Duff has been a bit âflightyâ in his career.
He wonât make it to June Iâd say
His record would suggest heâs not a man to see things out. A few losses and heâll be gonzo
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The first division will be a dogfight between the Munster teams.
Could be a few good post match interviews.
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This lad could do with a good feed.
Peter Collins looks frozen
Cork win by 6.
Take that Cabinteely!
Disgusting enough video of the Cork fans rioting in bray and starting fights. Not for the first time @Corksfinedtboy and the scumbag Cork fans bring shame on the league.
He defended the riots in inchicore and is very quiet on this.
Huh mate?
They fought tooth and nail
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Anyone able to post up that article from Dan McDonnell on Cork yesterday?
A few mates of mine were on the Board that nearly brought them to bankruptcy so Iâd like to see have they been thrown under the bus or not.
The other three Amigos podcast is out now
Here you go bucko.
rom double winners to First Division drop and a stalled âŹ1 sale. What happened to Cork City?
February 21 2022 02:30 AM
Premium
Five years of contrasting emotions have brought Leesiders back to square one with disputes lingering around the reasons for the collapse
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A Cork City supporter in full flight during an SSE Airtricity League First Division match against Galway United at Turners Cross last season. John Caulfieldâs side are in town again this Friday. Photo by: Michael P Ryan/Sportsfile
In truth, the pandemic distraction has largely confined the story to local discussion networks, with their relegation at the end of a curtailed 2020 season lost in the blur of our darkest evenings.
The fact that Cork are starting into a second successive campaign in the second tier is the extraordinary angle of the Munster absence from this yearâs Premier Division, especially given that as recently as 2017, they were double winners who collected full points in 21 out of their opening 22 games to steamroll to glory.
Three days before that ill-fated 2020 season kicked off, legal advisor SeĂĄn Ă Conaill, an ex-board member who had drafted the constitution for FORAS, the supporter organisation that reinvented a club from the ashes of a previous mess in 2010, was summoned to Abbotstown for crisis talks.
They ran out of meeting rooms in FAI HQ because of the volume of clubs present to iron out last-minute licensing issues, yet there was no doubt that a big fish was in serious danger of sinking on account of a failure to produce a tax clearance cert. Revenue debts were a red line.
âI knew things werenât great, but I was shocked to get the call,â said OâConaill, who lectures in UCC and is an expert in sports law, âThe FORAS motto is âhere today, here foreverâ. I was thinking how could we be messing up that weâre not even true to our own values.â
Disaster was averted. Salvation effectively came in the form of a rescue package from Grovemoor Limited, the company run by Trevor Hemmings, a man better known for his ownership of Preston and multiple Grand National winners.
They paid âŹ650,000, which was enough to cover a variety of debts â not just the Revenue issue â to keep the show on the road with Niall Quinn, then a member of the FAI executive, making contact with ex-Leeds chairman Peter Ridsdale, an advisor to Hemmings, in the final stages.
Buying out sell-on clauses made up âŹ500,000 of the outlay â City held on to Preston pair Alan Browne and Seani Maguire and the remaining âŹ150,000 was designated as an option to buy the club.
Later that year, FORAS members voted by a 70-30 majority to give Grovemoor the power to take over for a nominal fee of âŹ1, a takeover that would subsequently hit the rocks when the UK operation were unable to reach agreement on a lease with Munster FA, the owners of Turnerâs Cross.
This situation has left Cork suspended in limbo, with the sad death of Hemmings last October creating further uncertainty.
Grovemoor have asked for more time to decide on whether they will exercise their option to assume control or walk away, with Cork members pushing their hierarchy to apply a deadline.
While time ticks by on that front, the release of former manager John Caulfieldâs autobiography Rebel Heart has brought the blame game around the sharp decline right back to the top of the agenda.
Declan Carey , the current chairman of Cork City, says he hasnât read Rebel Heart but key passages were screenshotted his way.
