'That's good business' - Bradley on importance of being a selling club following Honohan deal

STEPHEN BRADLEY SAYS it makes perfect sense for Shamrock Rovers to be a selling club, even though the champions didn’t need to offload Ireland squad man Josh Honohan to Lincoln City.

A deal worth an initial €500,000 was finalised between the Hoops and the high-flying League One side on Thursday, with the 24-year-old Corkman moving in January.

Bradley knew last summer that Honohan would be leaving, although he didn’t know then that it would be to Lincoln as Honohan was a man in demand. But while sorry to see one of his key men leave the squad ahead of next season’s league and FAI Cup defence, Bradley feels there is sound business logic behind it.

“Josh has been outstanding for us. He got better and better every week, every game. He has a real appetite to learn – he’s a student of the game,” said the Rovers manager.

“As a club we’ve always had that model of if we feel it makes business sense, we do it. Hopefully his injury clears up in time and he can go straight into the swing of things in January for Lincoln.”

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Bradley continued: “We’ve lost players since I’ve been here. I don’t have any issue with that. We’ve always sold players and they’ve always been the standout player that year. That’s part of the business plan as it represents value for the football club. We should never come away from that. It’s our job to have the next one ready and we will.

“A football club can’t just run and be successful on the pitch, it has to run and bring in money from all aspects of the club and selling players is part of that. We could easily have turned down the money now because we’ve had a good year, but you can’t come away from what our plan is. We trust what we do.

“Every club in the world is a selling club. There’s no club in the world that doesn’t sell players. Real Madrid is probably the exception. Everybody sells. Does a half a million make-or-break our season off the pitch? No. It’s not about that.”

Honohan joined Shamrock Rovers from Cork City ahead of the 2024 season and made an immediate impression and was involved in Heimir Hallgtimsson’s Ireland squads this year. The powerful wing-back remains uncapped but Bradley said: “You look at what we bought Josh for and what we sold him for. That’s good business.

“When you start thinking you’re too big to do good business, it’s your downfall. We didn’t sit in front of the board and say ‘we have to take X- amount. It’s different when you go to Victor (Ozhianvuna, league record €2 million sale to Arsenal)) levels. That’s different for clubs like us.

“Do you want to get to a point down the road that we’re selling players like Scandinavia do in terms of that price, all the time? Of course. But the whole industry has to grow for that to happen. You need the facilities, you need the league, you need everything because it needs to be respected. It wasn’t about the money for us. It was about what part of our plan is.”

Meanwhile, Bradley has reiterated that he wants to test himself at a higher level in management at some point in his career. There has been fresh interest from clubs outside of Ireland but Bradley is already preparing for another year with the Hoops, having first taken charge in 2016.

After signing off a marathon 55-game season with a European win over Hamrun Spartans of Malta on Thursday, the Rovers squad are now on a three-week break. But going into pre-season, Bradley said: “I understand a lot of people have an opinion that you must move, you must go, you must jump, you must do this.

“I’ve made no secret of what I want to do and what I want to achieve. But you have to understand that everything has to be right. I don’t get that mentality – and never got it with players – of just wanting to jump for the sake of jumping.

“My job right now is to manage Shamrock Rovers and do everything I can to make us better on and off the pitch and I’ll continue to do that. But I’ve made no secret of the fact that my ambitions, my personal ambitions, haven’t changed one bit.

“But I don’t listen to other people’s opinions outside that don’t know me and how I think, how I feel, the plan – I don’t listen to their opinions. They’re irrelevant to me. It’s head down, keep learning, keep working. There’s been a lot of interest, talk. But like I said, I won’t be jumping just to jump. That’s not me.”