As pre-season announcements go, it was more than a little underwhelming. In fact, I doubt if anyone outside the club itself was excited by the news that Cabinteely FC will compete in next season's SSE Airtricity League.

It's easy to dismiss Cabinteely as an over-reaching minnow without a hope of survival. After all, they have no fan base, no money, no ground, no players and no experience of this level. They have no history of involvement in the League of Ireland and their place in the First Division this coming season is the result of an administrative process as opposed to anything they achieved on the field. They may know how to run a well-organised schoolboy club, but that is no preparation for the challenge facing them now. Most people with an interest in this story would have that view.

There are others who are using Cabinteely's inclusion as grounds to heap further criticism on the FAI and their running of football in Ireland. On their watch, the League of Ireland has become so unattractive that plucking a team from obscurity like this was the only way to avoid a seven-team division. They were wrong to include yet another Dublin-based team in a league that is still unrepresented in most parts of the country, but most of all, if they had put a pyramid structure in place by now, then none of this would have been possible.

But there's a more positive way to assess Cabinteely's arrival in the big time. First of all, rather than judging them for what they are not, it's worth pointing out what they are. Cabinteely FC, formerly Cabinteely Boys FC, is comprised of 54 teams from under eights up to seniors, with almost 900 members. In a country where you'll be praised for having a solid structure if you have access to a decent training pitch, here is a club firmly established and on a stable footing. I'd wonder how many other senior clubs have a foundation like that?

It's not hard to see why they might be interested in making the step up. Their underage players will now have a clear pathway within the club to the top level of senior football in Ireland. The reputation of their youth section will be enhanced by entry into the national under 17 and under 19 leagues and the senior team will have a steady flow of schoolboys from which to choose. Unlike most of their new League of Ireland peers, Cabinteely are a club in the truest sense of the word, the furthest thing from the top-heavy model of nearly all the others.

So how will they adjust what they do to adapt to their new surroundings? Chairman Pearse Toale says the club will remain amateur and the senior team will be self-financing. There has not been one word about winning leagues or making it to Europe. Their plans are prudent and sensible and there's no mention at all of turning professional. They are also realistic about the attendances they're going to get ("the low hundreds", says Toale). Expecting low crowds is better than blaming the hundreds of thousands of people who choose to do something else with their time for not showing up, a standard fallback for the League of Ireland fan. In fact, the more you look into them, the more they seem like the very model of what an Irish club should be.

A club is about more than owning a stadium or having a past and in Ireland, it should never involve paying players big wages. Forget fan ownership, central contracts, merging clubs or setting up franchises, the best way to build a club is always from the bottom up. It's exactly how Cabinteely have managed to get to this point and they have the foundations in place to deal with success or failure in equal measure. Not many League of Ireland clubs could say that.

They may, of course, discover this was a step too far. If so, their approach to this season will ensure the rest of the club will have remained largely unaffected. They can leave senior football to others for the time being. But if they go on to establish themselves in the League of Ireland, it will be the result of years of patience and doing things in the right way.

They have a business model that can survive the Premier League being screened on television. It's not reliant on the financial input of one man. It won't suffer because the GAA get big crowds during the summer or because there are concerts on in Dublin the same night as their games. None of the usual excuses apply here. They are being prudent and sensible about everything they are doing. It may come across as being unambitious, but it's realistic. While that doesn't sound particularly inspiring, maybe it's just the type of inspiration the league needs.

rsadlier@independent.ie

Sunday Indo Sport