John Delaney’s year will end with delegates afraid to ask real questions

"We've got a very open approach to the game. The members are very happy with how we run the game of football. We have an AGM every year, our accounts are given to the public, our members. I don't know what more we can do in terms of being open and transparent. Our members are very happy with the way the association is being ran." – John Delaney on what he regards as the openness of the FAI with its membership

"The reality is stark. There is no public dissent out of fear or need. To publicly challenge is to put the club, region or committee you represent in a negative light when you are entirely dependent upon favours and scraps from the top table. – Former Cork City chairman John O'Sullivan on FAI AGMs

Delegates from Irish football's many strands will be in Sligo today for the FAI's AGM where most, if not all, are set to pass up the opportunity to ask some of the more pressing questions that hang over the association at the end of what has been, even by its standards, a pretty extraordinary year.

If today’s AGM follows the pattern of recent years, the meeting will include a few upbeat presentations and set-piece speeches on the state of the association’s affairs; there’ll be a powerpoint presentation on the accounts, perhaps a sales pitch from a sponsor and silence from the floor.

John O’Sullivan, the former Cork City chairman, suggests in his blog for the42.ie (from which the quote above comes) that rather more business will have been done last night over a few pints. He’s doubtless right but his assertion – widely acknowledged by other delegates in recent years – that people are afraid to question the organisation’s leadership because of the potential consequences for the clubs or leagues they represent, is a pretty damning indictment of the man who spent early June calling for greater transparency at Fifa.

The mockery those comments were subjected to when he ended up confirming the FAI had received a secret €5 million pay-off from Fifa in the wake of the Thierry Henry handball incident in 2009 ultimately led to 17,000 programmes for the Scotland game being pulped at a cost of €10,000 because he raised the same subject in his article for the publication.

Then there were the events around the year’s other Scotland game, back in November, when a lack of transparency over the distribution of the association’s allocation of tickets led to the alienation of some of the national team’s most loyal fans.

Some, though not all, had previously been supporters of the chief executive. By the June games, however, the section of the ground they inhabit had become a hotbed of hostility towards Delaney. After protest banners in the ground had repeatedly been removed, a group of the supporters clubbed together and tried to hire a plane and have it flown over the ground before kick-off, trailing a message calling for his resignation.

As for the €5 million, Delaney original suggested that it was in settlement of a claim for damages arising from a poor refereeing decision. But when lawyers queued up to pour scorn onthis idea, it was claimed it had, amongst other things, been for the way Sepp Blatter had joked about the way the Irish were taking their exit and the decision to seed the original draw for the play-offs.

Real concerns

“If you see the document we made with Fifa,” Delaney told RTÉ television while pointing at the paper, “you can see Fifa’s real concerns. They’re not my concerns, they’re real concerns and they’re in this document and laid out bare for the Irish public and the world to read.”

In the document, however, Fifa only made reference to the referee’s error.

Before that, a video emerged of Delaney singing a ballad about an IRA hunger striker in a busy pub after an Ireland home game. Opinion seemed divided along predictable lines on that one but that was before it emerged the association itself told one Irish website, and had London solicitors tell a British newspaper, that it was wasn't Delaney in the video at all.

In both instances there was a threat of legal action. In both instances the threat was effectively based on a lie.

On each occasion subsequently – the programme pulping and Scotland ticket shambles – it was said that Delaney had been unaware of what was happening and an unnamed member of staff was blamed.

The Fifa money did at least have one redeeming feature: whether you think it should have been taken or not, or whether you believe that the confidentiality clause fatally undermined Delaney’s moral authority when he talked about transparency, it did at least knock €5 million off the association’s very substantial debt.

Delaney once claimed that the FAI would be able to write a cheque for its share of the Lansdowne Road redevelopment; he then claimed that the Vantage Club 10-year premium ticket scheme would cover the Aviva Stadium mortgage.

More recently, when plans A and B failed to come off, he and the association asserted that the debt would be paid off by various other means by 2020. Since the much-trumpeted debt writedown of €11 million in December 2013, this has become less implausible than it used to be, but more than €50 million is still owed.

Without knowing the terms of the new loan with an American equity firm, it is impossible to know whether the new claims are more likely to be delivered on than the previous ones.

If, in the circumstances, Delaney really wants to know what more he could do to make the association properly transparent then he could arm delegates at AGMs with the information they actually need to ask genuinely informed questions. But then he probably knows that, doesn’t he? Some ground was given in the letter that accompanied this year’s accounts but a lot more remains to be done.

Inspire confidence

With regard to the media, his general avoidance of journalists whose beat is actually football can hardly inspire much confidence. The fact is, for all his celebration of openness and transparency, a fair few members of the “football family” have had to rely on newspapers and other media for their information on the Fifa pay-off, the scale of the Uefa loans and whatever the association has deemed fit not to tell them . . .

All in all, the suggestion that there is nothing to ask questions about today seems akin to that scene in the Naked Gun when the fireworks factory is exploding and Inspector Drebin is telling people via a loudhailer to "move along, nothing to see here".

Almost the only thing, it seems, that we really know the answer to in relation to Delaney concerns his personal life. If you’re actually interested: apparently he’s never been as happy.