IT IS DIFFICULT to remember anything quite like the 2024 Premier Division season, in Irish football or elsewhere.
No team has more than five games remaining, and yet only seven points separate the top-six sides.
It is unlikely, but even St Patrick’s Athletic in fifth and Sligo Rovers in sixth have a mathematical chance of triumphing.
Almost everyone has been written off at some point or another. Many fans and pundits suspected a title challenge was beyond Shamrock Rovers after the Hoops’ poor start to the season.
Yet Sunday’s win over Shelbourne took them within two points of Damien Duff’s side.
Given their limited budget and squad depth compared to others, the Tolka Park outfit have overachieved to be top of the table at this stage. Still, they have underachieved in their last 10 league matches, winning only one.
But remarkably, Shels’ fate is still in their own hands — they will be champions if they win all three of their final games against Waterford (home), Drogheda (home) and Derry City (away).
Yet it’s not hard to imagine Stephen Bradley’s second-place side prevailing and capitalising on any slip-up. The Hoops have remaining fixtures against three of the bottom-four sides — Drogheda (away), Dundalk (away) and Waterford (home).
Like Shels, Derry’s fate is in their hands, though it is complicated by the fact that they have five games to play — Bohemians (home), Sligo Rovers (home), Dundalk (away), St Patrick’s Athletic (away) and Shelbourne (home).
Given the chaos that has characterised this campaign, the finish is unlikely to be more straightforward.
This situation has created some debate over whether or not it has been a great season in every sense of the word.
The highest points tally possible now for any team is 65 and that can only happen if Derry win all of their remaining fixtures.
Generally, the League of Ireland champions tend to pass the 70-point mark.
Since the turn of the century, there have been six occasions where the winning tally was less than 65 points, though this is the first time it has happened in a 36-game season.
The others were Bohemians in 2000-01 (62 points from 33 games), Shelbourne in 2001-02 (63 points from 33 games), Bohemians in 2002-03 (54 points from 27 games), Shelbourne in 2006 (62 points from 30 games), Sligo Rovers in 2012 (61 points from 30 games) and Shamrock Rovers in 2020 (48 points from 18 games).
In terms of excitement, entertainment value and sheer unpredictability, you could make a strong case for 2024 as one of the best League of Ireland seasons ever.
Yet you could also argue that there has been no outstanding team or that the one exceptional side, Shamrock Rovers, bidding for their fifth title in succession, have been uncharacteristically out of sorts for long spells. Does that factor undermine a season’s greatness?
The Tallaght club’s manager, Stephen Bradley, subscribes to the view that it has been a below-par season in terms of quality.
“For the neutral, I think it’s great that it’s so competitive right until the last day. But I think if we’re being honest, the standard hasn’t been great,” he told reporters earlier this week.
“To have the points total where we are now, all of us, it hasn’t been great.
“We can’t speak about other clubs because we’re part of that and our form has been up and down and patchy so we’re part of it.
“For the neutral it’s great, for the overall standard of the league has it been great? I don’t think it has.”
Bradley also suggested it has compared unfavourably to campaigns where his team or Stephen Kenny’s Dundalk side went on long unbeaten stretches to clinch glory.
Yet Shels boss Damien Duff took issue with these comments after his side’s loss to Rovers.
“It’s there for everyone to see this season, the amount of upsets. Stephen said in the press this week that the quality of the league hasn’t been very good.
“I think it’s a poor comment because it’s disrespecting the 250 professional players that have dedicated their lives to this season.
“The level of the teams, they’ve all crept up on each other, and that’s why there’s so many upsets.”
Both managers are right in a way. The quality across the league has been more evenly distributed than it has been for a long time.
But whoever ends up as champions may not be remembered as one of the all-time great League of Ireland sides on a par with Kenny’s Dundalk or the peak of the Shamrock Rovers team that won four in a row in the 1980s.
Yet this unpredictability is a healthy state of affairs and something all football competitions should aspire to.
One of club football’s biggest problems this century has been the growing inequity between the elite sides and the rest.
In England, Man City have won the last four Premier League titles. Bayern Munich won 11 consecutive Bundesligas before Bayer Leverkusen finally broke their run last season. In the last 20 La Liga campaigns, twice has a team other than Real Madrid or Barcelona prevailed.
This trend has been emulated across Europe in less high-profile leagues, including Ireland, given Shamrock Rovers’ dominance in recent years.
The Hoops may make it five on the bounce at the end of this campaign.
However, the fact that it has been such an exhilarating, close-run race is surely something to be celebrated. Ideally, that is how it should be every season.
Football needs a degree of competitiveness and unpredictability to keep most fans interested. The greed of a few people has threatened to undermine that sentiment.
The League of Ireland has enough challenges otherwise — the Premier Division simply cannot afford to become renowned as a competition dominated by one team.
Therefore, genuine football fans must hope 2024 can be seen as the benchmark rather than an aberration.
