillsbrook Drive in Crumlin. When Quinn answered there were two men standing in front of him: Jim McLaughlin and Noel King, manager and coach of Shamrock Rovers. They were interested in the 16-year-old’s future and whether he would like to spend a season or two of it at Milltown.
Quinn was already destined for Arsenal by then. But he had been going to Rovers to watch League of Ireland games, enjoyed doing so and was keen to finish his Leaving Cert. His mother, Mary, a teacher, also wanted him to stay to complete his education.
There was a moment of hesitation. But Arsenal had already knocked on the same door and manager Terry Neill had spoken of a new set-up in London that would help Irish boys settle in the big smoke. In the teenage Quinn’s head, he was already off to follow where O’Leary, Brady and Stapleton had gone before.
“Jim McLaughlin and Noel King asked me to sign, to play for a year before going to England,” Quinn says. “But I’d had the offer from Arsenal and they said: ‘No, it’s now or never.’
“I sort of wanted to stay so I could do my Leaving Cert – and my mother did. But if I’d done that Rovers could then have commanded a fee and Arsenal didn’t want that.”
The path was laid out in front of Quinn, a traditional one for Irish boys of promise, and he took it. He made it work, playing almost 700 games for Arsenal, Manchester City, Sunderland and Ireland, two decades’ worth of goals and tackles and caps and weekly pay packets. From Crumlin to a World Cup, that’s a successful career.
Along the way, though, Quinn saw those whose path petered out or reached a dead-end or they took a wrong turn. Bad advice maybe, bad decisions sometimes. And if they were Irish, they either dropped down the rough pyramid of professional football to feature in matches unmonitored by the broad public; or they got the boat or plane home.
While he was away, of course, Quinn was not going to Milltown as he once did, or Dalymount Park or heading to see Thurles Town when the family were back in Tipperary for the weekend.
“Rovers were still getting good crowds in ‘83,” he says, “and I played twice for Arsenal at Milltown – there were big, big crowds.
“I went as a fan for a couple of years, at 15, 16 when you get a bit of freedom, went to Dalymount, Milltown. My family went down to Thurles a lot then and I’d try to tie it in with a Thurles Town match. The joke was that the crowd was so small one week they announced the crowd changes, not the team changes. It was pretty small stuff.”
It feels timely to ask Quinn about his League of Ireland experience. His recent interventions into domestic Irish football and its governance have been based on questions from him, but there are also questions about him. What are his motivations? Why now? There is some scepticism about his interest in domestic soccer.
Quinn is aware of it and his response is: “I don’t have a League of Ireland pedigree, I’m not Brian Kerr.
“But my drive isn’t: ‘I love the League of Ireland.’ My drive is player pathways. My drive is the overall game.”
The story Quinn tells about Shamrock Rovers in 1983 illustrates the fork in the road Irish teenagers face. He may not be Kerr, but Quinn understands the choice offered to him was rather more seductive than the one facing boys today: League of Ireland clubs desperately treading water to stay afloat in a system mismanaged by the FAI, or a shot at a Championship club or lower in England: “We’re not going to Arsenal or Man United anymore, we’re going to Lincoln City and clubs like that.
“As good as the association is trying to be in terms of national structure, we’re only putting our best young players in a lovely position for the scouts to come and take them, we’re facilitating the scouts. The intention is good, but it’s still the question of a scout saying to a boy: ‘Accrington Stanley want you. Come on over and try your luck.’
“Quite frankly, we should be offering that boy an alternative pathway and a viable one, one that would fit into a system the Government could support and which would also attract private investment.”
We've to get creative and imaginative. My interest is in stopping 16-year-olds taking 100-1 shot bets on their lives
When Quinn began to look deeper into the state of Irish football, his tone was critical but conciliatory. He listened and deferred to some voices in authority. But after Wednesday’s calamitous FAI appearance, his views have hardened, so that now he asks: “Who are the FAI trying to fool?
