At the launch of SSE Airtricity National U17 League on Monday the attention was, as is always the case, on Roy Keane.
The Republic of Ireland assistant manager appeared to be in good form, and spoke on a range of topics, from his own experiences in League of Ireland, his ambitions to return to club management and the chances of the young players in attendance having a professional career.
Most media outlets focused on Keane’s view of Ireland’s qualifying draw for the 2018 World Cup. The U17 league was mentioned in articles, which was the purpose of getting Keane over to Dublin, raising the profile of the venture, if not exactly offering insight into how it’ll work.
What should be of much more interest to Irish football fans were Ruud Dokter’s views.
The FAI’s High Performance Director spoke a good game in his opening address, saying the new league will feature “the best, with the best, against the best, throughout the country”, while words like “consistency”, “continuity” and “collaboration” frequently came up.
The U17 national league begins on August 9 and will feature 22 teams, 19 of whom will be SEE Airtricity League clubs, competing against each other on a national level.
Dokter sees the league as a bridge from schoolboy football, a pathway to elite adult football and a competitive alternative for those who’ve yet to move to clubs across the water.
Despite the new venture being divisive among schoolboy clubs and leagues, the Dutchman said there’s “huge appetite for change” among clubs, and now is the time for unity of purpose.
In addition to attempting to foster an unprecedented level of collaboration, Dokter said a change of mindset is needed.
He cited the benefits of reorganising the football calendar in line with the Airtricity League, how playing during the summer months is more fun for players and spectators, more practical on a windswept rock on the edge of the Atlantic ocean and how, since switching to summer football, Mayo have doubled their participation numbers.
“It’s not about winning games,” Dokter said, “because winning games is for players, if you work with children, you are an educator. You have the responsibility to develop all your players.”
However, will Dokter’s admirable rhetoric and ambition yield the desired results? Or is Irish football doomed to repeat the failures of the past, continue to be seeded fourth in qualifying draws and sit behind Cape Verde in world rankings?
And what does the U17 national league mean for in the greater picture of Irish football development?
We’ve looked at a number of different issues raised by Monday’s launch, and what they could mean for the future of Irish football.
The U17 National League
In The Wire season four, an academic approaches Bunny Colvin, a former police Major, about conducting a study hoping to gain insight that may help prevent young men from becoming repeat offenders.
The academic wants to focus on males aged between 18 and 21, Colvin laughs this off, saying they’re too far into the drug game at that point for any difference to be made.
To convince the academic, Colvin arranges a sit-down with a person from his original target demographic.
They instead focus their study on kids aged 13, an age just before they’re completely lost to “the game”.
Something similar applies to Irish football. By the time young footballers will be eligible to play in the new U17 national league, they’ll have already been conditioned in the habits of a dysfunctional system.
Those deemed the best are already at clubs across the water, and those who failed to fit into a coach’s plan to win games have either dropped out of football, or haven’t developed to their full potential.
The initial group of U17 players may be the best, but they’re the best that have come through a system that is not set up to develop footballers to their full potential.
For any meaningful change to be made, a uniform, national approach will have to be implemented a lot sooner.
Dokter did recognise this need to introduce “improved elite structures at a younger age”, and similar elite national leagues have been mooted at U15 and U13 levels. And, if this was to occur, one would imagine the Dutchman would seek national leagues at even younger age-groups.
This will lead to undoubted conflict though.
Collaboration
“Irish football is too fragmented; we have to collaborate,” said Dokter on Monday, a statement as obvious as saying “it really does rain a lot in Ireland.”
The Dutchman also said there was appetite for change amongst clubs and schoolboy leagues throughout the country. However, on the day after Dokter’s press conference, I heard about a young player who was let go from the club where he’d played since he was six-years-old because he went on trials for a rival team.
Clubs are even less likely to be receptive to the FAI telling them how to produce players, or that what they’ve been doing for decades is, in fact, partly negligible to a player’s development.
There should be a clear path for players to progress, from schoolboy to junior to senior football, but none exists. Collaboration entails cooperation and compromise. When asked if the various leagues were open to compromise, Dokter said it was “a process”.
It’s going to be slow and painful process.
Coaching
Dokter also said a coach is supposed to be an educator, that “the best players of today, might not be the best of tomorrow.”
However, for many coaches there is no tomorrow, it’s all about winning the next game, the next trophy, getting the next player over to England.
