Amazing I don’t remember them being that short lived.Originally Posted by Finlay Harp
I was just about to post this, but didn't know where to - then saw it uploaded !
Agreed on the 3 seasons, if I had guessed I would have gone for 5, good article, almost everything about their existence and achievments was just bizzare.
They had some decent players though, played some good football, tiny fanbase however the 'another club in Dublin' thing didn't help them.
Last edited by oriel; 05/05/2020 at 11:41 AM.
#DundalkFC - First Irish club to win an away game in Europe (1963), first Irish club to win points in a group stage in Europe (2016).
The Fingal article was an interesting read. One of their games in Terryland I would consider as one of the best style of soccer I have seen from a league of Ireland team. Have to check for the programme sometime.
"Fingal is located 35 miles north of Dublin" highlights one of the fundamental problems LoI clubs face; the lack of a strong local connection/link. More time may have help but looking at the project from afar it seems to have been top down rather than grassroots up, like Bohemians are in recent times.
I suppose the county manager at the time wasn't the HSE guy by any chance?
While we always teetering I always wondered would Kilkenny survived if FAI weren’t trying drive on the moneybags Fingal in that period
Last edited by Bunny Kelly; 05/05/2020 at 1:13 PM.
Very good point Bunny. Would love to see Kilkenny back in loi but doubt somehow. SF had too much going their own way when they started up which was unnatural. No wonder they went bust. They were the Irish version of Gretna!
Gary Cronin is he the right man to manage Longford Town?
Yet another example of a failed Dublin club, why does Dublin struggle to keep clubs alive?
This gets thrown at Cork all the time but there have been far more failed Dublin clubs than Cork clubs. In total I count 26 different Dublin teams compared to 9 Cork Clubs (plus Cobh) It happens in Galway, Limerick and Waterford too. Waterford have two very clear changes in 1980 and 2017 then seem to get forgotten about for some reason. Its not about the cities, its the nature of the league. For decades there was no second division so whenever a club went bankrupt it could just change the name and sign up again. Even the clubs who have survived as a single entity have has multiple holding companies.
A good few of them are gone since the 1920's - 30's and Home Farm in their various guises make up three or four of that number.
I used to be of the opinion that there was too many clubs in Dublin, now I am not so sure. A lot depends on what type of club there is. The "local" is still an important factor in Irish life, clubs need an identity and also need a close by rival to compete against. Cluster of clubs rather than a geographical spread is whats required. For a city of its size Cork needs a 2nd team, along with Cobh. A derby game would still mean something even if the clubs are not at the top of the table.
Kilkenny would fit in the middle between Waterford and Wexford. It would also give an extra outlet to players in that area.
As said before a lot of the Dublin clubs are from the leagues early days when it wouldn't have been too inaccurate to just call it the top division of the Leinster Senior League.
Since then that I can think of you have Drumcondra, Dublin City, Home Farm, St Francis, St James Gate, Sporting Fingal and Transport of who I think all but Sporting Fingal and Dublin City are still going just not at LOI level.
Dublin doesn't struggle any more than any other place in the country to keep clubs alive.
A pattern that I do sort of see is that completely new entities struggle a lot more than clubs progressing on from a lower level which seems an obvious thing to say but people creating clubs don't seem to have realised it for some reason.
A Fingal club actually based in Fingal and given time would have gotten huge support eventually. A move to Swords or Lusk or whatever was on the cards for them would have been massive in terms of creating a community fanbase. Swords, Malahide, Donabate, Lusk, Skerries etc must have a population of over 100k
This is my point. No where is struggling more than other areas, its the nature of the league and the lack of a pyramid that leads to this happening. As always the outliers are the towns like Sligo that can manage to keep teams going no matter what rather than the places that have lost teams.
Clubs starting from the bottom, building themselves up in the community first, before chasing silverware, is the blueprint to success.
Clubs like Sporting Fingal were only a vanity project, regardless of any newspaper articles claiming otherwise. Fast tracked success through wreckless spending without ever building up a support base, basing themselves a five minute drive from Tolka Park, it was always going to fail spectacularly.
