October board meeting to be key test of FAI's own appetite to implement player pathways plan

Gavin Cooney

MARC CANHAM IS at pains to point out that an aligned calendar for all levels of football in Ireland is not the only part of the FAI’s football pathways plan, but it’s certainly its most symbolic. 

The pathways plan is an overall blueprint for the sport in Ireland that first highlights its biggest problem: it is gapped, discontinuous, inconsistent, fragmented. 

Different counties and leagues run different seasons, with the country beset by a mixed application of the formats requested by the FAI under the plan of Canham’s predecessor Ruud Dokter.

Only Cork and Dublin operate at all levels of the game: youth, junior, intermediate, and League of Ireland, and that’s only for the men’s game. Not a single county in Ireland offers all of these levels to girls.

There are some counties in which kids are playing football only 30 weeks a year, which is down to poor facilities that are quickly made unplayable in winter weather.

Different strands of the game running different calendars is not normal – Ireland is the only country in Europe currently doing so. 

So the vision to have the underage grassroots and adult amateur game align with the League of Ireland and play in a single, calendar year is an overarching one to unite the game in Ireland. This would in turn allow the FAI to build a football pyramid, in which it would be theoretically possible for an amateur side rise to LOI status by virtue solely of their results on the pitch. 

Following publication of the pathways plan in February, the proposed calendar season was met with some vociferous criticism. The Carlow and District Soccer League took it upon themselves at their subsequent AGM to vote against any future calendar season, saying they want to continue to run from September to May and they hope the FAI board will respect that wish.

Canham and the FAI have been meeting affiliates in recent months to talk through the calendar proposals, and how the plans could look in their respective leagues. He says the opposition is beginning to soften. 

“From when we first launched the plan there is definitely a different conversation happening now to what it was then”, Canham told reporters at a briefing yesterday.

“There are still some really strong voices that are really against these proposals. I would say in the meetings we’ve had with [with provincial FAs] there is now a strong pool of voices for this as well; a more than mixed blend I would say.

“Reverse back four or five months and there was definitely a strong position that ‘we don’t want to do this.’ It has definitely become more mixed and there are more voices saying that this can be good and ‘I understand this a bit more now, and understand what you are trying to achieve.’” 

The FAI aim to have the aligned calendar in place from the start of 2026.

While Canham admits that there remains opposition to this alignment, it has significant backers: the whole of the FAI board have endorsed the pathways plan, and thus the alignment within it. The full document is prefaced by a message from FAI president Paul Cooke, who wrote he “fully endorses” the plan. 

FAI president Paul Cooke. Laszlo Geczo / INPHO Laszlo Geczo / INPHO / INPHO

A staging post for the strength of that support will be at a board meeting at the end of October. 

“The idea will be to go to the board next month and present all the feedback from the game, specifically on what the calendar and children’s games programme will look like”, said Canham. 

Canham’s next sentence may have contained some unfortunate Freudian foreshadowing. 

“Then we’ll collectively agree a different way forward – sorry, not a different way – a way forward”, he said.

Whatever the precise details of what is presented, were the FAI board to opt against the principle of an aligned calendar months after endorsing a document which presented that very principle would bring scrutiny upon board members, rather than Canham. 

The board only weeks ago bestowed upon Canham a new title of chief football officer. 

Through this prism, next month’s board meeting will be a measure of the FAI’s own appetite to tackle the problems in elite player development that have become so painfully evident in the senior men’s team’s on-pitch struggles across the last few years. 

The pathways plan contains a few other specifics aimed at elite player development, with the decision made to discontinue the Emerging Talent Programme, which provided additional contact hours for talented teenagers from eight centres across the country. 

Canham says contact time for highly-rated prospects in Ireland needs to be trebled, and professional LOI academies will be expected to do this work. They remain starved of funding, though the FAI hope to have clarity by the end of the year as to how much of their requested €10 million will be granted by the government. Canham cited highly-developed football nations like Spain, Germany, and France who have effectively outsourced the development of players aged between 14 and 18 to club academies, from where those players train for between 40 and 50 days in the international programme. 

The FAI want to get to this point, but admit in the medium-term that they will need to provide some level of elite coaching from Abbotstown to complement what is being done at clubs. They are currently working on what this offering will look like. 

That offering will likely be influenced by “the green line”, the title Canham has slapped on the FAI’s vision of the style of football all Irish international teams should play. It’s envisaged that this style should be so obvious to the public that an Irish team could be identifiable even without wearing Irish shirts, and it will be developed by a “technical leadership group”.

Canham will be in this group, along with senior managers Heimir Hallgrimsson and Eileen Gleeson, plus U21s boss Jim Crawford, head of women’s football Hannah Dingley, board member Packie Bonner, grassroots director Ger McDermott, and Canham’s assistant Shane Robinson. 

Future head coaches will be recruited on the basis of this style of play, but neither Hallgrimsson and Gleeson will be obligated to immediately enforce it among their teams. 

“Heimir and Eileen’s job is to maximise the talent pol we got at the moment”, said Canham. “In time, hopefully they are in situ for a long time, and we start to see that development come through. But their job is absolutely around performance and getting results.” 

Elsewhere, the FAI will soon send out expressions of interest to clubs interested in joining a new LOI third tier, which they hope to get up and running in 2026. The ambition is to build two regional divisons of 10 teams each as the pinnacle of amateur football. Canham was taking nothing off the table as regards which teams would be eligible, throwing open the prospect of the league featuring LOI reserve teams, college teams, and schoolboy clubs. 

Canham also preached patience: he cited the England team that recently steamrolled Ireland at the Aviva Stadium and pointed out that seven of that starting XI were in primary school when England massively overhauled their player development plans in the wake of the failure to qualify for Euro 2008. 

While the fruition of the plan is undoubtedly a long-term thing, a crucial early staging post is fast approaching.