Caulfield will go down as a City legend as a player and manager, and 2017 was a culmination of four yearsâ work, starting from scratch to put together a side to challenge Stephen Kennyâs Dundalk.
In May 2019, Caulfield was shown the door by what he viewed as a new and inexperienced board responsible for errors.
Carey was 31 and the only remaining member of the previous board to stay on after a January vote resulted in turnover and his promotion to the chair.
âThe old board were guys involved in business in their forties and fifties, and they had a lot of experience. You can bounce ideas off guys like that,â wrote Caulfield.
âThe new board had a different profile. It was a younger board, for instance, it had two 27-year-olds on it. It was like scrapping your first-team squad and putting your U-19s into the first team and saying . . . âWeâll let them develop.â
This theme continues with Caulfield attributing Corkâs poor results to budget cuts, while there are veiled references to the high pay of staff in the commercial department. He also believedthere were faces on the board who didnât want him as manager.
âThey were all supporters and they had the best of intentions. Only time would tell if they were out of their depth,â he said.
Readers are left in little doubt about his verdict.
âTo me, it didnât seem like they knew what they were doing.â
When his services are dispensed with, in the aftermath of a meeting where he had insisted he could turn things around, Caulfield predicts trouble is ahead.
âI think thereâs a lot of details omitted,â responds Carey. âAll I can say is John was a salesman for a long time and his goal is to sell those books and I wish him all the best. Anyone who writes a book is never going to put themselves down or the people they had good relationships with.â
Carey says that Cork supporters know âthe truthâ of why things went off the rails. His version is that a flawed risk-and-reward strategy caught up with the club.
The timing of board transition meant the newbies inherited the 2019 budget which was submitted to the FAI by their predecessors.
Caulfield, who recruited a variety of players in an attempt to revive a team badly missing Maguire and others, naturally pushed for as much as he could get.
Caulfield outlines in Rebel Heart how outgoing chairman Pat Lyons told him that heâd used his casting vote to get a reduced third budget passed after the first two suggestions were rejected.
The incumbent board had a different perspective on the estimates used to justify spending, especially a projected average crowd in the ballpark region of 3,800 per home game. There were also reservations about commercial expectations tied in with this.
New treasurer Conor Hallahan was one of the twentysomethings dropped into the storm and the qualified accountant is blunt about what he inherited.
âThe forecasting was way off,â he says. âIn 2019, we had some average League of Ireland players on very good money, and when results werenât coming on the pitch, gates collapsed, fundraising and other income fell off and there was still a massive wage bill.â
Caulfield spoke of how his playing budget was reduced by around âŹ300,000 but the fact Cork were in the Europa League and not the Champions League after finishing runners-up in 2018 reduced their guaranteed European income by circa âŹ600,000.
Cork were eighth when Caulfield departed and they would end up finishing there after interim boss John Cotter and new hire Neale Fenn both had a go in the hotseat.
The average attendance of 2,500 â as per extratime.ie â meant they were in bother and cutbacks across the season were introduced in an attempt to limit the damage. Hallahanâs broader view was that the club was spending far outside its means long before then.
âIt had been coming for around 12 months since midway through 2018 but the fact we had Champions League money carried us through survival point,â he argues.
âIt was literally a fight every week to pay the wages in 2019, scraping the bottom of the barrel to see if we could sell another couple of jerseys and get a few cent in.â
In Europe, a seeded Cork side (with Cotter in charge) lost to Luxembourgâs Progres Niederkorn when the prize was a lucrative second round clash with Rangers.
This was a heartbreaker, but Hallahan had other things on his mind after a meeting with Revenue on the eve of the first leg.
It was a consequence of belatedly learning that a balance of penalties was due on a settlement reached before his appointment.
âIt was a slam-dunk case,â said Hallahan.
Later in the year, the clubâs name featured in a list of tax defaulters released by Revenue. It detailed that Cork owed âŹ88,817,02 following a revenue audit, with a portion of that in penalties.
