HAVING ONCE hosted Queen Victoria, Grace Kelly and some of Europe’s top golfers, the Mallaghan family are now hoping to attract some of the world’s best footballers to their 1,100-acre estate at Carton House.

The Mallaghans are in the middle of a €200,000 investment to install Premier League class football pitches close to their luxury hotel for use as a training base by Europe’s biggest clubs on pre-season or mid-season trips.

Fintan Drury’s Platinum One sports agency has been engaged to market the property. “Top clubs want to have a self-contained complex where they can train and stay, they don’t want to have to travel 20 minutes by bus to get to a pitch,” says Eamon McLoughlin, who heads Platinum One’s football unit.

“We don’t have that in Ireland at present. We’ve worked with Barcelona and Valencia and they’ve expressed an interest in coming here. They’ve sent some of their people over to look at Carton House and they love it.”

Drury has form in this arena, having organised Barcelona’s pre-season trip to Scotland last year for friendly games against Hearts and Dundee United. The venture is believed to have netted him a surplus of €400,000.

The Spanish team stayed at St Andrews for the duration, better known as the home to golf. Platinum One will repeat the trick again this year with the Catalans squaring up against Hibernian at Murrayfield and Dundee Utd at Tannadice Park.

It also has an eye to arranging a similar tour for Dublin next year, possibly at the RDS, which could cater for a 20,000 all-seater crowd. The new Lansdowne Road offers great potential from 2010. However, locals hoping to watch Ronaldo or Kaka going through their paces are likely to be disappointed. “Teams will have a separate entrance,” McLoughlin says. “They won’t have to go through the main lobby of the hotel.”