“You can lose the will, but we’ll see what happens.”
Regardless, some essentials remain. The fate of Irish boys in England and the possibility of offering an alternative structure in Ireland is crucial.
“A lot of clubs have reached out to me and I have a voice so I think I should use it,” he says.
“I want to hear a young player say he’s not going to Lincoln City because there’s something better for him in Ireland – football, an education and afterwards maybe a role within the game. ‘If it does work out, I can go over to England later. There’ll be a fee paid for me and they’ll care about me more. And my club will get money to put back into the system.’
“We’ve to get creative and imaginative. My interest is in stopping 16-year-olds taking 100-1 shot bets on their lives.
“We only see the ones who make it, we miss the carnage in and around it, creating failures of players before they’ve even developed as human beings and have had no education.
“Look at Iceland and their recent government investment. There’s huge investment in coaches and facilities. There’s trust there between the government and football.
“I’m guilty, at Sunderland I brought a load of Irish kids over, promised an education. But it’s impossible to be at a Premier League club, trying to make it as a young lad, and prioritise your education. You just can’t do it.”
One of those Irish boys was Conor Hourihane, signed by Roy Keane on Wearside and then by Keane at Ipswich. Hourihane is now thriving at Aston Villa and internationally, but he is 28. His pathway has been a long, winding road.
“Conor had a year left on his contract and his mum and dad asked to be released from it because Roy wanted him at Ipswich,” Quinn recalls.
“I said: ‘Well that’s okay, tell Roy to get in touch.’
“I drove down to Cork to see Conor and his mum and dad. They were pretty adamant Sunderland wasn’t for him any more, he just couldn’t see a pathway.
“But it didn’t happen for him at Ipswich, so he went to Plymouth and it started to happen for him, then to Barnsley. Now he’s at Villa. It’s an interesting journey – Plymouth were bottom of the fourth division.
“That’s an unusual pathway. Others have gone back and gone away again. But wouldn’t it be great if a player will say that it’s Shamrock Rovers he aspires to play for because it’s better for him? ‘It’s good to be here and I get an education. And you know what? I can go to England if someone pays a million quid for me, not steal me for 50 grand.’
“That system isn’t there yet. And as I say, boys aren’t starting off at Manchester United, they’re starting off at a level we used to not want to be at. The odds for our kids are getting longer and longer. If we can create a system, the League of Ireland will be a beneficiary.”
Why would an exchequer give money to Irish football when there's no system there, no ecosystem as in horse racing?
The public conversation Quinn has been having began following an invitation before Christmas to the PFAI awards night. The request came at short notice, the scheduled speaker withdrawing after getting a job with the FAI.
Quinn sat beside PFAI chairman Stephen McGuinness and heard “hours of tales of woe”.
In England, Quinn experienced the boom of the Premier League; back in Ireland he sees another side.
“The Premier League arrived almost 30 years ago and the shadow it’s put over the League of Ireland had made the league suffer,” he says.
“I was asked to speak at the dinner on the Thursday and it was on the Saturday, so I didn’t have loads of time to prepare. But I started looking at structures and other sports and I was amazed to find that horse racing received €58 million from the Government. That’s when I raised that.
“Football gets about €2.9 million. I thought: ‘Wow, that doesn’t seem right.’
“Fair play to horse racing, I’m not having a go at them. When I looked at it a little bit closer, I saw horse racing deserved their €58 million, it’s money well spent by the exchequer. The ecosystem they’ve created – rural employment – it’s huge: the best horses in the world, best vets, best trainers, the best jockeys, bringing international investment, foreign-owned stud farms. They tick all the boxes. Irish horse racing couldn’t be any better.
“Then you ask: ‘Where does that money come from?’ And it comes from the 2 per cent betting levy on every bet placed in Ireland. I thought: ‘That’s interesting, I wonder how many of those bets are football bets?’ Then you find out the majority are football. So that’s quite strange.
“So I thought, let’s bang a drum and say Irish football should get more from the betting levy.
