As part of Off The Ball's 'Future of Sport' series, we spoke to Dr Laura Finnegan and Dundalk FC opposition analyst Shane Keegan on the future of Irish football.
We aim to get a full flavour of the discussion points and problems facing clubs, administrators, parents and players.
Physicality & early development in grassroots football
One of the big factors to influence coaching, as Keegan attests, is the training of players who physically develop quicker than others in their age group.
"Majorly to my fault, I can talk anecdotally about that," Keegan said.
"In one of my under-age Kilkenny teams, the one which Mikey Drennan and Sean Maguire would have come out of, our best player at the time was a lad called Mark Lyons.
"I'm talking 12 years of age, but he was your typical best player at 12 in that he was bigger than everybody, more athletic than everybody else. We put him at centre-back and he just defended all day and booted the ball up the field.
"We were just happy to roll with this, we just thought it was the best thing ever.
"I would do it so differently the second time around, we made such little effort to focus on the softer skills that were going to bring that player along.
"Inevitably, within three or four years he wasn't the biggest player on the team, and he was just another Joe Soap.
"We go after the softer skills, particularly the brain power, the decision-making - it is so, so important.
"I see it at the moment with Evan Ferguson, who has gone from Bohemians to Brighton. What a fantastic player he looks.
"I hope that his physique is not going to be a hindrance, where they say 'well, here's a big strong fella who's able to bully people', you really hope that the rest of his game gets developed."
Drop-out rates v the best against the best
"There is a lot of research to suggest that a mix of approaches is best," Finnegan said of how to treat the children deemed the best at football at age group level.
"When we talk about the 'best' kids, what do we mean by that? Well, it's probably physicality, it can also be maturity masquerading as talent. We need to be creative about bio-banding and pairing teams in different ways.
"The idea of the best against the best is a controversial, teams a, b and c are not necessarily the way to go.
"If you put a stronger player in with lesser players, they can be more creative - it is almost giving them a tool-belt of experiences.
"Drop-out at that level is really important; trying to keep those late-maturers, and the development versus the win focus.
"Competition is not a bad thing in itself, but it is how we interpret it at grass-roots."
England v Ireland setups
"It depends where you live, there is definitely a place of birth factor in Ireland, and the chances that you get will differ depending on where you are.
"You were 50% more likely to get onto an emerging talent programme if there was one in your county.
"Then there are representative spots per head of population as well - it is not an equal opportunity. There are different challenges for people across the country.
"It is very different, but that is our strength as well. We have to be creative, we don't have professional academy structures from a young age. We could look and think that that is automatically a bad thing, but I think we can be creative and inventive with the resources that we do have."
The next part of our Future of Sport series is with Professor of Health and Human Performance at DCU, Niall Moyna.
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