STEPHEN KENNY has made a remarkable return to the League of Ireland after being appointed by St Patrick’s Athletic.
Kenny has been out of action since the FAI decided against renewing his Ireland contract last November.
4
4
4
The loose ends were tied up this morning with Kenny signing a contract until the end of the 2029 season.
He is expected to take training in Abbotstown at midday today.
Ahead of this fresh campaign for the 52-year-old, SunSport has compiled a profile of his life away from the pitch:
Who is his wife and how many children do they have?
He is married to childhood sweetheart Siobhán. The pair met as teenagers and have been together ever since.
They met at a disco in their hometown of Tallaght. They have four children together.
In 2019, Stephen told Paul Kimmage of the Irish Independent that Siobhán managed a team of engineers before she gave up her career in order to look after their kids.
He said: “We met at local disco. I was 17, she was 18, and we had both left school and were working.
“I was in a factory making aluminium doors called APA – Aluminium Profile Accessories – on the Long Mile Road.
“Siobhan was on an assembly line at Packard Electric, a big employer in Tallaght at the time, but went on to work in IT, and was managing a team of engineers before she gave it all up with the four kids.”
Last year, one of his sons signed his first professional contract as a footballer with Kenny’s old club Dundalk.
What was his salary with the FAI?
In Mark Tighe and Paul Rowan’s best-seller Champagne Football, they revealed that Kenny earned €205,000 in 2019 before being bumped up to €300,000 in 2020 and €540,000 in 2021.
However, that was still a considerably lower salary than his predecessors in the job Mick McCarthy, Martin O’Neill and Giovanni Trapattoni all received.
How did he fare in the senior job?
Having presided over an impressive spell with the 21s, there was huge excitement across the country when he finally took over the senior team.
However, he and the public soon learned that while he was correct in trying to modernise how we play, he had to compromise on his principles somewhat.
Both he and the team had to learn not to try to play out from the back every time as results were extremely poor initially as The Boys in Green went winless in his first 11 games in charge.
But thankfully 2021 saw the tide begin to turn with results beginning to match the uptick in performances in spite of our failure to qualify for the World Cup in Qatar.
2022 can sadly be summed up by the old mantra of one step forward and two steps back though.
There were really encouraging performances like the 2-2 draw with Belgium and thumping Scotland 3-0.
But they were followed up by a disastrous loss to Armenia and defeat in the reverse fixture in Glasgow respectively.
Ireland were then beaten by Norway and beat Malta, before a 3-2 win over Latvia in March saw teenage starlet Evan Ferguson score his first senior goal for his country.
Although failing to qualify for the 2024 European Championships saw the end of Kenny’s reign.
Beating Gibraltar home and away were the only positive results Kenny and co could take from the campaign.
Greece, Netherlands and France all took maximum points from Ireland in the difficult group.