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
But trying to balance that with the ambition we have for Irish football was what I identified as needing a small bit of adjustment.
Yeah, there's no point aggressively paying off a debt if you can't grow or do anything.
Correct.
And I think the reality is people need a bit of hope in the game.
But it needs to be balanced in reality.
And, you know, we are and we pride ourselves on being responsible with regards to our debt and making sure that we will honour our commitments.
But what we did is we worked with our four lenders.
So that would have been Bank of Ireland, UEFA, FIFA and the government of Ireland.
to make sure that we could rephrase that debt from 2031 horizon to 2035.
And I'm delighted that all four parties recognized the progress that we have been making.
And I suppose they had the confidence that we were in a position to commit to those longer timeframes.
That
was what I suppose needed to happen to then enable us to undertake what was a major transformation programme that we just completed in the last couple of weeks for the association.
So I can expand on that in a few minutes if you want.
Yeah, so I think it was clear to me anyways when I joined the association because I had the benefit.
I used to work with the English FA for six years and in that role quite regularly.
extensively across European football, so I could see what good looked like.
And I think as time evolved within the FAI, we were able to identify that we weren't set up for success.
Let me just, not to interrupt you, but how far off good were we?
Well, our current strategy, which we just released in the last maybe five, six weeks, is called It's Time to Change the Game.
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