Harvey confirms CK Utd's plans for senior football

CK United Chairman Peter Harvey is targeting 2026 as the year that the club both a men’s and a women’s senior team, after the FAI’s historic announcement that from 2026, there will be a National League to bridge the gap between junior soccer and League of Ireland. This will serve as a third tier to the League of Ireland. For months, Harvey has been campaigning and pushing for a third tier and has targeted that for CK United’s foray into senior men’s football for the club. Speaking to The Nationalist, Harvey welcomed the announcement and says that it’s all systems go now. 

“That’s very much on our agenda. The plan is we’re working towards Tier 3 in 2026 as we have been for the last two or three years. We’re ready to go bar the stadium, and we’re working on that down in Tullow. We won’t be able to play First Division games down there but we’ll be able to play third tier games as far as we’re aware. Obviously we’ve already made it known that we want to compete in Tier 3, that’s a given. Hopefully by the summer we’ll have our own grounds up and running. It gives everyone a focal point, but everything has been aimed at 2026 anyway so it doesn’t change our plan, it just sets them in stone. It’s also a lot easier to say to players this time in three years, you’ll be playing in the third tier, so it gives them an incentive to stay at the club, whereas previously, other clubs have been able to attract them away because we never had a first team. I would think a lot of the players who are already in the club will be playing first team, but there’s also a lot of talent in the Carlow and Kilkenny leagues. So the talent is out there, we just have to go and scout it and see if they wanna play. Next year, once everyone knows we’ve been accepted and we’re in, when we’re recruiting, that will be part of our recruitment talk, that they’ll be able to play first team football. We want players to come through the system, we want our 17’s and 20’s to play first team, because it shows that we’ll give them a chance, and they’re good enough to move onto the next level, which is what it’s about.”

 He added that there’s not much time to get everything organised. 

“Realistically you only have a year to get prepared, because it’s coming in August ‘26. This time next year is when everybody will be getting told you’re in or you’re out, so you’ll only have six months to prepare. It’s not just about the grounds, it’s about getting a team ready. A lot of these lads are playing junior soccer or underage National League. So you’ll be identifying players and getting them in. It’s a lot of work but you just have to go do it. We’ve got such a good crew of people on board now and there’s people with roles and they’re going out and doing it. We already have a management team, we’re not announcing it yet, but we know who’s gonna manage our first team, we also know who’s going to manage our women’s team. A lot of work to do though over the next 18 months.” 

He’s hoping that 2026 will also see them secure senior League of Ireland women’s football too, but says that’s more reliant on a first division being created, after being denied a spot in this season’s Women’s National League. 

“We’re hoping by 2026, a women’s first division is up and running. We need six teams who are playing underage to step up and then we’ll have a first division. There’s 12 teams playing underage Women’s National League who don’t have first teams so they’re the ones you’ll target. There will probably be a third tier for that in the future too.” 

Harvey, a former Carlow Juveniles League Chairman, welcomed the news of Calendar Football being introduced, saying it can only be good for the game and benefits the local clubs to be on the same schedule as the League of Ireland sides and says it’s vitally important that the league academies survive. 

“It helps the clubs and us because we’re not taking their players off them mid season. They’ll sign for us in December/January and be ours for the year. I think from what we’ve seen in the presentations, it won’t affect them as much as they think it will. They’ll just have to arrange their fixture schedule around the new season. It’s not set in stone that you have to start in February and play every weekend until November. You’re allowed to take as much time off as you like. When I was over the Juveniles League, we took 3-4 weeks off in December/January. It’s just realigning things. I understand why there’s a lot of opposition to it, but when we were opposed to it, the GAA was just summer. Nowadays, GAA is 12 months of the year. We in the National League need our leagues to be strong as we need players to progress to the next level. Without the hard work of those academies at 12/13/14, they won’t be ready to play National League at 14. They need to work with us to get to where they need to go. We’ll give them the help that they need. We can send some of our coaches to them sometimes. Even when we don’t take players from them, there’s still a role for them as they can be late bloomers sometimes. So it’s vitally important that they survive.”