Purcell puts his money where his heart is

SOCCER:As the new season prepares to kick off next Friday, EMMET MALONEtalks to a player, a manager and a supporter about how the league can cope in the current recession.

THE FAN:"THE THREE best days of my life," says Andrew Purcell, "were Drogheda United winning the FAI Cup, getting married and the birth of my son although," he adds quickly and with a mischievous laugh, "I'd never say in what order."

United, it seems safe to guess, have given the Termonfeckin dairy farmer, a few poor days too in the six years since that memorable day out at Lansdowne Road.

There was a league title, of course, and two Setanta Cups, but more recently mainly financial problems and more than one dark day when it seemed that saving the club might just prove to be beyond its supporters.

Purcell reviews it all with a fair amount of wonder when asked about a 23-year love affair with the club that started when he dropped by to watch a pre-season friendly against Dundalk.

A decade or so later he was a regular who would stick it out until the end as others left early during heavy defeats and who hoped against hope that the club, like Galway or Bray, might get lucky and put together a cup run that would lead to a trophy.

Nothing, though, quite prepared him for the boom years to come.

“We were the ultimate Celtic Tiger club in that the fortunes of the club were directly linked to land prices and all that went with that,” he says. “When the money started to pour in it was surreal really, a crazy transformation but if I’m being brutally honest I’d say that the majority of fans just paid their €15 and expected us to win. Only a minority were asking questions about how sustainable it all was.

“In hindsight,” he continues, “maybe it would have been better to pull in the reins a little after the cup win and hold off a bit until the ground was sold and the planning permission for the new one was secured. As my mother says, nothing’s certain till it’s done.”

That, of course, would have meant no league title in 2007 and no trip to Kiev the following year for the Champions League qualifier in which United nearly pulled off one of the league’s greatest ever coups. Given how fondly he remembers being there for that, it’s not entirely clear that Purcell would actually rewrite history if given the chance.

It would also have meant, though, that the club never reached the stage where it was paying out more than €2 million annually in wages on the basis of an impending property deal that ultimately never came off. Within a few months of the trip to the Ukraine, the chickens were starting to come home to roost.

“We were victims in a sense,” says Purcell with regard to a failed attempt to secure planning permission that club officials are adamant they were told would be granted.

But having said that we probably got a little carried away with the fully professional team and all of that. We were a microcosm of the whole thing really.”

Last year, the club ended up owing over a million euro and having to negotiate its way out of examinership for a good deal less than half that after a remarkable fundraising effort that reflected the amount of pride that had been generated locally over the previous few years.

Purcell was amongst those to put money in the kitty and, he laughs, he chased up relatives to do the same. “I felt we owed it to the directors who had put millions into the club,” he says, “that it was time for us to put our hands in our pockets. And, yeah, I would have encouraged family members. My dad wouldn’t go to games but he wouldn’t have wanted to see the club go either.”

Now, he says, he has embraced the share scheme that, it is hoped, will transform how the club operates and, at a time when budgets are a tiny fraction of what they were, enable the supporters to genuinely take control of its future, albeit for around €1,000 per share. “There’s a new focus and all the talk is about sustainability which is right although if this fails,” he says, “it would probably be the end for the club in my view.”