LockerRoom: Occasionally in The Sopranos some poor sad-sack filled with decency and enthusiasm will join one of the poker games with the boys. He's attracted by the rivers of bourbon and the chips forming lovely alps on the table. The guy loves poker, loves good company and, well hey, these are legitimate businessmen aren't they? A few weeks later, naturally enough, the poor milquetoast will be desiccated and submerged. Debt. Fear.
Debt. Not enough coming in and more going out than he can afford. He'll be weeping every time he thinks of what will happen if he doesn't come good.
And people telling him that they told him so.
I imagine it's a little bit like that becoming a paid employee of the Football Association of Ireland. Of course (we're dealing with enthusiastic litigants here, folks), there's no suggestion of organised crime or indeed of organised anything within the FAI. Nobody gets fitted for concrete boots and nobody wins a free trip to go sleep with the fishes.
Yet in terms of a man's reputation the first morning in an FAI job involves getting sized up for a concrete blazer for that inevitable day you must walk the plank. By the first afternoon you realise the fishes won't sleep with you anyway. And people telling you they told you so.
When it comes to disorganisation and chaos, well, with the FAI you're dealing with made guys from the start. The outside world? Fuggedaboudit. Normal business practices? Fuggedaboudit. Knowing who your friends are? Fuggedaboudit.
The thing is they all seem like such decent, stand-up guys. You'd like to play poker with them. You'd like to work with them. You see them padding about in the hotel in Chiba wearing just shorts and big grins and making with the firm handshakes and happy howyas and you think yes, yes, yes, that would be the life for you. Ba-da-boom! Ba-da-bing!
You forget the detail really. You forget these were the people who hired Jack Charlton by accident having voted for Bob Paisley. These are the guys who presided over the only international game which any one can remember having had to be cancelled because of a riot. They are the geniuses who put the Combat 18 hooligans upstairs so they could get nice trajectory on their missiles. Then in a spirit of Christian forgiveness they put the chief security officer that night in charge of the whole organisation. Arise, Sir Bernard O'Byrne.
These are the guys who came up with Eircom Park and still when they are discussing the Lansdowne development will give you the faraway look and say they made a mistake scrapping their own Shangri-La, that they deserve a palace of their own. And you say but Eircom Park was going to cost twice the original estimate and the only place of their own the FAI would have would be in a special edition of Stubbs Gazette. They give you that other look - the You don't understand me anymore look.
These are the boys who handed over $474,125 worth of World Cup tickets to a chap named (reassuringly) George The Greek. They weren't complete fools of course; for security they got a third-party cheque worth $30,000 made out to somebody they didn't know.
These are the fellas who in relation to the same matter announced there had been no shortfall in takings from the 1994 World Cup, "not now, not ever", just 48 hours before Joe Delaney announced he had felt "honour bound" to pay £110,000 of his own money to make up the shortfall.
Maybe they were confused. Not long afterwards, their own chief accountant Michael Morris alleged he had been pressurised into making omissions from the lists of ticket debtors which the FAI had accrued.
Somebody is always confused. These are the people who flew their World Cup team 23 hours to Saipan, where there was no pitch, no footballs and no isotonic drinks. They are the people who announced after Mick McCarthy's appointment that he hadn't been top of their list but who, just like that, agreed a handsome bonus with him after a match in Japan. For a long time they were the guys in the first-class seats with their players shoe-horned in behind them. They have been hosts to the top 10 most chaotic press conferences you've ever been at.
These are just the landmark controversies, debacles and mishaps. We can't get into the day-to-day, run-of-the-mill foul-ups, all the days when they've all run to the front door in Merrion Square singing a chorus of "It's raining writs, halleluiah".
And yet they are all so likeable. If you were writing a sympathetic (or ironic) book about them you'd call it When Bad Things Happen To Good People. Not that you'd write a book. The eminently likeable Brendan Menton wrote a book. He filled it with such bile and bitterness it practically oozed green stuff. Instead of calling it the Merrion Square House of Horrors though, he titled it Behind The Green Door. It sounded like a sequel of To School Through The Fields or a Shakin' Stevens hack biography. Either way it was widely and wisely ignored by a weary public.
Anyway, why pay for badly-written reminiscence? For anyone interested in reading more, the FAI are more written about than The Beatles. They are a consulting phenomenon. They have been the subject of more reports about reform than Dublin hurling has.
There was the Bastow Charlton report, which pointed to "a complete review of the rules of the FAI, its council and committee structures and a review of its staff structure". That was eight years ago and it led to the Cass report, which found basic management principles and discipline to be non-existent with the FAI.
Which brought us up to the Genesis Report, over which there is much blood currently spilling on the floor, even now, nearly two and a half years after Saipan.
Ah, they are chaotic but they are magnificent. They are incorrigible. They are unreformable. They are themselves and a law unto same.
I love meeting them, love when they go sotto voce and tap your forearm with a crooked finger and direct your attention to a blazer across the room. "Off the record, between you and me, your man over there talking to your wan, he doesn't know it yet and don't tell anyone but he's for the high jump, he's about to be shafted, heh, heh, heh."
You look at the guy who's going to get whacked and you realise this is the way of things. It's a jungle out there. He knew the first time he sat down at the table. Didn't he.
I've thought for a while the only way of saving the FAI is to make it a subsidiary of the GAA or the IRFU; just let some people who know how to run sport administer soccer for a while till there is nobody left alive who remembers the charming era of the Blazer Empire.
I have received suggestions though that perhaps soccer should be handed to a smaller sports organisation like swimming or athletics because people in those businesses have more specific expertise. They know more about back-stabbing than a veteran murder detective in Limerick does.
One thing is for sure. As a nation we can't take any more "FAI in crisis" headlines. No more Prime Time specials. No more reports, recommendations or promises. No more resignations. No more press conferences. No more nights of the long knives. No more Merriongates.
The people who pay the money through taxes and tickets and replica jerseys deserve more. The players who play the game and love the game deserve more. The spirit of the game itself deserves more. Any player who slips on a green Irish jersey deserves more.
The FAI will never reform itself. Time to tear it down and build from the ground once more. No more decent skins. No more goodfellas. No more blazers.
