Irish Soccer Migrants by Conor Curran

Author:Conor Curran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cork University Press
Published: 2017-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

IRISH-BORN PLAYERS IN MAJOR EUROPEAN LEAGUES: GERMANY, ITALY, FRANCE AND SPAIN

Irish football migrants to European clubs in the pre-Second World War period were few, although an exception was Tommy Davis who was suspended for three months by the FA in 1935 after he broke a contract with French club FC Metz to join Oldham Athletic, having initially moved to France from New Brighton in 1934.48 A professional league had been set up there in 1932, and despite British players being the ‘dominant non-French national grouping during the first two years of professional football in France’ (making up around 40 per cent of ‘foreigners’ in the league’s initial season), by the mid- 1930s migration of British-based players to France had declined.49 According to Matthew Taylor, ‘many of those who travelled to France were on the margins of the professional game in England’, while ‘the problems of adapting to a different style of football and a new way of life’ are of key significance in explaining why this decline occurred.50 By the 1938–39 season there were only five British players in top-flight French football, a figure which was less than 2 per cent of the overall number of players.51 Jim Donnelly, a Mayo man who joined Blackburn Rovers in 1920 from the Royal Artillery and who later had spells in Yugoslavia with Grajanski and Gunes in Turkey after an eleven-year career in England, was another exception among pre-war Irish football migrants to Britain in that he also moved to European clubs.52 Naturally, some Irish-born players had toured Europe with their clubs, with Charlie O’Hagan noting how he had played in Austria and Germany with Tottenham Hotspur ‘a few years before the big guns had caused earthquakes in the heart and the coastlines of the continent’.53 Indeed, prior to the First World War, Barnsley, Blackburn Rovers, Burnley, Everton, Manchester United, Oldham Athletic and Sunderland had all played tour matches against European clubs.54

Figures for Irish football migrants from both the Republic and Northern Ireland who moved to England in the 1945–2010 period indicate that the vast majority of these 917 men did not play outside the United Kingdom and Ireland. Of the 500 Republic of Ireland-born migrants who played league football in England, just fifty-six players or 11.2 per cent, and sixty-nine or 16.5 per cent of the 417 Northern Ireland-born players, also played outside of Irish and British football leagues. Despite this, it is possible to offer a wider analysis of the experiences of a number of players who have also moved outside Britain. Writing in 1984, one journalist praised League of Ireland club Shamrock Rovers, whom he claimed had ‘shunned the traditional market place and put the advantage in their favour’.55 In selling players Pierce O’Leary, Liam Buckley and Alan Campbell to Canada, Belgium and Spain respectively in that decade, it was noted that ‘Rovers met the clubs and negotiated on an equal footing’.56 He added that the three players in question had ‘proved their mettle in their new environment’. Despite the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.