Waterford FC have announced the appointment of Johnny Dunleavy as our new Academy Director on a full-time basis.

Dunleavy, an experienced player & coach, joins the Blues as their first-ever full-time Academy Director, having started in the role in recent weeks.

The 34-year old was the stand-out candidate for the recruitment process which began at the turn of the year, where he came through Stage one process before impressing in his Club-specific recruitment and selection process.

Dunleavy, who is a Donegal-native but has since moved to Kilkenny, had an illustrious League of Ireland playing career, spanning over nine years representing Cork City, Sligo Rovers & Finn Harps between 2012 to 2021. Most notably, he played a crucial role in the heart of the Cork City defence between 2012 – 2018 as Cork battled with Dundalk at the top of the Premier Division.

Johnny was named captain of Cork in 2015, before helping City to their third Premier Division title in 2017. Altogether he made over 200 League of Ireland appearances during his career.

While at Sligo Rovers, Dunleavy began his coaching journey, working closely with their MU19s, before relocating to Kilkenny where he was on both the playing & coaching panels at Evergreen FC as the Kilkenny-side continued to shine in the junior level of football in the country, as he now takes the role of Academy Director at the Blues where he currently holds a UEFA A Licence.

Dunleavy will now oversee all areas of the Academy structure at the club, a position that had been filled on an interim basis for the first half of this season by Gary Hunt, who worked in this role alongside his duty of Women’s First-Team Head Coach over the course of the last five months.

This role is funded through the League of Ireland Academy Investment Programme supported by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport and Sport Ireland. Waterford FC have thanked Minister Patrick O’Donovan and Minister Charlie McConalogue for their support in helping the Club in this invaluable appointment.

Speaking to the club media team on his appointment, Johnny spoke of his excitement & focus on his role and what’s to come in the future with our Waterford FC Academy:

“It’s been great to get started. I knew the start date was coming for a while & I couldn’t wait to start getting going. It’s been a busy couple of weeks with meetings & introducing myself to everyone in the club, and seeing the structure that’s there. Everyone’s been brilliant with me, and it’s great to get started.

This role is a change for me, I’ll have to get used to wearing a half-zip instead of a jersey, but it’s something I’ve always been passionate about and felt I could contribute to in some way. I have experience of being in an academy system when I was young, so I understand what it’s like on both sides of the fence – playing & coaching.

Since I’ve come in, the structures and facilities in place already are phenomenal, and you can clearly see the work that has been done through the years. For me, a lot of the good building blocks that are already in place are just foundations for me to help build on. It’s a brilliant academy with a lot of fantastic people involved in it.

I’ve already spoken with Graham [Coughlan] & Lee [Bullen] about how they see things and what’s important to them, and that’s important for me to know from an academy perspective as well. And similarly with Gary Hunt on the Women’s side, who was doing this job on an interim role along with the Women’s job so he had a lot of work on, but again it was a similar dialogue in terms of what he’s looking for. Both the Men’s & Women’s First-Team staff have been top class with me since I’ve come in, and now it’s important that we continue that dialogue.

To see the commitment from the FAI & the Government, it’s brilliant to see and it will only benefit football in Ireland going forward. Having that full-time staff and focus on the academy system and developing home-grown, local talent, it can only benefit Irish football as a whole, and I’m very privileged to be a part of the first wave of that, and I’ll do my level best to make sure it’s a success.”