Is Derry City Football Club being killed with kindness?

A season that began promisingly with a 30% increase in playing budget and a slot in Europe limped to an end with the Candystripes narrowly avoiding a relegation play-off. Defeat to a beatable Lithuanian side in Europe was a hard pill to swallow, and supporters have grown weary of the team’s performances and style of play.

In football the buck always stops with the management but in many ways it is irrelevant who has Derry City’s top job these days. That’s because Irish football has a growing chasm in talent and finances that the Candystripes are currently on the wrong side of.

Derry City secured only one league trophy in 43 years of the Irish League, and have so far bagged just two in 35 years in the Republic. Making a total of three championships for 78 years of effort.

This despite being one of Ireland’s biggest and best-supported clubs - located in its fourth biggest city, where football is the number one sport. Even the Candystripes’ golden era in the late 1980s – when it was by-far the richest club in Ireland - delivered neither dominance nor consistency. Derry City FC has been a perennial under-achiever throughout its history, and the growing gulf in Irish football suggests that is unlikely to change any time soon.

The source of the club’s latest struggles arguably lies deeper than just managerial or player performance. Put simply - Derry City has little chance of being consistently successful on the pitch, because it isn’t set up to deliver such success off the pitch.

The club had the third or fourth highest playing budget in the league this year, yet finished seventh – tied with Finn Harps, who have the smallest outlay. And Derry’s failure to qualify for Europe next season will hurt the club whilst simultaneously boosting key competitors.

The tectonic plates are shifting in Irish football as the likes of Shamrock Rovers and Dundalk pull away from the rest. And only a short window remains for Derry to find a way to bridge that gap, or risk being permanently cut adrift as also-rans. Whilst some may view the potential for an All-Ireland League as the club’s salvation, that would probably just see the Candystripes struggle to keep up with more big fish in an expanded pond.

Some smaller clubs than Derry are already determined not to be left behind. The likes of Bohemians and Sligo Rovers have become well-run, locally-embedded institutions that have nurtured strong community roots and identities, and are prospering as a result.

Despite operating on a shoestring in a town smaller than Culmore, Finn Harps have registered a five-figure profit in each of the last three seasons – whilst Derry have essentially racked up six figure losses. If continually successful football clubs are strong from their roots up, Derry sometimes looks more like tumbleweed.

The club has done little to make itself financially viable, and has instead grown dependent upon the unceasing generosity of its Chairman. If he stopped writing cheques tomorrow (and thankfully there is no sign that he will) the club would have to slash its playing squad dramatically and risk relegation, or could even go bust.

Derry City is extremely fortunate to have a Chairman with both the means and the passion to cover its annual operating losses, and the dedication he shows to his home town is genuinely commendable. But there may also be a downside to this footballing generosity if it is creating a culture of dependency.

Modern football clubs – even those with generous benefactors - need to be run as professional businesses. Yet Derry City has essentially become a charity. One in which there is no genuine pressure to maximise revenue and increase support, because there is always someone there with a chequebook.

Whilst other Irish clubs have a growing number of volunteers and professional staff to focus on ticket sales, sponsorship, commercial partnerships, matchday income, fundraising, community development etc, Derry City is a bare-bones operation.

That is not to denigrate the small band of volunteers, directors and staff that the club does have, by the way, who do sterling work (and often at genuine personal cost). The problem is that there just aren’t enough of them, and the club hasn’t deep enough roots locally to inspire and justify more such people to get involved.

With the club shielded from commercial reality, it hasn’t needed to get its house in order off-the-pitch – which has stunted its growth as a business. All of which may put a team out every week, but builds nothing for the club’s future and leaves no legacy for the large sums being generously pumped in.

It is not my place to tell the Chairman of Derry City how to spend the money he has earned through years of hard work, smart decisions and sheer determination. And this would be a significantly better city if we had more folk with his talent and generosity.

Yet football has a habit of encouraging smart, successful people to make the kind of short-term decisions that they wouldn’t in their own businesses. If I was putting large sums of money into Derry City every year, I would want to know that it was building the club as an organisation and leaving a legacy that I could look back on with pride – not just paying for journeymen players to deliver little success.

And I would be mindful that there isn’t long left until the gap in Irish football has essentially become unbridgeable. All of which would point me towards a different strategy. One in which the club’s focus over the next five years was on building the structures, capacity and partnerships that were essential for it to begin operating more as a genuine business and less on largesse.

That strategy would necessitate a temporary diversion of some resource away from the playing budget, with the expectation of a consistently stronger team in future years as a result. And it would require clear and consistent communication with supporters – to ensure they bought-into the mission and stuck with the club whilst it transitioned. Supporters know that the current model isn’t working, isn’t sustainable and delivers the pain of mediocrity without the promise of future success.

In the modern game – even in Ireland - it would be naive to expect a relatively small regional club to be consistently competitive through only its own resources. Because as soon as any other club secured external financial help, the scales would be tilted.

That is exactly what has happened with Shamrock Rovers and Dundalk in recent years. But the days of clubs expecting to succeed primarily on charity are also over, and that is a problem for Derry City. When the Chairman’s generosity inevitably stops – and all things must come to an end (though hopefully not soon) – the fact that the club functions beyond its means could result in a very painful reckoning with reality.

If Derry City isn’t restructured to become more viable as a business it will be a prisoner of circumstances, requiring ever-more generosity just to stand still. And it will fail to maximise the emotional bond it should have with a city that desperately needs a successful football club (even if it doesn’t always realise that).

As the old parable says, if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day – but if you teach him to fish you feed him for life. Generosity is a hugely commendable virtue, but it can also have unintended consequences for the recipient. Is it now time for Derry City to be weaned off of a diet of dependency and to learn how to start fishing more for itself?