All-island league plans gaining pace after positive response

League of Ireland clubs are to be asked next month to consider delaying the start of 2020 season as a first step to the introduction of an all-island league the following year according to Kieran Lucid, the driving force behind the proposal which has already received a positive response from leading clubs on both sides of the border.

Lucid and his backers, who include former Republic of Ireland manager Brian Kerr and Dublin solicitor Brendan Dillon, previously a chairman of the league, continue to progress their plans to generate the required funding for the new competition but the 35-year-old tech millionaire acknowledges that all of the money will not be in place by the time he updates clubs at their next meeting in the Aviva Stadium on September 10th.

He has, he says, held positive talks with sponsors and broadcasters but says that there is a “chicken and egg” aspect to selling a league that does not yet exist and so he is currently talking with potential underwriters, including government agencies and departments, with a view to obtaining guaranteed funding up front.

“We have this chicken and egg scenario,” he says. “The clubs want to jump on board when the cash is all in place and the broadcasters and sponsors are more comfortable backing something that is already there.

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“So what we are looking for is an underwriter. A benevolent, or otherwise, third party who will put the money up up front, x million for x number of years. If the league drops below that number in terms of what it generates commercially the underwrite kicks in, if the revenues are above that then there is a capital upside for the underwriter.

“We’ve met with multiple underwriters and I would have to say that those discussions have been positive.”

Commercial return

A number of the parties he has spoken to are “government agencies or departments”. Backing from such a third party would be particularly attractive as it would not be based on the potential for a commercial return which would inevitably take from the new league’s revenues.

Lucid, who has recruited former English FA general secretary Alex Horne to the group and hired London-based Ollie Weingarten to help negotiate with potential sponsors and broadcasters has spoken to five broadcasters to date, all of whom, he believes, would bid for rights as well two of the three big football data outfits and a couple of potential lead sponsors.

“The goodwill towards the project is huge and the pot is growing steadily but it’s a question of synchronising everything so that the clubs are in a position to say ‘yes’. The underwriters would make all of that so much easier,” says Lucid.

In the weeks since he addressed a meeting of the clubs at Abbotstown he has responded to concerns raised on the day by providing assurances on the number of league fixtures – which would be 36 for top six clubs and 32 for the bottom eight, the same as in Denmark and Bulgaria – as well as adding a second safety mechanism to the proposed structure to ensure that the new league does not quickly become dominated by southern clubs.

There would, he says, be "regionalised promotion and relegation," as well as "convergence payments," consisting of "non trivial," amounts of money targeted at northern clubs threatened by relegation or competing for promotion if the initial south/north balance of nine and five begins to shift too much. "The IFA or the likes of the BBC NI wouldn't stand for subsidising what are now League of Ireland clubs," he explains.

Major influence

He believes the potential is enormous with the Danish Superliga, a major influence on his thinking, generating around €50 million on broadcast revenues alone despite the country having a million fewer people than the island of Ireland. His initial aim is to generate between €6 million and €10 million to get the league up and running after which, he argues, there would be the potential for very substantial growth.

With the NIFL expected to "tweak" its season over the next couple of years to much the same schedule that he is proposing for the new league – May to January 1st – he feels the timing of the Airtricity League is slightly more of an issue with a potential shift of four weeks for the start date next season reducing the scale of the change that would be required the following year.

“The first thing we will be asking them is if they are still interested in 2021. If they are, they don’t have to make a big decision in the next few weeks and they could just continue as they are and then have a longer off season after 2020 but we feel this would help.”

He is, he says, hugely encouraged by the widely expressed support for the proposal on both sides of the border but he accepts that ultimately the plan’s fate will depend on his ability to deliver the anticipated funding as that is what clubs all over the island are attracted by. “The two things that unite clubs north and south,” he says, “are their love of football and the fact that they have no money.”