Ownership in the League of Ireland: why Irish professional football clubs are transitioning to the co-operative model

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Date
2025
Authors
Kearney, Barry
McCarthy, Olive
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Taylor & Francis
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https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2025.2457148
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Abstract
The League of Ireland (LOI) is the Republic of Ireland’s top tier of professional football. In the 2022/2023 season, six of the nineteen clubs in the LOI were owned and governed as co-operative organizations. This paper identifies the key motivating factors behind the emergence and development of co-operative clubs in the LOI. To achieve this, semi-structured interviews were conducted with board members of five co-operative clubs in the LOI and with two key stakeholder organizations. The research found that the co-operative model was adopted by supporters and communities as a last resort option following decades of financial distress and poor corporate governance under the investor-owned model. This paper argues that the co-operative model has succeeded in saving numerous clubs from the brink of financial collapse and the model could be considered by other clubs in the LOI as a viable alternative model of ownership.
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Keywords
League of Ireland (LOI) , Irish professional football clubs , Co-operative model
Citation
Kearney, B. and McCarthy, O. (2025) ‘Ownership in the League of Ireland: why Irish professional football clubs are transitioning to the co-operative model’, Soccer & Society, pp. 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2025.2457148
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https://hdl.handle.net/10468/16937
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Centre for Co-operative Studies - Journal Articles
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© 2025, the Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided theoriginal work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allowthe posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.