FAI PLANS ROSENBORG STYLE ‘BIG CLUB’

By John Healy

STIG has been known to get into interesting places to sate the appetites of our tens of readers for amusing anecdotes and exposes involving goalpost notices. However, we’ve never gotten as deep into the zones of bureaucracy of the FAI as this time. Sneaking past the dozing Beholder guarding the dungeon, we found ourselves face to face with the FAI accounting staff.

That’s a bit misleading really. "Staff" usually implies more than one person, but they hired a civil servant a while back who went on to improve efficiency so much that all the work is now done by a single Australian quantum accountant. STIG was a bit disappointed to be honest. We’d actually been looking for John Delaney’s personal lounge. With blackjack! And hookers! Still, we made do, and interviewed the accountant.

We were pleasantly surprised - he’s had considerable influence over FAI policy recently. In fact, his opinions have helped shape the FAI’s vision for the league. We got to asking him about the financial side of the eircom league, and he was quite animated, "This is really my brainchild here. It depends very much on quantum accountancy." Now STIG can call on a body of knowledge so vast that we are personally responsible for most of the factual errors on Wikipedia (we have a bet going on how long it will take the public to correct them all), but quantum accountancy was a new one to us.

"It’s quite simple really," the Australian guy told us. "Applied to the eircom League, it says that observation changes the financial state of the league. If you think of the Gini index of a population of league clubs, the Gini index is where you put the clubs in increasing order of wealth and then the first entry is the proportion of the wealth the poorest club has, and the second entry is the proportion of the wealth that the first two poorest clubs have and so on. You get a straight line for equal distribution of wealth, and that’s one sort of ideal, but normally you get something like the second line here," he said, pointing to the lower curve on the graph below (Fig. 1).

"Then your Gini index is related to the area between the two lines. Economists use it as a measure of wealth inequality, but it’s much more important here. You see, the line in the first graph there is what you get if you monitor the clubs’ finances, make sure that they’re liquid, paying their tax, that sort of thing. Quantum accounting theory says that observing it changes the result though. If you don’t observe club finances, you get something like this," he said, sketching the graph opposite (Fig. 2) on an elderly pizza box.

"The dips in that graph are impossible in classical accountancy, but the thing is, in this quantum accounting model, the richest club is wealthier than in the classical model."

STIG was a bit dubious, but willing to accept that as an accountant, he was probably off his head on crack, so we asked him why this was beneficial to the league. He pointed to the popular Norwegian model. "The FAI wants a big, successful club in the league," he explained. "This is why the whole league selection thing and UEFA licensing don’t observe club finances. If you start examining finances, it all goes to hell, and the classical approximation starts to work again. It would have worked too, only the Revenue stepped in. They observed the finances at a couple of the peaks, and they collapsed the whole quantum wave of club finances. Look at Shels. They were wealthy as you like before someone actually checked the books. Then they were totally screwed."

STIG escaped at this point by pulling an old anti-accountant trick. We produced a box of screws, and asked him to confirm that there were 3025 screws in the box. STIG’s own accountant has confirmed that there are 3026 screws. We left while he was still counting.

Sorry if the FAI’s accounts are a bit late this year. We were stuck.

This article originally appeared in STIG volume 6, issue 6.