From the publisher:
Over the course of fifteen years, John Delaney ran the Football Association of Ireland as his own personal fiefdom. He had his critics, but his power was never seriously challenged until last year, when Mark Tighe and Paul Rowan published a sequence of stories in the Sunday Times containing damaging revelations about his personal compensation and the parlous financial situation of the FAI. Delaney's reputation as a great financial manager was left in tatters. He resigned under pressure, and the FAI was left hoping for a massive bail-out from the Irish taxpayer.
In Champagne Football, Tighe and Rowan dig deep into the story of Delaney's career and of the FAI's slide into ruin. They show how he surrounded himself with people whose personal loyalty he could count on, and a board that failed to notice that the association's finances were shot. They detail Delaney's skilful cultivation of opinion-formers outside the FAI. And they document the culture of excess that Delaney presided over and benefited from, to the detriment of the organization he led.
Champagne Football is a gripping, sometimes darkly hilarious and often enraging piece of reporting by the award-winning journalists who finally pulled back the curtain on the FAI's mismanagement
The author:
Mark Tighe (Author): Originally from Donegal, Mark Tighe is the legal correspondent of The Sunday Times in Ireland. As well as covering legal affairs, he specialises in investigative reporting. He was Irish newspaper news reporter of the year in 2018 and 2019. In 2019 he also won the Journalist of the Year award for his reporting on the FAI.
Paul Rowan (Author): Born and raised in Dublin, Paul Rowan is the Irish football correspondent for The Sunday Times, and the author of The Team That Jack Built. In 2019 he was joint winner of the NewsBrands Campaigning Journalism and Investigative Journalism awards (alongside Mark Tighe and Colin Coyle) for his work on the FAI.
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