John Delaney, CEO of the Football Association of Ireland

Yesterday.

John Delaney, the chief executive of FAI, fielded questions at Sport Ireland’s announcement of Government grants to sporting organisations for the year.

Readers may recall how, in January, the FAI held a press conference about its 2016-2020 strategic plan and only invited representatives from their “media partners” to the launch – those from RTÉ and independent.ie.

One journalist described the press conference as ‘the press conference to which the press were not invited’.

Further to this…

This morning, The Irish Times reports:

Private funding, from Denis O’Brien, remains essential to the reappointment of Martin O’Neill as Republic of Ireland football manager, FAI chief executive John Delaney confirmed yesterday.

“Denis’s contribution is invaluable to the reappointment of Martin O’Neill and the management team. Without his contribution it just wouldn’t be possible. The association is more than grateful,” said Delaney.

“Denis has always been a great supporter of Irish football – not only, by the way, in the international team appointment but he was also very helpful in achieving our new finance reduction of €10 million. His company Island Capital were central to our discussions with our new finance partner.”

…It was put to Delaney that the debt has not dropped by any significant amount year on year.

“Well, no, if it was at €70 million and now it is €35 million that is a significant drop . . . ”

Much of that reduction was write downs?

“No,” Delaney replied. “It is not. The recent €10 million was paid down, it wasn’t a write down. It was paid down. That’s significant, okay? So, now you look at the facts: We used to have a debt of €70 odd million. It is now, with our banking partner of €35 million. It is well within our compass to be debt free by 2020, if we wish to do so.”

FAI says Denis O’Brien key to reappointment of Martin O’Neill (Gavin Cummiskey, Irish Times)

Previously: Blatteresque

Rollingnews

FAI chief John Delaney and partner Emma English at the Aviva Lansdowne Road Nua yesterday

Anything good in The Washington Post?

But of course there are questions of legal and ethical impropriety in this arrangement. For one, the payment was kept confidential, and Delaney claims he had to abide by a confidentiality provision.

On the other hand, his spontaneous public confession suggests otherwise, and he didn’t have to agree to the confidentiality provision in the first place.

Why would a nonprofit sporting organization and one of its member nations think that keeping this payment secret was a proper way to conduct business? Losing teams are always unhappy, and lawsuits almost never provide satisfaction, so FIFA had very little to fear in a courtroom.

Yet this secret deal — with both the amount and the entire arrangement kept clandestine — still struck both parties as perfectly reasonable. If further investigation determines that these private parties agreed to commit public wrongs, the deal might not be a shrewd bargain so much as an illegal conspiracy.

More troublingly, why was the payment characterised as a “loan” to build a stadium? If that description turns out to be inaccurate, then the creative bookkeeping might have been an effort to hide the hush money.

So even if Delaney was right to accept the money and to stay quiet about it, football fans of Ireland might still consider this accounting ingenuity a firing offense. If not for Delaney, then perhaps for the auditors…..

Prof. William Birdthistle, professor of law at Illinois Institute of Technology

Famine In Irish Football (Washington Post)

(AP)

Alternatively…

Unpalatable as it may seem, €5m in cold hard cash was an extraordinary coup. In one fell swoop, Delaney made up for much of the shortfall in corporate ticket sales for the Aviva, and did so without being in any way beholden to Fifa.

When all the posturing and righteous indignation has died down, people will see that John Delaney actually managed to deliver what our actual team has conspicuously failed to achieve in recent times. A result.

BOOM.

John Delaney has played a blinder – and it’s time that everyone woke up to that (Michael O’Doherty, The Herald)