When John Delaney went onto the Ray D’Arcy show and admitted that FIFA had given the FAI a payment in the aftermath of Ireland’s Thierry Henry handball-induced defeat in Paris in 2009, he did so with a smile.
€5 million for nothing? Not bad, is it?
But the reaction immediately turned sour, with players and fans furious that their sporting integrity had been compromised by accepting €5 million from the administrators of world football.
Basketball Ireland CEO Bernard O’Byrne was once in the same position as Delaney. As chief executive of the FAI that is, rather than bigging himself up on national radio as the man who told Sepp to ‘move on’.
O’Byrne told SportsJOE that his initial reaction to Delaney’s admission was surprise.
“I was shocked when I heard what it was for,” O’Byrne said.
“There is nothing wrong with getting a loan in the middle of a project but this seemed to be a payoff for a terrible sporting decision. I would have preferred if we had pursued sporting compensation instead. It didn’t sit well with me.”
O’Byrne, who ran the FAI for five years until 2001, says that had he still been in the role that Delaney now occupies, he wouldn’t have been bought off so easily.
He also didn’t hold back on how he views the money given to the FAI.
“I think the loan was given so the FAI delegates wouldn’t kick up a fuss at the FIFA congress in South Africa [in 2010],” O’Byrne said.
“My attitude would have been to go and kick up as big a fuss as possible in front of the world media.
“He [Delaney] was saying immediately afterwards that it wasn’t a matter of money, that it was a matter of injustice so his attitude seems to have changed a lot in the years since,” O’Byrne continued.
“I think it [the criticism of Delaney] is justified. It was a sellout.”
In his former role with the FAI, O’Byrne also had interactions with FIFA’s cast of characters who are now being scrutinised relentlessly by fans, the media and, most importantly, the FBI.
The Dubliner pointed to the day Sepp Blatter assumed power of football’s most powerful body as why he wasn’t surprised about the arrests of key FIFA members.
“I have met all these guys before, Sepp Blatter, Chuck Blazer and Jack Warner,” O’Byrne said.
“I remember being in Paris for the FIFA congress when Blatter was elected and there was a very bad atmosphere in the hotel. It wasn’t happening out in the open but there was very little concealing that people were being bought off for their votes. We weren’t a part of it but you knew it was going on.”
