The latest edition of Village has an article of mine on John Delaney and the FAI.
The piece covers the last decade of the association and tracks Delaney’s rise to power and his involvement in its many crises during this time.
You could quite easily write a book on the FAI during this time-frame and still have to leave some things out, so there’s a lot that couldn’t be covered within the article as a result. That said, it’s still pretty expansive and I think adds a lot to what is already known about the subject.
As a journalist who has never written a sports story before it was quite a task trying to make contact with the right people in a short amount of time. As the FAI has been so factional over the years it was also key that I speak to as many people as possible too to ensure I wasn’t just getting the story of one guy with a grudge.
If there was an advantage to not being a sports journalist, it was the fact that I came to the subject without a reputation for supporting one faction over another. The fact that I wasn’t looking for quotes helped too as much of what I was told wouldn’t have been uttered “on the record” (and much more was completely unprintable!).
It took me over a month to put it all together in a satisfactory fashion but I was happy with the finished product.
You can read the article online here or, naturally, in the magazine itself.