Delaney and FAI have little to be bullish about

SOCCER NEWS:IT'S NOT so long since annual general meetings of the FAI tended to produce a few lively scraps over motions relating to the way the association was run or structured or planned to carve up its generally fairly meagre resources between the fiercely competitive strands of the game.

In recent years, however, things were changed as an effort was made to project both the organisation and the wider “football family” as the sporting world’s equivalent of the Waltons. Just about anything now that might prove contentious is dealt with behind closed doors and little or nothing reaches the floor of an AGM.

Behind the scenes the tensions continue but generally they seem happy around Abbotstown that things are largely kept under wraps. Still, as they head into this year’s AGM in Ennis this afternoon, John Delaney and his board might just be wishing there was the prospect of a good scrap to serve as a distraction from a set of financial figures that make for grim reading.

Turnover declined by around a fifth last year from just over €50 million to just under €40 million although this is largely attributable to the fact that there were highly lucrative competitive games against Italy and France in Croke Park during the latter part of 2009. Clearly, though, the association could have done without the falls in revenues and the accounts show that that the organisation had no cash in hand or in the bank at all at the end of last year while its overdraft had increased from €2.44 million to €4.16 million.

Wider borrowings at the association continue to mount as the repayments on its share of the Aviva Stadium fall due. The accumulated total of its loans from banks at the end of 2010 stood at €63 million and the accounts suggest that most of the stadium repayments are being turned into longer-term debt.

This much had been flagged at last year’s AGM where then finance director Mark O’Leary painted a relatively upbeat picture of the association’s financial position before announcing that a new plan was being put into place to ensure that the organisation would be debt free by the year 2020. O’Leary left the association not long after but, as a €3 million grant from Uefa for grassroots projects was announced yesterday, Delaney made a point of mentioning the 10-year plan. Details of how such large debts are to be paid off have never been made public, however, and in the face of declining revenues and plummeting ticket revenues it is hard to imagine how it can be achieved.

The Uefa TV and centralised marketing deal for international games, which Delaney has suggested will generate €40 million in the four years after 2014, will undoubtedly help, not least in terms of providing a greater degree of certainty, but its actual impact on current revenues has not been revealed and so the degree to which the FAI will benefit cannot be accurately gauged.

Delaney is likely to be as bullish as ever about it this afternoon when he addresses delegates but the problem is that his previous predictions regarding the ease with which the association would meet their obligations in relation to the stadium, not least because of the huge revenues that he claimed would be generated by the failed Vantage Club premium ticket scheme, have tended to call into question the reliability of his more recent public statements on the situation.

He seems unlikely, in any case, to face any serious challenges from the floor while opponents have tended to be very timid in recent years and delegates 12 months ago greeted the assurances he offered then with a fulsome show of support for the chief executive.

Still, there must be just a little unease on the part of some of the delegates with regard to the scale of Delaney’s remuneration given the scale of the organisation’s financial challenges. He has previously said that he has taken a cut in pay but the accounts show that €431,687, down from €450,666, was paid out in “directors’ emoluments” last year and as Delaney is the only paid director it seems that this figure, which may include pension contributions, was effectively the cost of employing him.