The Irishman at the helm of the Football Association of Wales (FAW), Noel Mooney, is upbeat on the prospects for the game both on and off the pitch as it targets a big rise in revenues with a significant uplift in grassroots investment.
After decades of failing to qualify for major tournaments, who could forget the huge success of Euro 2016 in France, which saw the Welsh team progressing to the semi-finals.
While missing out on the World Cup in Russia in 2018, Wales qualified for the Euro 2020 tournament – staged last year due to Covid – which saw Robert Page’s team progressing out of the group stage before exiting at the last 16 stage.
The women’s national team has also performed strongly in recent years and currently sit second in their World Cup qualification group.
Tomorrow night Wales will aim to take a step closer to their first qualification for a World Cup since 1958, with a semi-final play-off game with Austria at the Cardiff City Stadium.
If they win they will play a final play-off game against Scotland or Ukraine.
However, with Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine it is not yet clear when that game will be played, but if Wales beat Austria it will be in Cardiff.
Mr Mooney, 45, is a former League of Ireland goalkeeper who played for sides including Cork and Limerick, before joining the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) in 2006.
Prior to his appointment as chief executive of the FAW last August he was head of strategic development for European football body UEFA.
Building on the sound governance and commercial footings set by his predecessor, Jonathan Ford, Mr Mooney has set an ambitious goal of driving revenues of the FAW to £26m by 2026.
By comparison the Welsh Rugby Union, which despite Covid games- behind-closed-doors restrictions, posted revenues of £58m in its last financial year.
However, both effectively operate a redistribution model to support their respective games at all levels.
Mr Mooney said the projected revenue rise, from the current audited year end of around £16m, would be achieved by driving commercial income, including e-commerce, where he recognises the association needs to improve its offer, but also driving grant support from other sources including the Welsh Government, local authorities and football bodies UEFA and FIFA.
The FAW plans to invest around £15m in upgrading grassroots facilities over the next few years.
Wales’ qualification for Euro 2020 saw the association receiving €9.5m (just under £8m).
However, the added logistical cost of having to play at numerous venues, including Baku and Rome, impacted on the net proceeds the association has been able to invest back into the game.
But the FAW’s business plan to 2028 is not predicated on the hope of any future tournament participation, where the unpredictable nature of sport means that qualification can rest on a controversial refereeing decision – although Mr Mooney said it would be an added bonus.
The chief executive said: “Our turnover is around £16m, but what I have promised to the board is that we get it to £26m by 2026. It is not a long time, but I have no doubt that we can do that.
“As part of our Sustainable Association for the Future recommendations [from Dr Carol Bell and former Scottish FA chief executive Stewart Regan], the football development aspects of the FAW Trust will move back to the FAW.
“Once signed off it would see its turnover of around £3.5m adding to our revenues, so reaching around £20m. Then with the extra investment required for grassroots facilities we need to get to £26m. We have a business plan to 2028, and based on the six months that I have spent here we have looked at all income revenues and have stress-tested them to see what we need to increase them by.
“We have also looked at all of our expenditure and stress-tested that, too.
“The life of the association is changing a lot and there are new issues such as sustainability, equality, diversity and inclusion, public affairs and new things coming at us where we are having to hire resource. So there is increasing demand on the association, which means we have to increase our revenues.
“We have a difficult model in Wales, where we get very little funding from the Welsh Government and Sport Wales for operations and that is just a fact. So, we are working with them to increase the funding to sport overall, so not just football. So, we have to massively grow our revenues and that is not just sponsorship. We have a very good TV until 2026 with UEFA for international men’s senior matches, but it is the other revenues we need to try to grow.”
Commercial potential
He added: “So, we can do better commercially, there is no doubt about that. We have tended to work on the cross-UK-type bids when England would do the first deal then we (other home unions) would all kind of follow with our own deals. We are going to try to move that on and do some better deals.
“We are also seeing a lot of sponsors and commercial partners looking to invest in the women’s game, where we have also seen our crowds going up and up.
“It is fair to say where we are not very good at the moment is e-commerce. I think we can be a lot better on merchandising and licensing.
“There are other people who have profited from our popularity very cleverly and good luck to them, but our job is to develop value for supporters and value for our members that also creates value for Wales.
“So, we have got to create products, and innovative ones as well, that fans can buy and invest in that allows us to drive our turnover.”
He said the FAW was also looking to bring in more commercial and business expertise to its board and committees. Its independent non-executive chairman is head of Sony in Wales Steve Dalton.
Mr Mooney said: “There are a lot of people attracted now to the FAW who are high profile and want to get involved. That is important to us to work with people with very high skillsets.
“We have business leaders from around Wales that are stress-testing our commercial strategy, then a digital panel with CEOs of tech start-ups and e-commerce entrepreneurs looking at our digital transformation plans.
“We are getting a lot more people involved in the FAW and it is just a case of making sure our nominations committee get the right skillsets for each of our committees and panels so we don’t bring them in just for the sake of it.
“So, we want more and more voices cross Wales to help shape our future.”
Euro 2020
On the financial windfall from the Euro 2020 tournament, he said: “It was around €9.5m gross, but you tend to get a rule of thumb where a third goes to operations, a third to the players and a third to the association for development of the sport.
“So you would look at getting something around the €3m mark out of that, but in this particular competition it was a disaster from the financial perspective because we have so much travelling out to places like Baku and Rome, so the expenses went well above what we would have hoped for and the profit wasn’t as much as one would have hoped for.”
