Originally Posted by
EalingGreen
What do you mean by "on fire"? Were that the case, then everyone inside (PD) would perish. If you mean that the "big" PD clubs are in a different financial league from the rest, then fair enough, but even there, there are significant financial disparities within the PD between clubs like UCD, Harps or Drogs, compared with Shams, Cork, Derry etc
Or how do you explain eg Scotland, where the Two Ugly Sisters suck the life out of the rest, yet a country of 5.5m can still somehow sustain a 42 team/4 division league pyramid, with Highland and Lowland feeder leagues beneath. Cove Rangers anyone?
You talk about "the LOI", as though it was one division. But teams coming up from a third tier wouldn't have to go straight into the PD (obv). The best/most sustainable should be able to find their level in the FD, until they grew, in time, to hope to go up another level.
Loughgall are an outlier - I doubt they'll last a season or two (max), just like their only previous short stay in the Prem, in the early noughties.
Which is hardly much different eg from Cobh (2008), Athlone (2014) or Wexford (2016) having their own solitary season in the sun.
In any case, I'm not saying that you should eg create a third tier next year or the year after and expect the top club or two to go straight into the FD the year after that - if anything, that is the opposite of what I'm suggesting.
Which is to build from the bottom up, rationalise your Junior clubs/leagues locally, then build up the best of those into a regionalised, Intermediate set-up, with ever more stringent requirements (financial, facilities, infrastructure etc) along the way, if participants are to achieve the appropriate License. So that eventually (10 years?) the best of the Intermediate clubs in a 3rd tier should be able to have a crack at the 2nd tier.
Or do you you have some alternative plan to expand the domestic professional game in ROI?
Or are you saying that a country like ROI can only ever be capable of sustaining a maximum of 17 or 18 Senior professional clubs, with some of those on a p-t basis?
And even then at the cost of occasional member clubs going bust every few years, only to re-emerge in a new wrapper, as though nothing had ever happened?
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