Cobh Ramblers sold Roy Keane to Nottingham Forest for £20,000 and a kiss on the cheek for their secretary John Meade from Brian Clough. Reading manager Steve Coppell prised Kevin Doyle and Shane Long away from Cork City for a combined total of around £150,000, but said his memory of the deal was hazy because of the amount of Guinness he drank when he was over there. Further north, Everton fans still sing about the “60k, 60k Séamus Coleman” which the Merseyside club paid for the full back to take him from Sligo Rovers.
Managers such as Shamrock Rovers’ Stephen Bradley are now working with some success to ensure that such virtual giveaways are a thing of the past.
Before they became Ireland internationals, Gavin Bazunu and Liam Scales were sold to British clubs for six-figure rather than five-figure sums, with add-ons in Bazunu’s case bringing the fee to about €2million. Naj Razi and Sinclair Armstrong are two other Rovers players who only moved abroad after some hard bargaining by the club, which has still managed to win five league trophies in the past six years and have some money-spinning European campaigns largely due to Bradley’s ability to rebuild the squad.
With growing transfer fees and wages come lucrative opportunities for agents, though rules have been tightened in recent years which forbid, among other things, agents acting for both a player and a selling club.
Other clubs such as St Patrick’s Athletic have also wised up, with the teenager Mason Melia going to Tottenham for around €1million and that figure has now been topped by Shamrock Rovers’ Victor Ozhianvuna signing a pre-contract agreement with Arsenal which means he will join the north London club when he reaches the age of 18. Forced by EU labour laws to hang on to their players for longer rather than send them across the Irish Sea at a younger age, League of Ireland clubs are reaping the benefit.
“It’s fantastic that the league is seeing the increase in transfer valuations and increased interest in the player base,” the FAI chief executive, David Courell, said last week. “That’s the byproduct of what has been a challenging Brexit impact, but also a reflection of the growth and quality of the product and what we’re producing domestically.”
With the big transfer fees inevitably come issues and Courell only had to walk across the corridor at Abbotstown to get a greater sense of them. The association’s director of football, John Martin — a high-profile appointment made last year to spearhead the new FAI — has been caught up in an ugly row concerning his previous employer, Shamrock Rovers.
This broke out after the collapsed transfer of the hottest young player in Ireland, Michael Noonan, from Rovers to Bundesliga club Hoffenheim for what would have been an Irish record €2million.
In his previous job, as chief executive of Shamrock Rovers, Martin had negotiated the sale of Noonan from St Pats to Rovers. In doing so, he reached an agreement with Noonan’s England-based agent David Moss which has now been reported to Fifa by Rovers and is also the subject of a complaint to the FA in London by the player’s family.
The family’s complaint has been passed on to Martin’s employers, the FAI, so the potential for embarrassment at the least is obvious. Courell needed an explanation from Martin that he could bring to the FAI Board — quickly — after details of the story emerged for the first time in The Sunday Times last week, creating a media frenzy.
What’s emerged so far is certainly a cautionary tale for Irish football but it could turn out to be far more than that. Noonan was down the pecking order at St Pats, where he was only an amateur, but Bradley knew all about his ability and was close to the family, having grown up close to them in Jobstown, Tallaght. Martin also knew Noonan’s father, Andrew, from their time managing different teams in the Leinster Senior League and also knew the agent Moss, with Moss describing him as a “good friend”. It was agreed that Martin would put the deal together and it was a notable coup when he did so, with Noonan joining the club 13 months ago.
Whatever Martin told Courell about the deal seemed to satisfy his boss as he went off to address the FAI directors, who were about to meet. “I and the board are understanding and supportive of John’s position that anything he did was in good faith,” Courell said later, though there was a caveat based on what might come up in Fifa’s “review”.
“If there transpires to have been an oversight, then that is something that John will have to address in time,” Courell said.
What was Martin’s explanation for what he did? Courell stonewalled: “That’s a private conversation between an employer and an employee,” he said. “I’ve given you the context, but I’m not giving you the detail.”
Press reports appearing around the same time also painted a more favourable picture for Martin after the original complaint from Rovers about the deal which Martin had negotiated with the agent over Noonan and another Rovers teenager. The Rovers statement, issued the day after The Sunday Times story, stated that the club was “working with Fifa to review two agency agreements. When the Chair and the Board became aware of these agreements in August 2025, independent legal advice was sought, and Fifa was proactively engaged to discuss.”
