Updated 14.15

ADMIT IT; BEING invited to a party you don’t want to attend is a pain.

Weighing up the pros and cons of attending, figuring out who will be there. Will you miss out on something if you don’t attend? Or, will you sit impatiently in a corner until the first person finally leaves and you too can grumble your excuses?

In the last decade or so, we’ve had an U21 league which made way for an U20 league – alongside the A Championship. These were then discontinued in favour of an U19 league. Cork City and UCD have each won the same Dr Tony O’Neill trophy across three different age groups. We’ve had Northern Divisions, Southern Divisions and Elite Divisions. We saw Shamrock Rovers ‘B’ enter the First Division for a season.

I was part of a steering group in 2013 looking to resurrect the Connacht Senior League which came close but ultimately failed when non-league teams got cold feet and some League of Ireland teams balked at the costs of putting out another senior side.

The desire to complete the player pathway and reduce the number of U19 players falling out of the League of Ireland is an understandable one, but it’s not a uniquely Irish issue. The difference in the UK – our standard and unimaginative reference point for all things football — is that there are multiple lower professional leagues that elite youth players can work in.

But it is an issue and one I’ve discussed with every manager with whom I’ve worked. As the U19 and U17 leagues were touted as coming on board, most senior managers I knew were more concerned at having to cut U19 players who weren’t physically or mentally ready to move up to playing Premier Division senior football. An intermediate league is needed for the league even if the FAI’s focus is on elite-player level starting as young as U13.

The invites will go out as they have before. The issue isn’t the lack of clubs in the country. There are plenty of decent, well-structured and well-run clubs on the island who could add to the LOI — but they could add to it now. There is absolutely no barrier to any club joining the league next season if they put together a proposal that the FAI feel would pass licencing. The main issue would be financial, as an ambitious Tralee Dynamos found out a few years back. The FAI inviting them isn’t going to address the barriers they already face, or how attractive the clubs view the party itself.

There’s no point in inviting clubs to a larger party, if the only part of it that’s remotely interesting lays off in the distance behind a velvet rope. The Premier Division, and particularly the teams qualifying for European competition, are in the VIP section and between them and the front door is an empty dancefloor and horrendously overpriced drink.

Clubs such as Fanad United, FC Carlow, Castlebar Celtic, Tralee Dynamos, Kilkenny City, Letterkenny Rovers, Salthill Devon, Mervue United and even representational sides such as the Kerry District League, the Mayo League and the Sligo Leitrim League have all shuffled through the door previously, with only Salthill and Mervue making it to the League of Ireland proper, which eventually caused issues that Galway football is still struggling to recover from. A repeat of the Galway situation is unlikely to be desired, so picking teams from underrepresented catchment areas would need to be looked at.

There’s no point inviting Avondale United to a league where they’d be in direct competition with Cork City. It’s highly unlikely they’d garner the attention, support and players needed to make a proper run at the First Division, unless they were to, in fact, become Cork City’s B team, which suits no one. Even then, would they want to go from being a big fish in a medium-sized pond to a small fish in a larger, but murkier pond?

Of course, picking by location doesn’t mean you get the best clubs involved, but why would a strong intermediate club want to join the League of Ireland when history has shown that the League of Ireland clubs don’t take such initiatives seriously? The A Championship and U20 leagues were largely mocked and ignored, some clubs only grudgingly putting teams forward because licencing expected it. Even in a regional U21 league, many clubs will see nothing more than the problem of fielding senior, U21, U19, U17, U15 and U13 League of Ireland teams. The fact that it makes sense in terms of player development will be irrelevant to many who struggle to afford half those teams now.

A side-effect is that the women’s game will continue to struggle. Women hardly get any party invites in Irish football. Only five LOI clubs currently field a senior team in the Women’s National League, and even then a few of those are only recently or loosely attached to the club in a meaningful way. It will only get harder to convince clubs to engage with the WNL in the face of six mandatory teams.

If it is to work by 2020, the first step for the FAI is to focus not on who they want to attract, but how they’re going to attract them. They need to create an environment which makes the First Division something to aspire to for non-league clubs, treated with more respect, with a proper marketing budget.

Funding to intermediate clubs to bring their facilities up to scratch in terms of licencing has to be considered, as does the level of coaching badges a ‘Second Division’ team manager will need, when the Uefa Pro licence costs nearly €7,000 to undertake. Huge work needs to be done in the area of referee education as the feedback on the standards in the U15 and U17 league recently has been damning.

There are a million different things that the FAI – and to a lesser extent the clubs – need to do to make the party something worth attending before they send out the invite. They need a party planner focused on the league, free of distractions of other competitions and leagues. They’ve needed it for a long time.

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