Great news, the FAI must be delighted with the interest in this new venture.Originally Posted by joey B
Good to see a public declaration from a club in Meath but mildly surprised it's Trim Celtic as they don't seem to have any spectator facilities (bar maybe the clubhouse?).
And speaking of spectator facilities, has anyone heard if Arklow Town applied? They seem to check a lot of boxes, especially for facilities and fielding competitive teams.
I share your surprise re Trim. Their facility is pretty basic and quite a bit out of town as well, so they're not exactly in the heart of the community there.
If anyone has a chance of establihsing a county-wide support base in Meath, it would really have to be a Navan club. Trim is less than a third the size of Navan, so I donlt think has the ingredients to become and remain a senior/LOI team.
To save my diverting or polluting this thread (again!), I've opened a new thread in the Irish League section, covering the latest proposed IFA reorganisation of the pyramid in NI. This may be of some relevance towards the changes which the FAI are introducing for the LOI:
https://foot.ie/threads/299428-Irish...36#post2225136
What would help a Trim club in LoI would be a Navan club joining also and visa versa, if they could resist a costly arms race with each other in the first few years. Drogheda and maybe Dundalk would become derby rivals in due course, throw in a Mullingar side also. Parochial rivalry is the bedrock of football supporters' motivation until national titles are on the card.
https://www.facebook.com/ArklowTownF...6056281449878/
The ground and facilities look great, way ahead of Trim Celtic.
Very true EYG, I can't see any team outside of Navan making a real go of it. Any suggestions on teams? Parkvilla playing out of Claremont Stadium maybe - no seats but room to add temporary ones.
I agree with the rivalry slant although surely there'd be a bigger rivalry between Navan and Drogheda than Navan and Trim no?? 😉
Yeah definitely a ground I'd like to visit one day - now I just need a reason to!
Posting this here because I know there was a mention of them joining the third tier potentially which I guess is dead now. Limerick FC have pulled the rug from under all of their academy players by pulling out all sides from their leagues with immediate effect. Madness that any club involving Pat O'Sullivan was allowed into the academy fold anyways but you have to feel for the kids left high and dry by this mid season
https://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/...-41658776.html
Paaatrick's Agletic
I couldn't disagree more. Yeah - rivarly is great in football. But clubs only play each other a few times a season The rest of the year they need to be able to attract sufficient numbers along as well.
Meath as a county has a population of 220,000, but Drogheda and some of the Dublin clubs already eat in to that (I'd guess that anywhere betwen a third and a half of Meath residents aren't from the county). I'm not convinced there'd be enough support across the county for a senior club in Trim - it's just too small, and the rest of Meath doesn't exactly look to or defer to Trim. Given where their ground is, and the experience of clubs like Longford on the edge of similar-sized towns, I'm not even concinved that Trim would draw much support in their own town to be brutally honest. If you then chuck another senior club in 15kms away in a town that's 3 times bigger and really does serve as the county capital, then Trim would become even less viable IMO.
So talk of having multiple LOI clubs in Meath 'For rivalry craic' is very fanciful in my view.
Well look how Drogheda thrived in the end due to their obsession with trying to emulate Dundalk. At the time populations were relative to today and Lourdes Stadium was on the outskirts of the town.
Its about creating an identity imo, a connect between the team and the town and rivalries do that. Trim people feel eclipsed and excluded by Navan even on an administrative level, as Drogheda people did and do. This cant be manufactured, or all encompassing like a county club. Now rivalries develop with success and sustaine competition between clubs anwhere in the country but getting there needs community buy in or someone just willing to foot the bill.
There is a combination of things that will help the success and growth of a new club or one that steps up to the senior game, a slow and steady sustainable effort with obvious improvement, but I also think an early seige mentalty that gets the locals bit between the teeth is part of it and local rivalry does that. Especially for the smaller community like Trim. Its a spring board rather than an isolated couple of games a season and there is an element of trying to out do the other competatively, attendances, merchandise, sponsorsip, facilities, community development, womens game, academy et al. This increases even the level of volunteerism and effort by wider members of the community rather than just those with a partcular interest, niche LoI types like most of us here on foot.ie. Well at least there should be when not trimming the fat or doing the silk purse stuff.
Last edited by Nesta99; 27/06/2025 at 2:22 PM.
No offence, but all this talk of choosing new NL members according to where they come from (county, population, rivals etc) is putting the cart before the horse.
For the essential difference between a potential Senior (i.e. pro- or semi-pro) side and a Junior, even Intermediate one, is support. And when I say "support", of course the most important element is those punters who buy the match tickets, for whom a degree of competitiveness on the field, plus facilities and comfort off it, are key, if they are to be attracted and retained. But it's not just paying public, it's also essential to be attracting volunteers, sponsors, local businesses and corporate etc.
And to attract all these, a club needs to be well established in its local community/town/catchment etc. Of course it helps if they are located in an area with a large population and/or no immediate competition locally etc. But in the end, it is the club itself which counts most, as evidenced eg by Sligo Rovers, in a small town in a rather sparsely populated area, versus eg Cork City, from a big city, with a huge, populous catchment area.
Or look eg at Co. Louth. If Dundalk were already established and Drogheda not (or vice versa), by the above reckoning you wouldn't expect to look for a second Senior club in a small(ish) county like Louth. Yet it is at least as capable of supporting two Senior clubs as eg Cork, Kerry, Galway or Kildare (random examples).
Meaning the LOI should be looking for the next Sligo, rather than the next Cork, whether or not there are already established clubs reasonably close by. And to get back to the club in question here, with (I think) just a football pitch and a clubhouse, I cannot see what the likes of Trim Celtic can show to indicate they're a nascent Sligo. Meaning that if there is no other club in Meath with genuine potential (unsure personally), then imo you should be looking elsewhere for entrants to this new league.
Last edited by EalingGreen; 27/06/2025 at 3:01 PM.
I think with this new third tier, what should be has passed and we have what is and work around that. Its not ideal and never was, opinions on what will or wont work will be determined as right or wrong in time only. Im not necessarily putting a time frame on the bedding in of a senior club new or 'promoted'. I do think that rivalry expidites the things mentioned like the various support. I agree on facilities but its a much bigger issue even with established senior clubs, there will have to be some hit and hope on new senior entrants eg a plan at the least. Navan or Trim or both, it'd be a fail to try the one size fits all in say Navan as Meath FC, its would just be a Navan club called Meath - Trim and others are not going to rush to loI 3 games because they play in green in PaÃrc Tailteann if they could.
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