Now, along with Courell’s conditional support for Martin, a more nuanced story was emerging. The reports, quoting club and FAI sources, suggested that a “mistake” had been made in drawing up the contracts and crucially, that the Rovers board were aware of the contents as minutes from a meeting back in February 2025 would show. The clear inference was that Rovers had made a potentially costly cock-up, but they were all in it together.
It was a slant on the story which clearly angered Rovers, in particular their chairman Ciaran Medlar, who has a high reputation in Irish football and is often seen as an “honest broker” in his other job as a financial expert and tax consultant when it comes to any disputes between international players and the FAI over payments.
Martin and Medlar
STEPHEN MCCARTHY/SPORTSFILE
Hours before the big Dublin derby between Bohemians and Rovers on Friday, Rovers issued another statement which slightly shifted their position without getting away from their central point.
“The club would like to offer clarity on issues arising from an article in last weekend’s Sunday Times and subsequent follow-up pieces on other news media,” the statement read. “The club would like to reiterate that the Board and the Chair [Medlar] first became aware of the detailed contents of agency agreements in August 2025.”
Sources close to the club say that when Medlar made the discovery, he informed Bradley, who then informed Noonan’s family, who are kept abreast of developments as Michael at the age of 17 is classified as a minor. On Monday, the day after the story broke, Bradley said that “not much shocks you in life, especially after what I’ve been through and in football, but this shocked me”. Bradley went on to list some prominent club figures who he was convinced weren’t aware of the deal including, most notably, Medlar.
[A housekeeping note is important here. Despite their continued success, Rovers is a club riven with division, principally between the supporters who own 50 per cent of the club as members and two businessmen, Ray Wilson and Dermot Desmond, who between them own the other 50 per cent. Bradley and his close associates, seen as more sympathetic to the businessmen, have frequently been caught up in the rows which erupt over a wide range of issues. When Martin handed in his notice last April, Desmond released a statement blaming “intolerable” pressures placed on him. Along with the Noonan dispute last week, another had broken out internally over whether the pitch at Tallaght had been overwatered before a game against Dundalk was called off.]
In fighting form on Monday, by the end of the week Bradley had clammed up. On Friday after Rovers had been beaten 3-2 by Bohemians, he stated simply about the Noonan affair and other matters, “speak to the club”. Standing yards away in Dalymount’s makeshift carpark, stood Martin’s replacement as Rovers CEO, Robbie Hedderman, who said he wouldn’t be commenting beyond what was in the statement.
Martin referred our approaches to the FAI press office, while the agent Moss didn’t respond to queries, though last week he complained that “a lot of misinformation has been passed on to the Noonan family, including Michael, by people acting in their own interests rather than Michael’s” and added that “I complied with all legal and regulatory requirements, as confirmed by independent legal counsel.”
The “detailed contents” referred to in the last Rovers statement are now what are concerning Fifa, even though the ruling body of world football will not be particularly interested in the blame game about whether somebody is individually responsible or not. Fifa refused to comment on Friday.
The central question revolves around the nature of the commission being paid; is it a percentage of the player’s salary, which is relatively standard practice? Or is there an element beyond that which may or may not be contained in or attached to the standard player contract and may involve percentages relating to the sell on of the player, which as was widely reported last week may breach Fifa rules on third-party ownership.
That is the nature of the complaint made by the Noonan family to the FA after Michael rejected a €2million move to Hoffenheim agreed between Rovers and the German club which would have netted the player a salary of around €10,000 a week. The Noonan family maintain good relations with Bradley and Michael now looks more likely to move to a British club in August when he reaches the age of 18 and may be out of contract.
Watching from the Dalymount stand on Friday night, Heimir Hallgrimsson, the Ireland manager, wouldn’t have seen much to convince him that Noonan may be ready for an upgrade from the under-21 side any time soon. The teenager was withdrawn on 80 minutes with Rovers 0-2 down after hardly getting a kick. Though Bradley has insisted otherwise, the uncertainty may not be helping.
The FAI is already being criticised by some at Rovers for being too passive over the Noonan affair, though Courell will clearly be watching closely.
“Michael’s been a phenomenal player for club and country. He is got so much potential,” says Courell. “I do hope that this matter gets resolved as swiftly as possible for Michael and his family so that they can move forward and he can focus on playing.”
Gone are the days when a bag of balls might have smoothed things over.