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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But the unique situation we find ourselves in is the absence of a football industry in this country.
So if you contrast it to England, where I would have spent quite a bit of time,
Yes, the FAA is a massive behemoth, but if you finish your time with the FAA, you go into a club or you go into private enterprise or whatever.
There's an industry there.
But in Ireland, the FAA has traditionally been the only show in town.
And that's what made it even more difficult and understandably framed maybe certain people's views of what the future could look like and the impact on them.
But we're trying in combination with this change to invest into the League of Ireland because we do recognise football is the global game.
Football is the biggest sporting industry in the world.
And let's be frank, sport is a business and our little island can play a much bigger part in that global landscape.
We've been overly reliant on the UK market to develop our players.
And by virtue of that, we only have in our academy system across our League of Ireland clubs, 11 full time equivalent resources working in the academy development space.
Yeah.
When we should have about 200.
OK.
So alongside this huge change that we were embarking on, we also sought government support in the form of an injection because we believe that.
Football can and should be a self-sustaining industry.
It is in practically every other developed country in the world.
And Ireland should be no different.
So I'm delighted that government saw the value of investing in the game, as they have on pretty much every time we've gone looking for their support in recent years.
And that has come in the form of a €3 million multi-year investment into academies.
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