Tommy Martin: Drogheda cockup a sore part of LOI's growing pains 

And they would have gone into their European adventure with high hopes. Their team has been magnificent this season, vindicating the decision to go full-time under manager Kevin Doherty.

But instead, UEFA kicked them out because their owners breached multi-club ownership rules thanks to their stake in Denmark’s Conference League qualifiers Silkeborg. This means that the only jaunt to an international destination Drogheda can look forward to is next week’s trip to the Brandywell.

As ever, most of the fallout has focused on who knew what and when. Drogheda’s owners, Trivela Group, claimed they were snookered by UEFA decision to move the date by which to square off multi-club issues from June back to March 1st, saying they only heard about this on February 26th.

It turned out that UEFA had sent out a circular on the matter in October, but the FAI hadn’t sent it on because Trivela didn’t buy their chunk of Silkeborg until November. The FAI said they tipped off Trivela at that point but obviously the penny didn’t drop with the US-based investors until it was too late.

It probably didn’t help that Silkeborg were bumbling around midtable in Denmark for most of the season and only secured their European place on June 1st via the Danish league’s elaborate playoff system. Unfortunately, because Silkeborg finished a few places higher in their league than Drogheda, by UEFA’s rules, that meant the Louth side had to put their suitcases back in the attic.

It feels like there was a general sense around Drogheda that this would get sorted – with these multi-club matters and UEFA, it generally does. You only had to look at Red Bull and their Salzburg and Leipzig outfits, Manchester City and their owner’s stake in last season’s Champions League qualifiers Girona, and the INEOS group with their chunks of Manchester United and Nice.

Usually, shares are shoved into a blind trust, or somebody divests themselves of the offending slice of whichever footballing subsidiary is causing the trouble and everybody goes away happy. Until this occasion, when whatever boardroom jiggery pokery Trivela were proposing wouldn’t wash with UEFA, on account of Trivela having missed the famous deadline.

The long and the short of it is that you either think that UEFA have had enough of this messy multi-club business and decided to make an example of little old Drogheda (rather than take on one of the big clubs with their battalions of lawyers), or you think Drogheda’s owners have cocked up big style, maybe with the help of the FAI, because it is traditional to drag them into this somehow, even though they don’t seem to have done anything wrong on this occasion at least.

Whither or which, you come back to those poor Drogheda fans, management and players, their passports all up to date but with nowhere to go. Getting into Europe is a big deal for Irish clubs. Drogheda were guaranteed €525,000 even if they got spanked 10-0 first out time out – that’s about four times as much as you get for winning the league.

And it’s an even bigger deal for clubs outside the traditional Dublin power block. Drogheda have only been in Europe five times in their history, three of those occasions in their late noughties heyday under Paul Doolin, when after winning the league for the first time in their history, they famously put it up to Dynamo Kyiv before exiting the Champions League qualifiers.

Not long after that, the club nearly went bust, as was traditional with title-winning sides of the time, and those supporters were the ones who stepped in and saved it. You would forgive them for thinking any good thing that comes along is only a precursor to calamity.

So, what does it all mean, this bitter entanglement with football’s beaks and bureaucrats? One of the reasons for the League of Ireland’s recent popularity is the sense that it is a place away from the moral sewer of modern professional football. There are no seven-figure salaries and no clubs owned by Gulf states or oligarchs, unless you count the regime of a notable former chairman of Shelbourne, and that was more of an Ollie-garchy.

And yet here are Drogheda, dumped out of Europe because of multi-club ownership, a grim feature of the modern game’s capture by the forces of mammon. But nor is it correct to see Drogs as collateral damage, babes in the wood gobbled up by the game’s corporate big beasts. They have done very well out of their membership of a multi-club organisation, including a plethora of very useful loans from Walsall, their sister club in the UK.

It’s difficult to imagine last season’s Cup success, this season’s move to full time football or the mooted stadium redevelopment without Drogheda’s membership of the Trivela Group. Yes, there are those of us who think the concept of multi-club ownership feels a bit rubbish, who think it treats football clubs like they are Costa Coffee branches, and that UEFA should have put their foot down on the whole thing a lot earlier.

But it feels like something a league with the profile of Ireland’s is going to have to get used to, as it develops financially and becomes more entwined with the big bad football world out there. Perhaps this cockup is part of the growing pains in that process. All the same, it’s a sore one to take that on a rare occasion UEFA put their foot down, it was one of our domestic clubs that got squished.