Ownership in the League of Ireland: why Irish professional football clubs are transitioning to the co-operative model

The League of Ireland (LOI) is the Republic of Ireland’s top tier of professional football. In the 2022/2023 season, six of the nineteen clubs in the LOI were owned and governed as co-operative organizations. This paper identifies the key motivating factors behind the emergence and development of co-operative clubs in the LOI. To achieve this, semi-structured interviews were conducted with board members of five co-operative clubs in the LOI and with two key stakeholder organizations. The research found that the co-operative model was adopted by supporters and communities as a last resort option following decades of financial distress and poor corporate governance under the investor-owned model. This paper argues that the co-operative model has succeeded in saving numerous clubs from the brink of financial collapse and the model could be considered by other clubs in the LOI as a viable alternative model of ownership.