It was an hour into the FAI Cup quarter-final at Mounthawk Park on September 12th, when an Owen Elding hat-trick appeared to have ruined Kerry FC’s third season in existence.
After all the excitement, all the hope ahead of kick-off, it was Kerry 0 Sligo Rovers 3. Nothing to see here.
“There was an All-Ireland final feel around Tralee in the build-up,” says Billy Dennehy, the club’s co-founder and chief executive. “Flags and buntings all over the main street.
“Not so long ago you were not allowed to play soccer in certain schools in Kerry. Now the community was rallying around a team full of local players. We could’ve sold five times the amount of tickets.”
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Elding’s goals muted the 1,150 attendance.
“It felt like a disappointing end to an exciting week,” continues Dennehy. “Then Colin Healy made a few subs that changed the momentum of the game.”
On came two local lads, Cian Brosnan and Daniel Okwute, with Brosnan’s second goal in the 92nd-minute forcing extra-time.
“For 60 minutes Sligo toyed with us,” says local journalist Murt Murphy. “But at three-all they were shot.”
[ Colin Healy appointed new manager of Kerry FCOpens in new window ]
Seconds before a penalty shoot-out, Okwute’s volley set Mounthawk ablaze.
“I’ve been around the game a long time and I’d never experienced anything like it,” says Dennehy.
Murt: “Grown men don’t cry very often, but that night I shed tears of joy.”
Dennehy: “The result represented the resilience and the fight that it took to get a League of Ireland club in Kerry. If anybody told you five years that Kerry would reach the FAI Cup semi-final against Shamrock Rovers, live on RTÉ, what would you’ve said? The journey so far has been one unattainable thing after another.”
Kerry have only two full-time staff - Healy and his assistant coach Chris Collopy. Dennehy recruited the former Republic of Ireland international and women’s coach in May, having been his team-mate at Sunderland and Cork City. Even Dennehy himself is a part-time CEO.
“Clubforce, my employer, have been brilliant. It is amazing how transferable skills can be in terms of a corporate and a sporting environment.”
Murphy’s is a familiar byline on Kerry GAA matters over the past 30 years. But he’s always been a soccer man. He even owns a piece of Mounthawk.
“I am still a trustee of Mounthawk Park,” he explains. “We bought it for £80,000 (€91,6000), 10 acres, in 1994. Kerry soccer officially started in 1971, when eight teams got together and formed the Kerry District League. In the early noughties, we thought we’d get to League of Ireland standard but there was nobody to push them through.”
Enter Billy Dennehy. The Tralee native’s story can begin at the Stadium of Light in September 2004 when then Sunderland manager Mick McCarthy told the teenager that he couldn’t return home for the All-Ireland minor football final.
“I’d been flying over to Southampton, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest on trials while I was a Kerry minor. In my naivety, when I signed for Sunderland, I thought I’d fly back to play the final. I remember saying it to Mick and he said ‘No, that’s not the way this works. You are under contract. You won’t be playing in that game’.”
Without Dennehy, Tyrone beat Kerry in the final. He signed for Sunderland but never played a first-team game.
“It would be frowned upon in other households in Kerry but my family was so supportive of the dream I was chasing – to sign for a Premier League club.
“Kerry, at that time, you were coming from the gutter of the game. No support networks. No player ID. I signed for Shelbourne at 16 and got the train to Dublin every weekend.
“It was the hardest way possible to make it. A lot of very talented players from Kerry fell by the wayside.”
After three seasons and no appearances in the Premier League, he returned from England to carve out a respectable 10-year career in the League of Ireland that included two league titles with Shamrock Rovers.
“When I signed for Rovers in 2011, Stephen Bradley was a team-mate. Moving up to Dublin, being a Kerry boy, it was a bit daunting at the time. Biggest club in the country. I certainly felt that pressure. Stephen made me very comfortable. Good craic and a great football mind.”