Cork said the settlement âarose out of an incorrect interpretation of the rules relating to VAT being reclaimed . . . for certain football related expensesâ.
It was stated this issue related to the period between January 2016 and August 2017.
This episode confirmed Hallahanâs opinion on legacy issues lingering beneath the surface.
Accounts presented at the 2019 AGM were later restated as they didnât provide the full picture.
âThere was a certain profit figure given,â says Hallahan. âIt took several months to get an adjustment.â
Thereâs claim and counter claim running through a review of the era, and the only common ground is found in the agreement that the communication between the respective boards was poor.
The sad death of Pat Shine in November 2018 robbed FORAS of a unifying figure who was influential in transitions.
When it rained, it poured. On August 31, 2019 a customer in Douglas Village Shopping Centre noted smoke at the front of her car as she parked it. In the ensuing fire that partially destroyed a complex which duly remained closed for 14 months, the Cork City merchandise shop was burned out of action.
For LOI clubs, cashflow is everything, especially in long off-seasons.
Cork have a large fanbase who would be good for buying shirts at Christmas and in the winter of 2019 heading into 2020, the shop was missed. It brought problems to the boil, and the seeds were sown for the Abbotstown emergency and the Grovemoor bailout.
This was difficult to swallow for believers in the fan-owned model, and the delayed debate around the nominal âŹ1 deal stirred strong feelings.
Ă Conaill was asked to address the meeting to explain some of the legalities and he admitted to feeling conflicted.
âIt was gut wrenching, the simple admission we hadnât managed it properly,â he says, while offering the reminder that forward-thinking decisions were made in the good times citing how senior board members had instructed him to negotiate the original Browne and Maguire sell-on clauses which did prove valuable in the end.
âA lot of mistakes were made but the ultimate issue was that the club couldnât absorb one bad financial year like other clubs can,â he continues.
âItâs a very different league now to what it was in 2010 and even in 2017 with the wealth of the private owners that are there. We thought we had reinvented the wheel but we ended up speculating to accumulate.â
The stress of a closed-doors year had strengthened a board stance that Grovemoor was the way to go, with Carey stating that every board meeting was a source of anxiety for âhard-working City fans blindsided by the absolute horror of the week-to-week challenges we facedâ.
Carey doesnât say it explicitly, but the clear inference is that the damage was done by the time they got the reins.
Last Thursday evening, in response to messages from the Irish Independent , two former board members decided to meet up and reply together.
Former treasurer Wyon Stansfeld called and said that ex-chairman Lyons was with him before turning the speaker on.
Lyons was keen to stress that he did not want to breach any agreements and the only reason he was speaking was because the request for comment made it clear that current board members had contributed.
âWe have suffered some bad stuff on social media and weâve resisted the temptation to reply, this is the first time weâve really spoken out to anyone,â he said.
What followed was a robust, unflinching defence of their work, with Lyons stressing success enjoyed under his watch that went beyond trophies, in particular a moneyspinning sponsorship deal with UCC.
He confirmed Caulfieldâs version of events on the casting vote on the 2019 budget and said that Stansfeld was with him, adding that those on the other side of the fence (including Carey) were asked if they had a better option and couldnât come up with one.
âWe wanted to make sure that we had the highest quality of football we could have,â said Lyons.
Stansfeld said the budget projections were around 500 per game lower than the previous year (the unofficial 2018 figure was close to 4,200) and said the decision was taken âvery carefullyâ and he indicated the outlay on the squad had crept up because of their status.
âThe difficulty in retaining players after youâve won the league is that the demand is way in excess of what it was six months previously,â he said. âWe employed a certain level of player in the view that if things came unstuck, you could offload them.â
Lyons argued that Cork had absorbed bad years earlier in the decade but when it was put to him that the risk was greater when the amounts were larger, he pointed out that other income streams such as sponsorship had risen.
The pair contested the suggestion that a major Revenue issue was left behind, stating that any penalty carried over was minor and couldnât have come out of the blue, while Stansfeld offered his own personal slant on the curious issue of the restated accounts, putting it down to different accountants preferring different procedures.
