News to me that he’s Doyle’s agent.
The agent developing Irish football while loving all things Italian
Mick Wallace does a lot more than broker deals as his investment in the youth set-up in Ireland proves
There are not many football agents you face in the technical area following a deal struck in the boardroom, but then Kevin Doyle’s representative is not your typical agent. This season the Ireland striker will bring his new club Wolverhampton Wanderers to his home county to face Wexford Youths an amateur club founded, funded, run and managed by Mick Wallace.
The friendly is part of the 6.5m deal that Wallace engineered to take his client from Reading to Mick McCarthy’s Premier League new boys a move that the Irishman sealed in his free time, of which there is not a huge amount. Wexford Youths is effectively a 5.1m weekend hobby for a football-loving property developer with a penchant for all things Italian a soft spot that manifests itself in six wine bars, an entire street on the banks of Dublin’s river Liffey that is dubbed the “Italian Quarter” and the Youths’ pink away jerseys, a homage to Juventus.
“They had a civilised society in Italy 2,000 years ago, 200 years ago we were swinging out of trees here, in comparison. It’s amazing how far they have come and all the problems they still have, how difficult is to get anything done,” Wallace tells me as we chat in a dressing room of the Youths’ modern complex in the suburbs of Wexford town in south-east Ireland.
“We can see Italy’s problems because we’ve a step back looking on it, but in fairness to the Italians they see that corruption triumphs over there, we don’t. We have very fancy notions of ourselves.”
Attempting to restrict a conversation with Wallace to football is as futile as it is self-defeating. In an hour he rambles from politics to economics to the media to philosophy displaying the keen mind and pugnacity that lead him to the Irish high court in 2002, where Dublin council lost their battle to have him remove from one of his sites a giant banner that read: ''No to War. No to Nice. No to American Terrorism." Football is his first love, but that does not mean it does not attract his ire.
"All the big clubs have too much money and the whole thing is a bit of a circus, really. If you look at the owners of any of the clubs, you’d have nothing to do with them if you were in any way socially minded, or political, you wouldn’t touch any of the big clubs.
“In a more perfect world the mad money that the big boys are allowed to make would filter down a bit. The big boy calls the shots and the big boy gets too much of the riches, and the small fellow doesn’t, even though the small fellow is putting in huge work it’s creating players, producing footballers all the time. It is very ethical what the small clubs do, they get very little back from professional clubs, who benefit from their behaviour.”
Entirely amateur, with one full-time member of staff, Youths can certainly be described as a small club. In only their third season they currently stand fifth in the League of Ireland first division, the second tier of Irish football, just below much larger professional outfits such as Shelbourne, UCD and Waterford United. However, Wallace insists any league success will be auxiliary to his primary aim of providing first-rate facilities for those in the area who are keen to play football.
“I didn’t build this place so we could have a big League of Ireland club, this place is for the young people and I included the League of Ireland team because I knew it would give the whole thing a shot in the arm, plus I wanted to get the young fellas into the League of Ireland scene at an early age.” The young “fellas” he refers to are members of the county under-16 and 18 teams, which Wallace had coached for years before establishing the club. Something he did with some degree of success.
“We’ve won five all-Ireland titles under-18; that is the biggest achievement of my life. I built and I own a whole street in Dublin, I’ve built a lot of real fine stuff but it’s not as great an achievement as winning the under-18s.” His client and star pupil graduated through that county under-18 team and Wallace’s affection for Wolves’ record signing is obvious, describing Doyle as “decent to the core” unaffected personally by the success he has enjoyed, success that Wallace maintains was by no means guaranteed despite obvious talent.
“He wasn’t used to hardship,” he says of the teenage Doyle. “He didn’t get a whole lot of hardship as a kid and trying to become a professional footballer involves some hardship, it’s a difficult job. Especially becoming one, staying one mightn’t always be as hard, but getting up there is very difficult.” Doyle’s route took him from Wexford to St Patrick’s Athletic in Dublin, the striker walking out with six weeks of the Premier Division season remaining. Wallace recalls “begging” him to go back for a second season. He did and moved to Cork City, where he met Pat Dolan, the manager Wallace credits with shaping Doyle’s career.
“Dolan was good for him and he wouldn’t have become a professional footballer but for Dolan. He was just what he needed at the time, he needed to kick his arse for him. It was good that he stayed in the game long enough to mature into the situation where he thought, ‘I’m actually good and I could make a lot of money playing this game and I might enjoy it as well’. It was in his second year at Cork that he really began to come good, it was obvious to anyone with eyes in their head that this lad was special, but we knew he was special all along, it’s just he wasn’t producing it all the time.”
Doyle scored 18 times last season, but only two of his goals came after Christmas as he, along with the entire Reading team, struggled for form. Wallace believes it is the style of play that prevails in the Championship which prevented the Ireland international from playing to what he sees as his full ability. "It always annoyed me watching Reading play that they had no one in the middle of the park who could pass the ball, but of course not many of the English teams have.
“What he’s screaming out for is to play in a side that have footballers in the middle of the park, oh he’d look great, I’m telling you. Ireland don’t have them either, he’s like a battering ram with Ireland,” added Wallace. Whether McCarthy will mould Championship winners Wolves into the passing side Doyle craves remains to be seen, but Fulham who were also interested in the striker seemed a better fit. Regardless, player and agent seem impressed with the project Steve Morgan is funding at Molineux and the enthusiasm around the city of Wolverhampton. The developer/wine bar/owner can now fully concentrate on his other football project.
Before the sale was agreed Wallace texted me to say Youths had scored twice in the last eight minutes of a cup match to draw 22 with Longford Town. In reply I suggested that is one replay he will fully appreciate. “Yeah, sure I’ve nothing else to do.” Nothing else he would rather be doing maybe.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/jul/13/mick-wallace-kevin-doyle-agent