with Brian Quigley, October 2013
October is also the business end of the soccer season for League of Ireland clubs. This year Bray Wanderers, who have been flying the flag for Wicklow on the national soccer stage for nearly 30 years, are facing a tough battle to stay in the Premier Division and need everyone in the county to get behind them in their last two home fixtures at The Carlisle Grounds (they host Limerick on Sunday, October 13 and Dundalk on Friday, October 25) as they try to beat the drop to the First Division. First Division football would entail a double financial hit as there would be a lot more travel for Bray given the spread of teams in that division and less revenues (both from gate receipts and TV – RTE’s Monday Night Soccer and Setanta Ireland’s live matches only focus on the Premier Division). Having said that Bray have been relegated before and have always bounced back in style!
Wicklow can and should be proud of the fact that it has League of Ireland soccer representation in the form of Bray Wanderers. More than half of the counties in the republic aren’t represented at the top level in soccer. If you look at the 20 clubs that comprise the League of Ireland Premier and First Divisions, five are from Dublin, Cork, Galway and Louth have two each while Westmeath, Longford, Waterford, Wexford, Sligo, Donegal, Limerick, Derry and Wicklow have one each.
Putting Derry city to one side, as they are from Northern Ireland, that makes a majority of 14 of the republic’s 26 counties that have no League of Ireland representation. Kildare (Kildare county), Monaghan (Monaghan United) and Kilkenny (Kilkenny city) have had League of Ireland representation in the past, but there have never been League of Ireland clubs from Carlow, Cavan, Clare, Kerry, Laois, Leitrim, Mayo, Meath, Offaly, Roscommon or Tipperary.
How is it that less than half our counties can boast a national-level soccer team? It can only partly be explained by population density or competing sports. It is true that many of the counties where there are no League of Ireland soccer clubs are also the least populated counties. I’m talking about Leitrim, Carlow and Roscommon here. But yet similarly sparsely-populated counties such as Longford and Sligo have League of Ireland clubs, and some counties high up on the population league table such as Meath, Tipperary and Kildare have no representation. Competing sports (the most obvious being the GAA) could account for the problem to some extent but all countries have competing sports and soccer should always do well and grab its fair share of participants given its high profile. For a developed football nation we should be able to have top-level representation from more of our counties. How can this be done?
One answer is a pyramid structure. These work well across Europe. The top of the pyramid is your most elite league, in our case the League of Ireland Premier and First divisions, and below that you have larger parallel leagues covering smaller geographical areas. Such a structure has been tried here before with the aborted League of Ireland ‘’A’’ championship, which was split into north and south groups. This division was flawed in my opinion as it allowed some League of Ireland clubs to participate through their reserve teams. A better way to set up a pyramid would be to have a direct progression through from junior (mostly county) level to intermediate (generally provincial) level to senior level. The top divisions of the Leinster and Munster (and Connaught should it re-establish such a division) Senior Leagues (i.e. intermediate level football) could feed directly into the First Division of the League of Ireland via a series of play-offs. This would improve competitiveness in the First Division as clubs try to avoid relegation and give clubs in the provisional senior leagues an incentive to grow and improve as they can see a roadmap to the top. At present Wicklow has intermediate level representation in the Leinster Senior League through Greystones AFC, Greystones United, Wicklow Rovers and Arklow town.
A pyramid structure also offers a safety net to clubs that hit difficulty. Instead of fading into oblivion if there is a safety net available (the next lowest level in the pyramid) clubs can operate on a less-costly (in terms of travel expenses) budget until they get back on their feet.
Good luck to Bray Wanderers!
