David Courell
speaker
622 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 21 May
David Courell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There's a reason why it's entitled that.
Irish football has been underperforming on a few different fronts.
So we haven't been qualifying consistently.
Our player development experiences are quite varied across the country.
If you're in Donegal, you might get 25 weeks of playing football if you're a young boy or girl.
While if you're in Leinster, you might get 40 to 45.
Facilities are way off the mark.
And quite frankly, if you look at the development pathway, our League of Ireland academies are woefully under-resourced, which we're making huge inroads in now.
But that title for the strategy isn't just plucked out of the air.
It is a fact.
UEFA evaluate every federation of the 55 against where they project you should be based on your GDP, your playing base, your population, etc.
the number of qualified coaches you have, etc.
And then they contrast that with tournament progression, club performance, number of players in the top five divisions, etc.
And we are the third most underperforming nation across Europe.
And that's not something that we're proud of, but it's something that we accept, we acknowledge.
And I suppose it gave us the confidence to say, we need to change this.
So in doing so, a key part of this transformation program was one,
creating the headroom to embark on it because, yes, there can be financial, I suppose, benefits off the back of it, but it takes a significant outlay initially to undertake it.
Secondly, we wanted to have a strategy defined for the future that made sure that we could line everything up to it.
And I'm delighted for the support that...
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