THERE was no talk of the Champions League around Oriel Park four years ago.
Dundalk FC was two weeks away from going out of business back then and the club was facing the wall until local businessmen Paul Brown and Andrew Connolly ignored the well-intentioned advice of friends and family and stepped in to pull it back from the brink.
Now, in a real life rags-to-riches story, the county Louth club is 180 minutes away from the group stages of European football’s blue riband competition and a guaranteed £6m windfall.
“We bought the club over in 2012 and everybody told us we were mad in the head, we were nuts,” said Brown, who is originally from Belfast.
“Andrew is an ex-junior soccer player in Dundalk and I’m an ex-minor league referee so we both have a soccer background and a connection to Dundalk.
“I’m here 35 years, so we both had an emotional connection to soccer in Dundalk and the problem was that if we didn’t step in, the club was gone.
“We were 14 days away from extinction and we ended up in a relegation battle with Waterford and scraped through.”
Extinction was narrowly avoided but all the problems remained and Brown and Connolly turned to a man with a proven track record of success and begged him to take over as manager.
“In November 2012 we went and got Stephen Kenny who was after getting sacked by Shamrock Rovers,” he said.
“He was left with no job and we sat outside his house and approached him, we went up to Donegal and begged him. At that time Dundalk wasn’t a good sell, the whole club was crumbling but we begged him.
“What could we offer? We couldn’t offer anything. Our pitch was terrible, the stadium was crumbling, we don’t even own it at the minute but we want to renovate it.”
They talked Kenny into signing on and he started his first season with Dundalk 66/1 to win the league. Dundalk ended up pushing eventual champions St Patrick’s Athletic all the way.
“The first season we came second,” Brown recalled.
“The next year we won it and last year we did it again.
“This year we’re top again and we’ve beaten FH in Iceland and BATE Borisov who are full of Belarusian internationals and have a value of £38m, one of their strikers is worth £12m but our centre-back snuffed him out.
“They’ve been in and out of the Champions League for years and they took four points off Roma last year – they’ve only been beat 3-0 in the Champions League by one other club.”
That club is Barcelona. If Dundalk can see off Legia Warsaw over two legs they stand a very decent chance of being drawn against the Catalan kingpins in the group stages. Brown expects the League of Ireland “football fraternity” to come along on tomorrow night to cheer ‘the Town’ on at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium.
“We’re expecting a very big crowd at the Aviva,” he said.
“As you go through every stage in the Champions League the ground stipulations get higher and higher.
“In group stage two, we could play at Oriel Park, in stage three we had to go to Tallaght and now we have to go to the Aviva. In stage four even Windsor Park wouldn’t fulfil the criteria – it had to be either the Aviva or Croke Park.
“If we win we’ll stay at the Aviva and if we get beat we’ll go into the Europa League – we have European football now until December, but our season finishes in October so we have to extend it now until the 18th of December.”
The windfall Dundalk will earn from this run should guarantee a bright future for the ambitious club but Brown says money isn’t the driving force.
“They are great days, but it’s hard work as well,” he said.
“Money isn’t what’s driving us, reaching the Champions League is what’s driving us and we feel the team that Stephen has built is good enough for the Champions League and he is taking us in the right direction because, at the end of the day, he runs the club.”
Kenny has put together an experienced, driven group of players including David McMillan, the leading goalscorer in the Champions League with five goals so far.
He also has the likes of long-serving club stalwarts Chris Shields and John Mounteney who played in that relegation play-off against Waterford and will feature on Wednesday night too.
“They are there from the relegation days when we thought we’d be going down to Galway to play Mervue United and now we’re a game away from Barcelona,” said Brown.
“We have players from the four provinces of Ireland and what we have built up is a League of Ireland team against Legia Warsaw – we have a great demand for tickets in Dublin and all over is big.
“The football fraternity is backing us.
“We’re up against Legia who are bringing 3000 fans and there are a lot of Polish people in Ireland who are going to the game too.
“We were hoping for Celtic, but only because we thought we had a good chance against them – David McMillan up against Efe Ambrose isn’t much of a match, is it!
“The team we didn’t want was Apoel Nicosia because of the heat but Stephen has gone over to see Legia already and has done his homework on them – he’s very meticulous.
“They’re an international team – there’s four Polish internationals on the team and Nemanja Nikolics [Hungary international with four goals in the Champions League so far] so it’s hard – but football is football.
“We have to keep our feet on the ground because we could take a hockeying from Legia, but we’re quietly confident.
“We have to keep a lid on it because expectations are at fever pitch, the second half against BATE was incredible and we’re very proud to have the top scorer in the Champions League playing for us.”