Going Under?
National League champions Shelbourne have been shipping water for some time and are in danger of sinking as chief executive Ollie Byrne battles illness.
SOCCER: Emmet Malone examines how Ireland's most successful club in recent times have suddenly come to be on the brink of extinction
The old Bill Shankly line about football not being a matter of life and death, "it's more important than that", rarely rang more hollow than it did this week as Shelbourne's owner and chief executive, Ollie Byrne, lay battling serious illness and his club struggled for survival.
The club's future remains in the balance with interim chairman Finbarr Flood putting their chances at 50-50, but no one when asked to consider their fate yesterday could do so without acknowledging the sad context in which the situation has unfolded.
The full extent to which the Byrne and Shelbourne had become intertwined has been starkly underlined this week as others sought to untangle the club's affairs in Byrne's absence. Speaking on RTÉ radio on Wednesday evening, Flood was asked about some aspect of the deal to sell Tolka Park to Coneforth Trading, the company owned by Ossie Kilkenny, Ivano Cafolla and Jerry O'Reilly, who agreed back in 2003 a price to purchase the ground whenever Shelbourne move on.
"I don't want to go into it, mainly because I don't understand all of it, I'd need Ollie here to explain it fully," replied the former Guinness chief executive and chairman of the Labour Court.
Byrne may not be universally liked within the game or particularly admired outside of it. Indeed, after years of what might kindly be described as a robust approach to championing Shelbourne's cause, he is now carrying the can for the crisis in which the club to whom he has devoted so much of his adult life to find themselves
Still there is a good deal of residual affection out there for the 65-year-old Dubliner. Many who know him well believe he is being harshly judged for what is happening at Tolka Park, and nobody who has had any dealings with him would make the mistake of taking him for a fool.
"What Ollie has been is ambitious, and it's very hard to knock that in a person, at least until afterwards when they haven't pulled off what they were hoping to," says former Shelbourne chairman Gary Brown.
"The fact is that he wanted to do something that nobody else here was even talking about until he tried it, and it seemed like the club was almost there a couple of times. The problem is that football is one of those sports where people often allow their hearts to rule their heads and Ollie has been as guilty of that as anybody."
On the pitch Shelbourne have been hugely successful in Irish terms over the past decade. The problem is that the club have managed to demonstrate just how little money there is in being successful here. He felt the sale of the ground for development would allow the club to establish a far more effective business model, just as Bohemians now intend to do with the money obtained for Dalymount Park.
Crucially in Shelbourne's case, however, the offer of the site in Finglas to which the club intended to move was withdrawn by the local authority after objections from local residents turned it into an election issue and previously supportive public representatives had a change of heart. Byrne had made the critical error of not indexing the purchase price, and so, while he and his colleagues searched for a new home against a background of soaring property prices, the capital sum that would be realised started to decline significantly in real terms.
At the same time, he was gambling hugely on success in Europe with qualification for the group stages of the Champions League viewed as pretty much the only way really serious revenues could be generated by an Irish club. Expenditure dramatically outstripped income - by 100 per cent, or roughly €1.3 million in recent years - and Byrne set out to make up the shortfall by drawing down funds from Coneforth against the purchase price.
This was roughly €25 million gross or, after a number of significant issues such as capital gains tax and the repayment of capital grants was dealt with, somewhere in region of €17 million.
The difficulty was that, as his relationship with Kilkenny declined, so the advances became harder to obtain, and after that he started to get the money pretty much from wherever he could.
"Ollie had a business model all right," insists former director and current management committee member Colm Murphy. "It may not have been the sort of one they teach in business schools, but there was a logic to what he did which was to invest in the club to achieve something specific and to do it by depreciating the value of the ground.
"The problem was that the outgoings exceeded the income by more than expected, and he then found it impossible to get more money from the person who was buying the ground, so he then borrowed from outside sources to make up the shortfall and those sources were us - everybody he knew.
"But," he asks, "who is standing at the door of Tolka Park threatening to send Shelbourne under? Nobody, because Ollie never borrowed money from anybody without telling them they would get their money back when the ground was sold, and while people are obviously concerned now, really they never stopped believing that."
Not everybody within the game accepts that, and it is often difficult to separate fact from fiction when dealing with the Shelbourne story. What is beyond doubt, however, is that when his back was to the wall Byrne was often unorthodox in his approach, with incidents such as the club's players being paid at one stage in Northern sterling prompting inevitable speculation among rivals.
The players happily lodged the cash and everybody associated with the club dismisses any suggestion of wrongdoing, but those stories, combined with Byrne's often aggressive style and the amount the club spent on achieving success, have combined to limit the amount of sympathy available from some quarters.
The wage bill last year was some €38,000 per week, but Shelbourne consistently had trouble meeting it, prompting anger on the part of those who felt the club were buying titles with money they didn't have.
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Originally Posted by Sheridan
Gareth, you made two errors in instigating this thread. One was in confusing mob consensus among internet users (who'll often parrot the prevailing opinion among more vocal members because they can't be bothered to think for themselves) with popular sentiment in the real world, the other was in starting the thread at all. By doing so, you're just inviting contributions of the grandstanding, posturing variety witnessed in this thread to date, mostly authored by hardcore wannabes desperately attempting to catch the eye of their "superiors" (and it at least one instance, a pathetic wannabe trying to impress fans of another club.)
Bit of success and you never know.
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