FAI confirms UEFA rejected request to keep Ireland and Israel apart in future draws

On 4 October, in Backa Topola, Serbia, a match will be played in silence. No spectators. Not a single ticket released to Republic of Ireland supporters for the away leg. The floodlights will be on, the grass will be cut, the referee will blow his whistle, but the ordinary meaning of the words "home fixture" was hollowed out long before kick-off. It is a UEFA Nations League tie between the Republic of Ireland and Israel, born from a ball drawn out of a bowl, and now forcing two associations to live with a calendar neither of them chose.

Across more than five decades in every kind of stand — full, empty, neutral — I have learned one thing: when a match is stripped of its crowd, what is stripped with it is the singing, and also a football nation's right to argue in public. This time, the stripped part has a name, a date, and a written answer from Europe's most powerful governing body.

The February draw placed the Republic of Ireland and Israel in the same UEFA Nations League group. For almost any other pairing, the story ends there. For this one, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) understood that the fixture list would drag in a chain of consequences beyond the pitch: pressure from campaigning groups, boycott calls, security measures, and internal meetings where the board had to weigh playing against not playing.

The FAI sent UEFA a request: in future draws, the two teams should be kept apart. That request was refused. FAI chief executive David Courell confirmed the outcome and set out UEFA's reasoning. European football's governing body operates an internal mechanism — Courell called it a "do not draw list" — that keeps teams from territories in a state of direct conflict from meeting in the group stage. Ireland and Israel have never been in direct conflict with each other. The FAI's request therefore fell outside the existing criterion and was declined.

Read that sentence slowly, because it is the whole core of the story: UEFA separates teams on the basis of territorial conflict, not on the basis of public sentiment. It is a dry legal line, but it is also the clearest line available in a matter where every other interpretation slips.

Earlier, in July, the FAI convened an extraordinary general meeting so delegates could decide whether to proceed with the two fixtures. The move showed the board did not push the decision into a dark corner. In the motion put to delegates, the FAI stated that a boycott would cause "significant and lasting harm" to the association. Delegates endorsed proceeding. From that moment the debate changed character: it shifted from shaping a decision to defending a decision already made.

Alongside that decision came a set of staging measures. Israel's home fixture is being played in Debrecen, Hungary. Ireland's "home" fixture was moved out of the Aviva Stadium in Dublin — a ground with a capacity of around 51,700 — to Backa Topola, Serbia, and played behind closed doors. No tickets were released for Ireland supporters at the away leg. Put those three details together and a template appears: the match must be completed, but every surface that could become a flashpoint is sealed off.

Financially, the direct consequence lands on matchday revenue. A home fixture at the Aviva generates ticket income, hospitality income and spend around the ground. Playing behind closed doors at a neutral venue erases that. The scale cannot be calculated precisely from public information, because there are no attendance figures, ticket prices or capacity differentials between the two venues on record. But the direction of the money is clear: outward. In exchange, the FAI keeps its competition rights and its share of commercial distributions, which a withdrawal would have put at risk. For an association under financial strain, that may have been reason enough to accept an empty stadium.

The more interesting governance point lies elsewhere. The mechanism for separating teams is described as an internal, unpublished list, and Courell himself said he could not remember its formal name. A rule that governs the fixture lists of national teams, yet whose name and scope are not at the fingertips of the man citing it. That leaves a transparency gap: how "direct conflict" is defined, who defines it, and which pairings it has previously covered, all remain unverified. No UEFA statement appears anywhere in the story. The entire account comes from one side, and Courell said he took UEFA's answer at face value.

A paradox surfaces here. The popular framing turns UEFA's refusal into a symbol of bureaucratic rigidity. Weighed properly, that rigidity is what protects the legitimacy of the draw itself. A draw only has value if its outcome cannot be adjusted by outside pressure, whether that pressure comes from a parliament, from the media, or from an organised campaign. If the separation criterion shifted from "territorial conflict" to "level of public tension", every draw would become a political hearing, and no association could predict its own group. That is the rarely mentioned price of a concession.

But the paradox has a reverse side. By publicly requesting separation and being refused, the FAI lost its best shield: the argument that it had tried everything within the rules. Before this information emerged, the decision to play could be read as a reluctant concession to a system that would not budge. After it emerged, the story becomes: the association asked, was answered, and chose to play. Responsibility returns to where it belongs. Pressure shifts from the question of whether UEFA would relent to the question of how the FAI decided.

The "Stop The Game" campaign launched by Irish Sport for Palestine is the clearest sign that this pressure is rising. The fixtures are described as being under increasing pressure. What makes this opinion cycle unusual is that it does not run on results. A crisis of form can dissolve after two wins. A political crisis does not. It attaches itself to match dates, peaks around 27 September and 4 October, and then either fades or pivots to another target.

Professionally, I see an operating model hardening into a template: neutral venue, closed doors, blocked tickets. Hungary and Serbia were chosen as hosts. This model solves the security problem in the short term and simultaneously sets a precedent for later competition cycles. Politically sensitive fixtures may simply default to this treatment. For those of us who report on the game, that is a far bigger change than the outcome of one administrative request being turned down.

People see the spotlight; I see the quiet backs. In this story those backs are security staff, ticket-office workers explaining why there are no tickets, and coaches holding a dressing room together while their players' phones buzz with news from outside. Every contract is a layer of sediment; others read value, I read the past. Here, the sediment is an unnamed internal list, invoked to explain why two national teams must still meet.

One detail is easy to miss when reading this over morning coffee. Both fixtures are classed as neutral events, but only one association had to give up its genuine home. Ireland lost the Aviva; Israel has long been accustomed to playing away from its own territory. That asymmetry appears in no press release, but it appears in the fixture list. And the fixture list, as I have learned over decades of note-taking, is the most honest document an association produces.

I am old, which is why I have the patience to wait for a football season to grow up. But I am also old enough to recognise that some questions will never be answered by a scoreline. The question left hanging after all of this is not who wins in Backa Topola, but this: if UEFA one day publishes its full separation criteria, how many associations will discover they have been misreading the rulebook for years?