It’s a real-life story with shades of Ted Lasso and a plot line torn straight from Welcome to Wrexham, minus the hefty star power of Ryan Reynolds.
That’s not to say Vancouver native Ciara McCormack, new owner and CEO of Irish football club Treaty United, isn’t famous.
McCormack was thrust into the spotlight four years ago for blowing the whistle on former Canadian National Team and Vancouver Whitecaps women’s soccer coach Bob Birarda, who was last year sentenced to jail after pleading guilty to sexual abuse involving players.
McCormack’s purchase of the Limerick-based club was done in partnership with Tricorp Pacific Capital, a Vancouver investment firm. The deal was announced last week and makes her the first female co-owner and CEO of a men’s and women’s club in the League of Ireland.
“The motivation is to really make this something special with Treaty, and hopefully show people that a woman in charge is possible,” said McCormack. “When sport and soccer is done right, it’s positive, impactful and life-changing.”
Buying a sports team, let alone one in Ireland, was never a goal of Tricorp Pacific, according to company principal Chuck Cosman.
‘Dream of Irish football’
But when McCormack brought forward the idea — “selling them on the dream of Irish football,” as she put it — they were intrigued.
“If you look on our website there’s nothing that says we’re investing in sports businesses. This was just an opportunity that presented itself,” said Cosman, Tricorp’s new representative on the Treaty United board of directors.
“After talking with the league and with Ciara and advisors in our network that have done these types of things before, it just seemed like a wonderful opportunity to do something fun, but also something that we thought could really have a long-term, positive impact on a community.”
Cosman said his company is in it for the long haul and expects an eventual return on investment. Much of the work facing McCormack is professionalizing what has been a predominantly volunteer-run organization.
Went to rent a car today and the guy asked me what I was doing in Limerick. Told him I was involved in soccer. <br><br>Guy: “Just heard on the news there was some big takeover of Treaty our local club by Canadians + there’s a female CEO for the 1st time.”<br><br>Me: “Oh no way, that’s wild!”
—@ciaramccormack
Treaty United runs a premier division women’s team and a first division men’s team that play out of the 4,500-seat Markets Field stadium. There are also a handful of age group academy teams for girls and boys.
The club is semi-professional — most of the top team players have day jobs — and is governed by a volunteer board of directors.
Neither McCormack nor Cosman will disclose how much they invested in Treaty United.
Whether a fair comparison, Reynolds and partner-actor Rob McElhenney paid £2 million — about $3.3 million Canadian at today’s rates — to acquire downtrodden Welsh association football club Wrexham in 2021, a takeover chronicled in the ongoing docu-series.
Unlike the Wrexham story, McCormack, 44, has deep roots underpinning the venture. Both parents are from Ireland, and McCormack herself played internationally for the Republic of Ireland from 2008 to 2010.
In January of this year she joined the Treaty United women’s team as a player, giving her an inside look at the operation. She also took time out to fly back to Ottawa twice to revisit past traumas by testifying about alleged cover-ups in the Birarda case in front of two parliamentary committees investigating abuse in the Canadian sport system.
“After leaving Canada, with all the stuff that happened, it felt like [Irish soccer] rescued me,” she said.
“In terms of the lens that I look at the sporting world through, it’s really about taking something that was super negative and having this tremendous opportunity to take all those lessons and apply them in a really positive way.”
McCormack brings to top job at Treaty United a degree from Yale University, a masters in sports management from the University of Connecticut and experience running TOPP Soccer, a company that helps soccer players land placements at Canadian and U.S. universities and colleges.
“Running a soccer club in Europe, it was always just this wild dream,” she said.
“I’m still pinching myself that this is my job. It’s pretty cool.”
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