If Wales qualify for next year’s World Cup in Qatar it will receive $12m (US) – Fifa works in dollars. Also based on a equitable split, this would give the association around $4m (£3m) to invest back into the game.
The operational costs from competing in next year’s World Cup won’t be as punitive as Euro 2020, as all the games will be staged in the small Middle East state. The further Wales can progress beyond the group stage the higher the prize money. And if Wales did win the World Cup, even if this may seem unlikely, it could mean circa $60m.
Mr Mooney said: “I would say the FAW is in a decent spot. We have done a full analysis of our finances with UEFA which compared us to 54 other federations and we have got good reserves. We also spend more on the women’s game, for example, than any other association in Europe as a percentage of our turnover.
“So, of our £16m we are committing about £2.5m on the women’s national team. The FA, although having a much bigger turnover, is not spending that sort of percentage on the women’s game.
“Around half our turnover at the moment is going on the national teams, which is a lot. When you take the FA with a turnover of £500m a tiny percentage actually goes on the national teams compared to what they have to develop the game.
“Our investment over the last decade has been in high-performance facilities and the new era is about grassroots development and the many different clubs across Wales where we have got a very difficult terrain and environment for facilities. We need to find investment and good partnership to develop these facilities right across Wales.
"Currently around a fifth of our games are called off at grassroots level each week, which is a real problem for us as we don’t have enough all-weather facilities, for example. You don’t need to be a Nostradamus to know what weather is coming in Wales. Jonathan (previous CEO) did a marvellous job in getting us ready in many ways, like in governance, and to think more like a business and getting the support for the national teams up and running. So, the new era will now be very much about focusing on the grassroots game and that is a big challenge for us as there are a lot of clubs with needs out there, but one that we are very focused on.”
Mr Mooney said the emphasis on investment in grassroots facilities would proportionately seek to mirror the example of the FA in England.
This follows a review by former FA chief executive Martin Glenn, who came up with a figure of around £200m to revolutionise facilities in England.
The Football Foundation, which is funded by the Premier League, the FA and the UK Government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) – and chaired by Mr Glenn – is now investing around £70m to £80m a year into facilities in England.
Mr Mooney said: “Martin also got Boris Johnson to give a pre-2030 World Cup pledge of £550m, some of which is Barnetised for Wales.
“So, some £2.6m of Welsh Government and DCMS money came two weeks ago in the first wave of funding for grassroots football and we have just funded 35 bodies across Wales for pitches, pavilions and all that stuff.
“So, this is the start of a big investment drive for the grassroots game and hopefully we can spend over £15m over the next few years on facilities because they are desperately required across Wales.
“To do that needs great partnerships with Welsh Government, with Sport Wales, the DCMS and the 22 local authorities.
“I have now met with 21 local authority chief executives and local authority leaders and asked for a shared vision for each of them in building facilities.
“They have been really warm and we are already starting to work on projects, local authority by local authority, that are so strategically important to us to get more boys and girls to play football.”
The Cardiff City Stadium
Mr Mooney said there are no plans for the national team to return to the Principality Stadium, which has a capacity around 40,000 bigger than the Cardiff City Stadium at just over 33,000.
The chief executive said: “It feels that the supporters and the players have made a great home there. We have spent a lot of time talking to people and understanding their perspectives, and the feeling is we will play at the Cardiff City Stadium for a long time. It is a good stadium that works for us. Would we like another 10,000 seats there? Well, yes we would, and a great scenario would be for 45,000 seats. We don’t like the idea of empty seats, and what has come back loud and clear is that the fans like the intimacy of the stadium.”
For the game against Austria, and then a potential final play-off game the FAW has increased ticket prices by a modest £4 on average. Mr Mooney said: “We did that in consultation with our supporters, having called a meeting with a representative group. The range is £20 to £50, with the average ticket around £30. That is good value to see top international players, but at the same time we feel it is in line with what is appropriate.”
The FAW is part of a joint bid for staging the Euros in 2028, with Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It is expected to be the only bid.
Mr Mooney said. “It looks like the tournament will go from 24 to 32 teams, which you would expect Wales to qualify for in the first instance. What we really want is to have all our Wales matches at the Principality Stadium.”
Could some international games, even if just friendlies, be played, as used to be regularly the case, at the Racecourse in Wrexham?
The chief executive said: “We are in active talks with Wrexham Council and we definitely see international football returning to the north, but as the ground is developed it needs to be done with international football standards in mind... so that’s things like floodlights, dressing-rooms, the media etc. That is a few years off, I would imagine, but I do know that the council, Welsh Government, the club (Wrexham) are on the same page with us in trying to bring international football back.”
ESG
In the summer the FAW will launch its new sustainability strategy, which will look at not ESG (environmental, social and governance), but the sustainability of its clubs, leagues and how it functions.
It is also expected to include a target for the association to achieve net- zero emissions, which could potentially be supported by offsetting measures like new tree planting.
Asked if the FAW would be open to, say, an investment from a company with a questionable environment record or a state-backed fund with a poor human rights record – an example was given of Saudi Arabia, which recently acquired Newcastle United – Mr Mooney said: “It is a very difficult thing as of course we want to develop our sport and if there is someone looking to invest to help develop our own sport domestically, or a club or whatever it is, then of course you are going to be interested in attracting that investment.
“However, that said, it is for each body to decide who they partner with. We were one of the first associations in the world that said we wouldn’t be playing Russia following the invasion of Ukraine as we just genuinely felt what they are doing is abhorrent.”
