About

…or, Oh no! Not another League of Ireland website!

Welcome to FootballPress (or FP for short).

This site tracks  our media’s singularly odd coverage of football, as well as the place of the sport in the Irish public’s perception.

Outside of match reports, and stories by a minority of talented and interested reporters, Irish sports news output reflects attitudes to Irish football that range from apathy and neglect to explicit and open hostility.

For some sports editors, in whose sections a diet of Gaelic and British football is the staple, Irish football is simply not something they cover. For others, it’s a matter of ‘Oh no! Not another League of Ireland story’. And, for a few, it’s even simpler. They just want the league to go away and die, and they will say so at every opportunity. Got a LoI-bashing story? Rest assured: it’s an easy sell. Overall, we Irish like our football only when it happens far away.

We think of ourselves as a sporting nation but, when it comes to football, most of us take our sport, and our support, elsewhere, to the detriment of the game here. Irish sports journalism and the sports television industry have a very big part to play in that.

FP will aim to highlight the often mundane, sometimes bizarre ways in which the inbuilt media bias against Irish football plays out, as well as the numerous contradictions and absurdities  in  Irish  culture as it relates to the beautiful game. We won’t catch everything (there isn’t a fancy software engine at the back end) but we will catch enough.

If you want to want to help out, or to alert us to something relevant you’ve spotted in the media, please get in touch.