By the time he finished up in 2018, Dennehy had seen every side of football and had no appetite to see more. But then Kerry FC came calling.
“I told my wife that when I retired from football I’d have nothing to do with the game. I’d sacrificed a lot of family events. Then someone asked me to help out with the under-17s. That was it, I was drawn in by the appetite and ambition these young players had.
“I felt a responsibility to share what I had learned from 15 years in the game. We reached the Mark Farren Cup final in 2019. Evan Ferguson scored a hat-trick. There were thousands of people in Mounthawk Park.”
That 5-1 defeat to Bohemians lit the fuse. Dennehy and his childhood friend Steven Conway had always talked about bringing League of Ireland football to the kingdom. It felt like the time to act or die wondering. Boston-based Conway is now the club’s chief financial officer.
“It was born out of a passion to create something that wasn’t there in Kerry – a self sustainable model,” says Dennehy. “We put a proposal together and spoke to Brian Ainscough.”
When Ainscough left to take over Dundalk in November 2023, Tralee man John Wall took the opportunity to put an initial €1.5 million into his hometown team.
Kerry FC have gone from strength to strength.
“John Wall is a Tralee man,” says Murt Murphy, “But he’s from Silicon Valley now. The CFO of Cadence Design Systems.” (Wall told the Irish Examiner earlier this year that the company he runs is worth “eighty billion plus”.)
“His father Johnny Wall was a musician in the showband era,” continues Murphy. “One of the ‘Kerry Blues’ and subsequently a town councillor in Tralee. He’s still active. You’d meet him down the pool on a Friday.”
When Ainscough departed, Dennehy had opportunities to bring in one of the equity groups circling Irish football. Cobh Ramblers, Athlone Town and Bray Wanderers were taken over this year by US investors seeing the potential to turn distressed-assets into profitable enterprises via European qualification and the sale of academy players.
“If we go on and win the FAI Cup things would change very quickly,” says Dennehy. “But when Brian Ainscough left, the board did not panic because we had a sustainable model.
“During this time I was approached by multiple private equity groups. There wasn’t a cultural alignment with any of them. They didn’t understand who we were. They didn’t understand what we were trying to do.
“We didn’t want instant success only to leave the local community behind. These groups wanted to come in and go from the bottom to the top as quickly as possible. But there is a process, you have to nail the foundations for any business to be sustainable.”
The next challenge is how Kerry competes with the ballooned budgets of Cobh, Athlone and Bray.
“We are not trying to compete with anybody, we are just trying to be the best version of ourselves,” replies Dennehy. “The real success from the Sligo game is that six years ago I was coaching six of the players on the pitch at full-time. Two of them scored on the night.
“That is success to me. We stuck to our core principles, with and without money - develop young talent, stick by them and they will come good.”
Put it another way, do Kerry FC have enough cash in reserve to ensure that the Sligo result was not a one-off?
“We would not be going in the direction we are going without John Wall,” he says. “All the basic support networks that the majority of leagues around the world have, Ireland does not have. We don’t have TV money, high transfer fees in general or support from the governing body.
“That’s why we are continuously reliant on external investment. That is not going to change any time soon, not until the Government comes in to support academies. That is the future of the industry.”
In the meantime, Ronan Teahan is as likely as anyone to slingshot Rovers between the eyes.
“Ronan could go on to greater things,” says Murphy of the 21-year-old midfielder. “His dad John Teahan is a well known basketball international. A steely Roy Keane-type character. His mom is Marie Fitzgerald, Kerry All Star footballer. And his uncle is the great Maurice Fitzgerald.
“On Sunday, when Ronan is playing at 6pm, his dad is the physio for South Kerry in the senior football championship and his brother Seán is playing corner forward at 2pm against Spa from Killarney.”
When asked which match his father should attend, football in Glenbeigh or soccer in Tallaght, Teahan replies, “We’ll see now which son he prefers best.”
You coming up Sunday, Murt?
“I’m waiting for the final.”
