The FAI's €32,000 Vantage Club tickets launched days after Lehman fell — and failed

On 18 September 2008 — three days after Lehman Brothers collapsed — FAI chief executive John Delaney launched the Vantage Club, a 10-year ticket scheme for the new Aviva Stadium priced as high as €32,000, more than 2.5 times the top rugby equivalent. "Some people will probably say we won't sell the seats – let me tell you, we'll do it, not a problem," Delaney said, citing 33,000 millionaires in Ireland and a database of 80,000 prospects. The scheme was, in Ken Early's words in The Irish Times, "a disaster from day one".

By January 2009 people in the FAI's sales operation were urging price cuts of 40 per cent or more. Delaney kept insisting the FAI just had to find the millionaires, and it was almost three years before the first reductions were announced. By then attendances at matches had collapsed and tickets could be had for almost any game; the sense that Ireland tickets were worth block-booking years in advance was gone. Early called the Vantage Club the defining decision of Delaney's near-15 years running Irish football, one that "condemned Irish football to a lost decade".

The austerity fell on everyone but the CEO, Early wrote: FAI workers were let go while the association paid Delaney's €3,000 monthly rent and an €8,000 bill at the Ritz, and the Ireland women's team had to get changed in airport toilets. Delaney earned €400,000 a year — a salary he defended by telling a live audience that questions about it were "boring the audience".

The pricing assumed an undented market: 3,000 of Ireland's millionaires buying three or four premium seats each, at 2.5 times rugby's top price.

The launch collided with a global financial collapse, and the product depended entirely on discretionary spending.

Delaney's refusal to admit the scheme had failed delayed price cuts for almost three years, compounding the damage every month.

Governance that priced ordinary fans out also tolerated a €400,000 CEO salary while staff lost jobs and the women's team changed in airport toilets.

When a premium scheme fails, the price of pride compounds daily: the real loss is not the launch, it is every month the denial lasts.

In the years that followed, Delaney continually cited the recession as the cause of the FAI's financial problems. Early argued the real damage came from Delaney's inability to accept that the Vantage Club had failed, which "massively compounded" it, and predicted the CEO would be remembered without fondness as the man who "inflicted a decade of austerity on everyone in Irish football except himself".