Shelbourne toasts “Hollywood” league win

After an 18-year wait, Shelbourne are champions of Ireland once again.

On November 1st, an 85th-minute winner from substitute Harry Wood was enough to see off Derry City and bring the biggest trophy in Irish domestic football back to the Northside.

A dramatic final day of the season saw RTÉ attract 400,000 viewers as the title race went down the wire, with thousands lining out Tolka Park the day after the match to welcome home their title-winning heroes.

The triumphant Shels first-team squad and backroom staff parading the Premier Division trophy in front of their supporters at Tolka Park on Saturday, November 2. Picture credit: Paul Reardon

Manager Damien Duff told the Shelbourne faithful at Tolka Park “this is yours” at their homecoming celebration.

Duff, who won Premier League titles as part of Chelsea’s all-star team of the mid-2000s under Jose Mourinho, said the league win was the “pinnacle of my career.”

“I’ve said the last few weeks have been the pinnacle of my professional career and that wipes the floor with it,” he told RTÉ after the dramatic away win.

Prior to his league title win, Duff told The Athletic “yeah, I’ve some nice memories along the way, winning trophies, playing some good stuff, 100 caps for Ireland blah, blah, blah. But it’d (winning the league) be the absolute pinnacle, blow everything else out of the water.

It was later revealed that Duff had enlisted the help of The Special One himself to give Shelbourne’s players some words of encouragement ahead of their title decider.

Striker Sean Boyd (pictured above with the trophy in the Brandywell dressing room following the match against Derry City) told the LOI Central podcast that Mourinho recorded a video message for Duff, with the video shown before the match.

Boyd revealed that Mourinho sang the praises of Duff as a player, with the pair working together at Chelsea from 2004 until 2006, winning two league titles in the process.

Boyd recalled Mourinho saying “you have a man in front of you who I had as a player, who didn’t want to be a star but did everything he could to be as good as he could, he would have played through pain.”

“If you take an inch of what the manager gave me as a player, and put that that into a performance, then no matter what happens, if you win the league or you don’t, you can look at yourself after the game and think I’m a champion’

“If you put them all together and do all these things, ten times out of ten you’re going to be champions anyway.”

Shelbourne’s victory is all the sweeter for the Tolka Park outfit, as it ended the hopes of bitter rivals Shamrock Rovers in their bid to win their fifth league title in a row.

The league victory also means that Shelbourne will play in the biggest competition in club football, the UEFA Champions League, for the 2025-2026 season.

Shelbourne will enter the competition in the first qualifying round, the earliest stage of the competition owing to Ireland’s UEFA coefficient.

Ireland’s UEFA coefficient is sandwiched between Moldova and Iceland, with the coefficient decided by the performances of Irish sides in competitive European football.

In 2004, Shelbourne memorably came within a match of reaching the group stages of the Champions League, after a 0-0 draw with former Spanish giants Deportivo de La Coruña before losing the away leg 3-0.

Only Dundalk have come close to matching Shelbourne’s Champions League heroics in that 20-year period, with the side also reaching the third qualifying round in 2016.

Dundalk failed to qualify for the Champions League proper following defeats to Polish side Legia Warsaw.

Duff is on a mission to improve Irish football’s standing, saying “I want to up the standards everywhere around the league because Irish football is in my blood.”

The former Blackburn, Chelsea, Newcastle and Fulham winger, who was also part of Ireland’s 2002 World Cup and Euro 2012 squad, took over at Tolka Park in November 2021.

This year’s league title is Duff’s first trophy as manager, with Duff serving as manager when Shelbourne went down 4-0 to Derry City in 2022.

Domestic attendance at League of Ireland games are at its highest in decades, with the most recent statistics from UEFA showing a 20% rise in attendances in the 2023 season compared to 2022, with 587,900 fans attending a League of Ireland match that year.

June figures revealed an increase compared to the same stage in 2023.

League of Ireland director Mark Scanlon told RTÉ in June “reaching half a million people already in 2024 is an exciting landmark and shows the rising profile of the league and our clubs.”

“Our clubs continue to develop and do fantastic work in communities they are embedded in and these statistics also highlight once more the need for investment in our facilities to help us grow to the next level as sell-out signs are a regular occurrence and many of the stadiums are unable to cater for demand.”

August’s derby against local rival Bohemians marked the biggest home attendance for a match at Tolka Park since 2006; on that occasion, 4,830 fans saw the two Northside teams draw 1-1.

Duff invoked one of the great upset victories in sporting history following Shelbourne’s win; “to come up to the Brandywell against a great team and manager, people talk about Leicester City and Hollywood — this is Hollywood.”