These are challenging times for fuel businesses like the one he runs but the sense this week as Pat O'Sullivan announced scaled back spending at Limerick FC was of yet another club owner reaching the painful conclusion that football is the game that simply keeps on taking.
O’Sullivan has made remarkable progress on all sorts of fronts since taking over the League of Ireland outfit around six years ago. His club’s community and youth development programmes, in particular, have shown what can be achieved with commitment and cash.
But in attempting to buy some measure of success at senior level he appears to have become the latest in a long, long line of club benefactors who have ended up overstretching themselves.
Ambitions for next year will now be pared back
in line with budgets. But supporters will be relieved to see the chairman quoted this week as still being “committed to ensuring the long-term sustainability of Limerick senior soccer”.
Seven-figure sum
Around the country, though, there will be a certain sense of déjà-vu amongst the slightly scarred band of ex-chairmen who know what it is to get caught up in running the type of club that can these days easily cost its main backer a seven figure sum over a few seasons.
Former Galway United chairman Nial O'Reilly never had that sort of money to put in himself, he says, with a certain sense of relief but he saw the way the club came to rely on the chequebooks of local businessmen like Joe Hanley and Gerry Gray before him.
“Even setting aside any money they might have invested,” he says, “the sweat equity they put in would have been very substantial and if you are a responsible business person then feeding a football club or any other entity for that matter is a questionable enterprise if there is no actual return for the business.”
Most get involved because they are themselves fans and there will usually be a great deal of goodwill towards them from others to start with. After that, though, there tends to be a pretty standard cycle of increased spending to generate success in order to attract paying supporters. This rarely ends well.
Lifelong association
“Pretty quickly you realise that the only people making money out of football are the players, managers and insurance companies,” says
Brian Lennox
, whose lifelong association with Cork football contributed to his decision to become
Cork City
chairman around a decade ago.
“I deliberately took over on April fool’s day because I knew that only a fool would do it but actually it was a couple of years before I really had to start putting any real money in. . . It only started to bother me when I felt people became complacent about it – somebody would tell you casually that they’d lost 10 balls at training the previous week and I’d be thinking ‘they cost 60 quid each’, that sort of thing – but then when you decide you want to get out, you realise that you can’t because there aren’t many people out there like you.”
Lennox recalls seeing a debate on a Shelbourne fans forum in which supporters of the Dublin club apparently debated amongst themselves as to whether they would observe the minute’s silence before a game intended as a mark of respect to the then recently deceased Ollie Byrne.
“That had an effect on me,” he says. “I had my battles with Ollie but he would have bled for Shelbourne and I was thinking, ‘you’re not even respected at your own club’.
In the end, he sold up to Arkaga but he he remains a regular at the games.
Others have departed on less amicable terms. Gerry Matthews was generally credited nearly a decade ago with saving Dundalk. Despite investing upwards of a million euro in the club he was still an unpopular figure by the time he departed with the club again in crisis.
The likes of John McNamara and Joe Colwell at Shamrock Rovers and even Garrett Kelleher must wonder sometimes about what they were thinking when they got involved.