“But then you ask: ‘Well, why would an exchequer give money to Irish football when there’s no system there, no ecosystem as in horse racing?’
“And why isn’t football already getting its fair share? Well, it’s not exactly helping itself to get a fair share. Why would the exchequer risk taxpayers’ money when there’s not really a system worthy of investment? How do you make it worthy? How do you build trust within government?
“That’s when people started contacting me.”
Quinn adds: “I didn’t put an SOS out there.”
But he knows his career gives him the voice to carry a message. Some of those who heard it, including League of Ireland clubs, made contact.
“The MD of one of the biggest financial institutions said he liked my thoughts and wanted to see if we could meet up, if there’s anything he could do.
“Others got in touch. We’ve now got a group of influential people. We spoke to Fran Gavin at the FAI twice and he said he’d be open to suggestions. So we agreed, we’d send a letter and work with the association. It’d be good to work together. Great.
“But as we preparing that letter, the dial changed with the announcement during the Gibraltar game. John Delaney had resigned but he hadn’t completely resigned.
“You go: ‘What’s the point?’”
“I’d been asked if I wanted to come in and do things, but how could you in a system like that? I immediately ruled myself out of that. I felt at the time Delaney’s departure was a stunt, a rush announcement because the scrutiny was increasing.
“I’m not a vindictive person, I’m not here simply to get somebody out. It’s not about that. It’s just too difficult to see a route forward similar to horse racing if the system stays as it is and the departing CEO hasn’t departed at all.”
Dismayed by the “fragmentation” of the domestic game from school upwards, Quinn’s ideal is the creation of a framework, as in horse racing, that would ultimately provide jobs and education. That, however, would require government funding initially and he does not believe that will happen when the current FAI board put on esoteric performances such as Wednesday’s.
“I think the CEO of the FAI should be a brilliant strategist and put the domestic game ahead of everything else to give government the chance to fund it. There’s more people suited to that job than me who’ve got in touch but I’ve a bit of anger now.
“In my time at Sunderland, they had about 100 educators and coaches going into schools every day, developing projects. There are outreach projects. If the power of football can bring Sunderland into homes through children, then it becomes part of the community. That’s why when people in Ireland ask me how Sunderland can get 46,000 at Christmas in what is the third division, it’s because the club is an integral part of the community. It’s the people’s church.
“There are teenagers in Sunderland who have only known the club’s failures, yet they still love the club. If Irish clubs are struggling even to stay alive, how can they develop that kind of support?
“You look at it commercially. There are games on RTÉ, on the Eir channel: how much are clubs getting out of that? Speak to the clubs and they tell you: nothing. It’s the Airtricity League. Are clubs getting a big cheque from Airtricity? No.
“And actually as a club you have to pay to be in the league, a licence fee.
“So how can you do it better? How can you give clubs comfort that their players won’t leave for nothing after their 42-week contract ends?
“You have to put in a better pathway. That’s the driver for me, that every player is guaranteed education to a third level and is not forced away. That’s the Holy Grail, creating a system where there’s a job, education. The horse racing industry has agri-science at universities – veterinary, analysis. There’s thousands employed in horse racing, they’d say over 20,000.
“We looked at the League of Ireland and found 13 people employed full-time in administration. Maybe we missed a couple – that’s outside of players and coaches.”
Quinn says he has gone through a range of emotions since that PFAI dinner – “apathy, sadness, curiosity, anger”. After Wednesday, though, he sounds more determined than before to help bring change. He thinks ahead to the FAI’s centenary in 2021 and concludes: “It’s not all doom and gloom.
“There’s a centenary coming up and we’re either going to stay in the last century or move into this one. It’s a critical time. We can have a centenary game against Brazil at the Aviva and everybody saying: ‘Sure, it’s grand, didn’t a team in Kerry get new nets.’ Or we can wake up, get some new, dynamic faces in, build some trust with government and create an FAI board fit for purpose.”