Cabinteely are doing things the right way, to a degree, but would really benefit from getting their own grounds up to scratch rather than continuing out of a rugby ground where they'll never really get much support. A Wexford style ground would help them get up and running in that regard. They've shown the appetite is there though, couple hundred going to see them regularly, and have shown they can get crowds of 1,000+ at times. I'd like to see them succeed.
All of this is pie in the sky talk though regarding new clubs. Same discussions had every few months, same ideas and same places given as suggestions.
Until the FAI properly back the league, until the government get behind the league, until we get proper sponsorship and funding, we're going to continue down the same road. There's no appetite for anyone to step into a basket case of a league.
https://kesslereffect.bandcamp.com/album/kepler - New music. It's not that bad.
I think the key difference is that Dublin has managed to keep its main clubs going consistently - Bohs, Shels, Rovers and Pats. Even when struggling without a ground of their own (Shels and Rovers).
Cork found it difficult at various times to sustain even just one club in the city.
This is the key point.
Joining the League of Ireland is financial suicide. And it's likely to put in jeopardy the existing/lower level activities of any club that joins. It's why no-one wants to. Don't forget that our league was supposed to have 22 teams but has ended up with 20 by default not design. 19 if you accept that Rovers B is just a place-holding exercise.
Until joining the LOI is no longer a financial risk, no established club will do it - as they've too much to lose. That leaves us prone instead to vanity projects like Dublin City and Sporting Fingal, or pointless additions like B Teams, to make up the numbers.
Dublin has roughly 28% of Ireland's population, and, not counting Shams B, 32% of LOI clubs, so it's not all that uneven (and yes, I know there are two more clubs only a short distance away, but they aren't Dublin clubs).
It would be nice if cities like Cork, Limerick and Galway could sustain more than one club, but I think Galway over the last decade shows we're a while away from such things.
Author of Never Felt Better (History, Film Reviews).
Yup. Only Bray and Cabinteely of the clubs to have joined the league since the First Division was added haven't folded in the meantime (Derry City, Cobh, Newcastle, Monaghan, Kilkenny, St James' Gate, St Francis, Dublin City, Kildare County, Wexford Youths, Sporting Fingal, Salthill Devon and Mervue United all folded or left; Derry, Cobh and Wexford at least came back for more). That's hardly a ringing endorsement.
And now we're running out of people to join (Tralee had to leave the Kerry League to join the A Championship, and then had to re-enter the bottom division of the Kerry League when the A Championship folded, which is idiotic), so the league has shrunk from 22 to (effectively) 19 clubs in the past decade. Coronavirus will probably take another couple.
It's why I'd strongly favour a 16-team Premier and the provincial leagues acting as regionalised First Divisions. Give stable, interested, currently non-league clubs (if there are any!) every incentive to step up. I know Dundalk/Rovers would give out about it, and I know the regional leagues would complain too, but it's not about them ultimately.
More importantly - Football is an urban sport. So it's no surprise that the Republic's biggest urban area contains so many of its teams. Until the State gets genuinely serious about decentralisation and regional growth, I can't see that changing much.
There is neither sense nor benefit in Galway or Limerick having more than one club IMO. They're both essentially just small towns in the grand scheme of things. Cork could maybe accommodate two as it continues to grow - but what would be the point in two teams with small fan bases rather than one with the numbers essentially combined ? If major cities like Leeds and Newcastle can get on with historically having just one main club, I think Ireland's regional cities will survive that way too.
This. A million times this.
A properly functioning FAI would grab football by the balls in this country and run Leinster, Ulster, Connacht and Munster senior leagues as regional first divisions. Or at least First Division North/West, First Division South, and First Division East.
But there's too many people in the FAI with a vested interest and prefer their own clubs to be big fish in small ponds.
https://kesslereffect.bandcamp.com/album/kepler - New music. It's not that bad.
It's mad to think the direct beneficiaries of their demise were Pats. I know they done well under Mahon but they'd never have won the league and broke their cup hoodoo without Bucko coming back with Ger O'Brien.
I get your point but I understand why people say that about Cork. The one team in Cork has failed a few times (I know you've had more than one club at times too), whereas a lot of those teams in Dublin were junior clubs that just stepped up to make the numbers up. You can't really compare Jacobs or Olympia to the one team that represents a city. But, yeah, I do think it suits people sometimes to talk about the failed clubs from Cork like it's some type of local disease.
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