âThey decided a particular set of figures should be in the following season, not the current season,â said Stansfeld, who owns a toy shop in the city.
âWhether it was necessary to go to all of that trouble . . . the damage doing that . . . thatâs questionable.â
In saying that, he did acknowledge that Hallahan âis an accountant, albeit a junior oneâ (for clarity, Hallahan is now classified as a senior accountant in his job).
The pairâs declaration that the club was handed over in a strong position invited a response seeking their take on how circa âŹ650,000 in net liabilities needed to be addressed a year later.
âThatâs the 64 million dollar question,â replied Stansfeld, who suggested that a focus on the gate projections was taking the scrutiny off performance in other departments (There has been chopping and changing in full-time admin roles in recent years for various reasons).
He also added that during his tenure, the number of teams fielded by the club had expanded from two to eight and that increased costs.
âAll I can say is what I did as treasurer and Pat did as a chairman still stands the test of time, I personally wouldnât change any decision I made.â
Lyons suggested that the chopping and changing of managers after Caulfieldâs exit was costly.
He believes that having no time limit on the call option with Grovemoor is âludicrousâ and that members havenât been provided with enough information.
âWhen youâre a community club, you need to be accountable,â he concludes.
What next? Carey accepts there is âfrustrationâ around the Grovemoor impasse.
âWe respect them and they have great respect for us at this stage I think,â he says. âWeâre trying to resolve the situation as quickly as we can. After he (Hemmings) passed away, we had to give the family space and support but at the right time we had to speak to them.â
Itâs conceivable that Grovemoor could relinquish their option while seeking to retain a strategic partnership around young players but Carey refuses to be drawn on that scenario.
Other consortiums are frequently mentioned on the rumour mill, with Roy Keaneâs name linked with one that went nowhere.
Itâs understood that Grovemoor were recently approached by a Puerto Rican group with a background in baseball but these stories tend to come and go.
For now, the volunteers are in control and Carey says itâs only in recent months that this board have been able to talk about driving strategies as opposed to making ends meet.
Manager Colin Healy is able to operate a full-time squad but the powers that be are comfortable with the boundaries.
An independent audit, risk and compliance committee has been established.
âThereâs a couple of lads from the big-four accountancy firms and they will make sure there is risk contingencies put in regardless of which board comes in,â says Carey.
Hallahan has been central to it and attempts to seek him out at a friendly in Turnerâs Cross earlier this month were aided by a lifelong Cork fan who both retains sadness at Caulfieldâs exit and has huge respect for the 27-year-old treasurerâs capabilities.
You wonât find anyone with a knowledge of his work saying heâs out of his depth.
Behind it all, the one-time poster club for fan ownership continues to grapple with the questions faced by leaving their destiny in the hands of third parties.
Ă Conaill feels like theyâre back at square one. It seems fractures exist between members which will never quite heal.
What hasnât changed is the potential for the club to ignite.
The post-Covid buzz is certain to draw a large crowd for Fridayâs home opener, particulary in the wake of their amazing, 6-0 success in their season opener at Bray Wanderers.
Fridayâs visitors are a Galway side managed by John Caulfield. The show must go on.
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Iâm a LOI fan mate. I donât have a club as such (Treaty the closest to my heart). Have been to matches around the country following Limerick teams in their various guises. Looking forward to bringing the little wan to Oriel in a few years.
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Previous board should all have been shot
Iâve the inside and honest account of what really went on
7 different bank accounts for starters
( co signatures not needed for most transactions despite agreements that this behaviour wasnt on or acceptable)
Johnny C was shafted-
He brought us swagger and pride
Despite all this we still stand
Over 1600 season tickets bought before Xmas
So thereâs always going to be a quorum of loyal supporters
Like us who travel to God forsaken dumps like Bray
My honest fear is not getting out of this division
Grovemoor saved us but they wonât be with us always
Itâll be an interesting but worrying season
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