Tom Humphries argues that the changes to how the FAI operates need to go further than outlined in the Genesis report.
It began late but the FAI organised their sentencing with an efficiency lacking in the commission of their crimes. There was a running order. Designated speakers. A slide-show. Tea and biscuits. Who knew that the high priests of chaos had it in them?
In the end the only sacrifice made on the altar of probity was that offered up by Brendan Menton, general secretary of the association and bearer of one of the most respected surnames in Irish football. Menton wasn't specifically damned in any section of the report as presented to the media, and most would recognise his decision to resign as being characteristic of the honour and seriousness he brought to the job of governing the ungovernable.
Menton had got through 18 months of his two-year tenure as general secretary and didn't take the decision to go lightly. His statement in departing did, however, suggest that he sees the big picture a little more clearly than others within the association.
"Some of the fundamental problems associated with the administration of football in Ireland are not just about Saipan. I took the reins 18 months ago, and, while I have made many changes across various disciplines within the association and the game, the review indicates that the issues impacting negatively on the FAI span a long period and, more importantly, looking to the future, require the type of radical and genuine reform of which some of you in this room have recently written.
"We are talking about a new organisation, not just a service and overhaul. This will take a certain type of leadership, not necessarily someone steeped in football. I indicated to the board today that I would not consider myself a candidate for the position of chief executive."
Menton's decision to move on, at least to a different position within the FAI, can be seen as symbolic. His family association with Irish soccer in particular and Home Farm football club in general marks him as among the aristocracy of the domestic game. The demands of an association dealing from time to time with major international competitions, with huge sponsorships, with a turnover of almost €20 million last year and with recurring crises in terms of communication, personnel, administration and infrastructure, suggests that Irish soccer needs the services of business executives and communications professionals rather than well-intentioned soccer lovers. The old guard must change. Soccer people must relinquish the thing they love the most if it is to survive.
The Genesis report, at least the diluted version of it issued for public consumption, is long on generalities and doesn't delve much into the business of why certain things happened this summer or what could have been done to avoid them. Rather it casts a light, curable plague on all houses.
Players need protection from the ravening wolves of the media. People need briefings and debriefings. Everyone needs to realise that it's good to talk. There needs to be a bridge from the players to the FAI.
Perhaps the nature of the process involved in collating 88 interviews on a narrow subject matter meant that, in the end, we would get a mosaic rather than a big picture.
The administration of soccer in this country has been a running sore which burst in Saipan. What happened there and in the week that followed was nothing which couldn't have been predicted by somebody coolly surveying the life and times of the FAI from, say, Merriongate through the 1995 riots through Eircom Park and onwards.
That somebody would snap in the end and that none of the personnel or expertise to put it right would be present was hardly surprising. What is surprising is the vagueness of the criticism of the FAI's communications structure, the shoddiness of the teams' dealings with the press, the absence of an FAI presence when everything fell apart.
The better to underline the urgent need for reform, perhaps these failings and others should have been highlighted and explored a little more heavily. A problem the FAI has had in dealing with its elite sportspeople over the years is that players see administrators in one of two ways: either superfans who pad from pool to dining-room in the team hotel without getting changed in between, or meddling, intrusive fools who don't understand the basics of life at the top in the game. Either way they are figures of fun.
There are stories which players tell about FAI officials which highlight the gulf there. One FAI Adonis was sunbathing in Chiba this summer when the players several stories above him spotted his togs and torso and began pouring water down on him from their balcony. When he would leap up the heads which had been keenly leaning over the parapet would have disappeared. Two things struck the lads as comical. The official never moved his deckchair. When he lost his temper with the whole thing he became delusional and incandescent with rage, shouting up at the players' balcony "I know who you are. I'll have you sent home."
If the FAI is to function smoothly again at a major tournament it needs to put an end to the freebie rotation, or if not an end to it at least to reward its officers with accommodation away from the team. A professional liaising with the team and the FAI should also have some input in liaising with the players and their management. If Roy Keane had a third party to turn to in Saipan, somebody more detached and less easily affronted than Mick McCarthy, perhaps history would be different.
For now we have a bland heap of conclusions most of which we all arrived at some time ago, and we have a set of proposals which may well be implemented by the people currently running the asylum.
It's one thing to appoint a chief executive but another to have the courage and grace to step back and allow that person free reign to express their expertise. FAI officials were suggesting yesterday evening that the chief executive might work to the orders of an eight-person directors board. While considerably less unwieldly than the association's current structure, such an arrangement would still expose a chief executive to the political machinations and chivvying of the top level FAI insiders.
One other area seems glaringly absent form the considerations of the Genesis team. By focusing (in fairness, as their brief asked them to) on the World Cup of this year, the broader problems facing soccer in this country perhaps got insufficient attention.
The infrastructure within which the association plays its games from the top to the bottom need refurbishment, renewal, whatever. The executive positions which Genesis propose (at a cost of €400,000) don't specifically address this difficulty.
An international performance plan for four to eight years is welcome, but the more abstract issue of why we need international success and how that success can transfuse money and organisation into the domestic game are not addressed.
Many would consider the gravest and most emblematic sin of the FAI to be the absence of top-class soccer facilities in this country 12 years after we were told that our first World Cup adventure would change all that. Teams and players have been succeeding despite the administration and its flaws.
Genesis by its nature focuses on how life at the top can be run more smoothly. How Irish soccer continues to provide a life at the top, and where it finds the income to do so, those will be the biggest questions facing whoever next joins the cast of our beloved soap opera down in Merrion Square