Why spend the limited time available developing a player’s technical ability, and tactical understanding, when you can lump it long to the big lad?
When Dokter spoke of making games non-competitive until a certain age-group, it wasn’t intended to dilute young player’s competitive instincts, but rather to focus coaches on what’s important: bringing players to the next level, rather than winning trophies.
Dokter is fighting against an ingrained culture in this regard. A deep seated ignorance that will only be addressed through education.
Ireland will have 65 Uefa Pro licences by the end of the year, up from 45 two years ago. In 2013, there were 183 holders of the A licence and 488 with the B licence. Unsurprisingly, in Europe, Spain lead the way in Europe, with 12,720 Uefa A level coaches. Germany have 5,500 and England 1,178. For the Pro license, Spain have 2,140, Germany over 1,000 and England 203.
Dokter said there are 9,000 people annually take coaching courses in Ireland, but it’s evidently not enough.
In relative terms, Spain had, in 2013, one Pro licence per 21,824 people, and one licence per 3,670 people. Ireland had one Pro licence per 100,000 people.
Nothing will change in terms of Irish football development, and, in turn, the fortunes of the Irish team or the quality of Irish players in other leagues, as long as there’s such a dearth of qualified coaches.
Continuity
Dokter said that the FAI are “responsible for the development of football,” and that “the player development plan is now FAI policy.”
The FAI expanded their Emerging Talent Programme last September, to include the country’s best players from under 10s to 16-year-olds. The programme aims to identify and develop the most talented players, and guide them towards the senior international team.
The U17 National League, and the U19 incarnation, are also part of this attempt to introduce some type of uniform, centralised plan.
These measures are progressive steps, ventures other European countries like Belgium, Germany and Holland done years ago.
However, good intentions will only get you so far. In the past ten years, the association has cut its development and operating grants to grassroots affiliates in by 50 per cent, from €2.2 to €1.1 million.
This contradicts player development plans, and weakens attempts to make serious change. The scarcity of qualified coaches could be due to qualifications being markedly more expensive to gain in Ireland, and England, than on the continent.
In Germany, the A licence costs €530, €1,200 in Spain and €2,350 in Ireland. The pro licence can cost €7,500 in Ireland. To improve the standard of coaching, which will, in-turn, improve young players, improve the national team and Irish players going abroad, one would imagine qualifications will have to be made more financially accessible and/or compulsory.
Competition
Dokter referenced, at numerous times, Ireland’s “unique” status as a sporting country, with four popular team sports competing in a small talent pool.
However, football remains the number one participation sport in the country. The Dublin District Schoolboy League is the largest of its kind in Europe, with over 200 clubs and 16,000 players competing from ages of eight to 18.
The challenge of other team sports has little to do with the failure to properly develop young players. For a start, a child playing more than one sport, until a certain point, is a good thing.
Most importantly though, if we were to wake up tomorrow and there were no Gaelic games or rugby, and every child who played those sports suddenly flocked to football, the same problems would still exist. Some naturally talented players would break through, but there still wouldn’t be enough coaches to properly teach them.
Physicality would still be favoured over creativity, risks would still be minimised, and skilful players would still largely be discouraged. The players deemed to be the best would move to England in their mid-teens and most would be home, or drop down the divisions, by the time they’re 20.
In relation to numbers, the problem is not the amount of people playing football in Ireland, it’s that, despite there been many dedicated coaches, there’s, as we’ve seen, not enough Uefa licensed coaches.
That being said, Irish football isn’t helping itself with some of it archaic practices. Compared to central Europe, Irish players during the ages of six to 16, the crucial ages of development, touch the ball, on average, 14 times less. This lack of playing time leads to many leaving the game, many by the age of 11.
Irish football is, in many ways, it’s own worst enemy.
Conclusion
It was hard to leave Monday’s press conference and not be impressed by Dokter. He has recognised the myriad of problems in Irish football, and appears to be attempting to address them.
He realises we can no longer depend on English clubs to finish Irish players development, that Irish football needs to take responsibility for developing elite, technical players, or we will sink even further behind.
However, the more changes Dokter attempts to make, the more resistance he will face. The SSE Airtricity U17 National League was pitched as a bridge to elite, adult football for young Irish players, but there a number of bridges to be crossed before the problems dogging Irish football will be resolved.
