The FAI media briefing on Thursday morning aimed to bring closure to Vera Pauw’s time at the association, while ideally avoiding further dispute with the history-making former Republic of Ireland women’s head coach.
Most questions fielded by the association’s chief executive Jonathan Hill and director of football Marc Canham focused on the last few months of Pauw’s four-years in charge, mainly because Hill curtailed talk about Stephen Kenny’s short-term future as international men’s manager.
Kenny’s position is secure unless the FAI board of directors go against their chief executive at the next scheduled meeting on September 26th.
“It’s really important to acknowledge publicly Vera Pauw’s contribution to football in Ireland,” said Hill, before he disputed allegations Pauw has levelled at his executive team. “It’s clear that Vera has always been a pioneer in relation to the women’s game and she will always be the coach who guided us to our first women’s World Cup, one of only three managers to do so.
“Along with her staff and of course the players, they collectively changed the face of women’s football forever.”
The English man denies the Dutch woman’s claim of interference before or during the tournament in Australia this summer. Hill emphasised a strong working relationship with Ireland captain Katie McCabe and other senior members of the squad, just as Canham is prioritising the recruitment of Pauw’s successor.
“We’ve started the process,” said Canham. “We have a clear vision of what we want that to look like.”
By December, Canham is due to publish details of this vision for Irish football pathways.
The former Premier League director of coaching has no intention of igniting a parallel search for a new men’s manager. Not until mid-November at the earliest.
In the meantime, Eileen Gleeson will lead the Republic of Ireland into the first ever women’s football international at the Aviva Stadium, against Northern Ireland on September 23rd, but the FAI’s head of women and girls’ football is due to return to her full-time position by October.
With the FAI potentially clear of the Pauw controversy and concerns over Kenny’s future calmed, Hill and Canham endeavoured to shift focus to the future of the game in Ireland.
Will Clarke, the FAI’s academy development manager, recently highlighted the enormity of this task. “In order for Ireland to sustain senior international success,” Clarke tweeted. “I’d suggest we need approximately 40 players playing approximately 1,400 mins per season in the top five [European] leagues.”
Currently, with most Irish professional footballers contracted to clubs in the lower tiers of English football, there are, give or take, 15 players in the top five European leagues who will clock an average of 650 minutes per season.
These numbers should spike this season because Evan Ferguson at Brighton, Nathan Collins at Brentford, Josh Cullen at Burnley and John Egan at Sheffield United are Premier League regulars. But Brighton and Brentford aside, the other clubs are highly susceptible to relegation. The same applies to Séamus Coleman at Everton and Chiedozie Ogbene at Luton Town.
“The first point to mention is that of course we want success for our national teams and we want results, we want to qualify,” said Canham, before identifying his major challenge as the FAI director of football. “If you do look at world football, though, over many years, and look at really high ranking teams or teams with similar sized populations, there is a direct correlation between the talent development and education system in terms of achieving that success.”
The lack of soccer schools in Ireland feeding League of Ireland clubs is stark when compared to other football nations, or how Irish rugby climbed to number one via private schools in Leinster effectively acting as self-funded academies.
Canham is cognisant how much work must be done before football can come close to the link the GAA has with schools.
“It’s very clear that the quality and volume of depth of the high performing countries has a direct correlation to quality of the talent development system,” he continued. “We still want success here and now but we also have to look into that.
“Just look at Belgium and Croatia who are two countries that often get compared with us – similar size population. Belgium had a clear vision 20 to 25 years ago and they’ve been number one ranked team in the world for many years. That’s because of a development system, not by chance.”
Currently, the FAI give €10,000 to each club academy. This is supplemented by Uefa and Fifa funding but as the numbers repeatedly show, any moves towards a football industry are impossible without large scale Government investment.
“We are trying to look long term on this, over 10 years and deliver things over two, three year periods,” Canham continued. “We won’t be able to deliver everything straight away so we have to have a phased implementation of this.
“What is absolutely key to a successful delivery of this plan will be an implementation plan and how we do that both nationally and regionally. It is not going to happen overnight.
“Not everything we do in Irish football means we have to have millions and millions of Euros to change. Having a clear philosophy of how we want to play, how we want to coach at grassroots level to League of Ireland to academies to international teams – yes, of course, that costs a level of money but having a really clear vision of what that looks like and educating the workforce does not costs millions of Euros.”
