As young Irish talent seeks to develop at home, the FAI struggles to keep up

Uefa Under-17 Championship: Ireland v Spain, Hidegkuti Nándor Stadium, Budapest, Saturday (kick-off 7pm)

Mason Melia has become the primary example of talent finding a way to excel inside a fractured system. See the 15-year-old’s thumping header to put the Republic of Ireland 2-1 up against hosts Hungary during this week’s Under-17s European Championships.

Melia refused to be denied at the back post despite the presence of three older Hungarian defenders. It finished 4-2, with the St Patrick’s Athletic striker scoring twice and creating two more for club mate Luke Kehir, setting up a quarter-final against Spain (Saturday, 7pm, RTÉ Player).

“Imagine if they were horses or greyhounds?” tweeted Labour TD Aodhán Ó Ríordáin along with dollar emojis to indicate the shortfall in State funding when Irish soccer is compared to other European nations.

Melia made his League of Ireland debut against Drogheda United earlier this month. A boy among men is essentially the strategy for under 18 talent blocked from joining UK clubs by Brexit.

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Unless St Pat’s receive a decent offer from interested Bundesliga clubs, Melia is set to light up the domestic scene, although parents and agents advising him and other players in Hungary believe that the FAI cannot cater for their needs. There are 63.5 million reasons why.

Sure, Melia is being fast tracked into the professional ranks at Richmond Park, but most of Colin O’Brien’s under-17s squad are too small to compete in the professional ranks. Realistically, most of them should be parlaying football into a free education.

The FAI cannot afford to address this glaring issue; under 17s in this country are shy 500 minutes per week of hands-on coaching when compared to the third tier English club academies.

“You can only get them in when you get them in,” admitted St Pat’s manager Jon Daly. “They have school and stuff like that. Obviously through the summer months when they are off school we will have them in as often as we can.

“At the moment within the academy they are getting the hours they are getting [an average of 270 minutes a week]. We need to find ways to improve that. There are other ways you can do it. At previous clubs I’ve been at [in England and Scotland] there are schooling systems within the club. Obviously that comes at a cost. At the minute, the way things are, we can only add to his hours when he is not being exposed to school.”

The challenge facing St Pat’s is enormous. The club filed accounts for 2022 with net liabilities of €3.3 million, and while they returned a €15,000 profit, this dropped from €55,744 in 2021. There was also a heavy reliance on Uefa prize money of €750,000 and a guarantee from club chairman Garrett Kelleher that his company Mancar Ltd “will not seek repayment of amounts due to them for at least 12 months.”

“On that basis,” read the club’s abridged financial statement, “the directors consider that it is appropriate to prepare financial statements of the company on a going concern basis.”

Transfer income last year was just under €500,000, which partly explains the drop in the amount owed to Mancar Ltd from €3.4 million to €2.8 million.

The club employs 38 staff, an increase of five since 2021, with seven in administration and ground staff, six coaches and 25 players.

A reliance on club owners – Kelleher is a property developer – rather than the FAI and the Government proves that Irish football cannot rationally expect to achieve consistent international success. Poland under-17s beat Ireland 5-1 in the group stages last week but, as noted in the Irish Independent, leading Polish clubs employ an average of 24 full-time youth employees. Irish football has yet to reach an average of one full-time underage coach per club.

Despite the €3.3 million hole, St Pat’s technical director Alan Mathews allayed concerns around the Inchicore club’s ability to strengthen the squad this summer to ensure European football happens in 2024.

“Myself and Jon have been talking about getting ourselves ready for reinforcements to freshen up the squad,” Mathews explained. “That’s going to result in resources being made available to Jon to do that. We’re down the road a little bit further than we might have been this time last year.”

The going plan for Melia and other exceptional teenage talent to continue their develop within Irish football has St Pat’s currently working off an Irish solution to an Irish problem.

“What a lot of clubs have got very good at doing with the high-potential players is moving them up a grade, maybe it’s playing 19s or training with first teams,” said O’Brien ahead of the Spanish game, which doubles as a play-off to qualify for the World Cup in November. “It is important that the players try and push themselves into those environments. They have come from League of Ireland clubs and grassroots clubs, and they have to continue developing once the tournament finishes.”

Approaches to education

Shamrock Rovers, where 20 teenagers are contracted full-time to the academy, have set the standard on education via an arrangement with Ashfield College. St Pat’s do cover fees for certain players but as Daly highlighted, following his time in charge of the Heart of Midlothian under-20s in Scotland, the game in Ireland sorely lacks a collective approach to education.

“There’s a handful of clubs in Scotland who have their own schools,” said Daly. “Players do a normal school day but might train beforehand at 7am, another break during day and again in the evening. That’s three sessions per day, those contact hours are massive.”

Matthews added: “I experienced it through my two young lads playing rugby within the Leinster schools system. It was practically 100 per cent funded by the schools. They took ownership of the players before some went to the Leinster Academy at 18. You can see the conveyor belt of lads coming through and we don’t have that. We have to do it ourselves.”

Elite rugby players’ education in Ireland is funded privately by parents and school fees.

“The principle could still be the same,” countered Mathews. “Football spreads across all strands of society whereas rugby is only in a couple of lanes.”

On the lack of serious central funding for academies, all roads lead back to the FAI’s €63.5 million debt. The association continues to seek long term investment from Government, this week hosting a delegation from the Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport and Media and the Oireachtas Sports Committee at Abbotstown.

In the meantime, League of Ireland clubs cherry-pick “underage elite performers” like Melia who might someday return the seven-figure-profit that Shamrock Rovers banked when Southampton paid Manchester City £15 million for Gavin Bazunu.

“In relation to the process for exceptional players, I think the club have done well over the last couple of years in co-ordinating the contact hours on the pitch with their education,” said Mathews, citing Luke McNally (Burnley) and James Abnkwah (Udinese) as examples alongside current first team teenagers Sam Curtis and Adam Murphy.

“We like to think when Mason comes back and we align where he goes he will fall into that.

“We do have our infrastructure in place to benefit exceptional talent on and off the pitch; make them better people, give them qualifications and a skill set outside of football as well as giving them the contact hours on the pitch.

“It is difficult to do it across the board but we have been able to do it with those particular players. It is a slow burn but it has happened. We want that to continue. The clubs have stepped up to the plate – we have anyway – to allow underage elite performers to fulfil their potential until they move over [to England].”

At Melia’s current rate of progress, the Bundesliga might beat English clubs to his signature.