Inside Fleetwood Town's Ownership of Waterford FC
The recruitment pipeline, the shared executive function, and what's at stake as the 2026 season turns difficult.
Last Saturday, Waterford FC announced that head coach Jon Daly and assistant Richard Foster had departed the club with immediate effect. The Blues sit bottom of the SSE Airtricity Premier Division after 14 games of the 2026 season, still searching for a first win. First-team coaches Brian Murphy and David Breen took interim charge for the Bank Holiday Monday fixture against Dundalk at the RSC.
A struggling Irish top-flight club parting ways with a manager is not, on its own, a particularly unusual story. The League of Ireland produces these moments every season. What makes Waterford different is the structure sitting behind that decision, and the fact that it is one most football fans, even ones who follow the game closely, have never had laid out clearly.
Waterford share an owner, a chief executive, and an active player-trading relationship with Fleetwood Town of England’s third tier. The two clubs have been operating as a single football group since August 2022. Tommy Lonergan plays for Waterford on loan from Fleetwood. Phoenix Patterson plays for Fleetwood as a Waterford-developed asset. Recruitment, executive strategy and long-term direction run through the same group of people in both Lancashire and the south east of Ireland. It is one of the quieter cross-border football projects in Europe, and one of the more interesting once you start looking at it properly.
This is the story of why it exists, what each club gets from it, and why the next few months at the RSC matter more than a 14-game winless run might suggest.
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A club with history, and a long fall from it
Waterford FC were founded in 1930. Between 1966 and 1973 they won the League of Ireland six times. They beat Manchester United and Celtic at Lansdowne Road on European nights that older fans in the south east still talk about. They lifted the FAI Cup in 1937 and again in 1980.
The decades that followed told a different story. Yo-yo football across the divisions, the 2008 credit crunch, the 2012 promotion playoff loss to Dundalk that The 42 later identified as the moment two clubs’ fortunes diverged in opposite directions. By 2016, Waterford were in the First Division, debts unpaid, attendances around 200, with the club running a public appeal for €80,000 just to stay in business.
Lee Power, then chairman of Swindon Town, took ownership in November 2016. He had Waterford grandparents, played underage football for Ireland, and saw the RSC’s facilities as a genuine asset. Power restored the historic Waterford FC name and crest, brought in Pat Fenlon and Alan Reynolds, and won the 2017 First Division title. A fourth-place Premier Division finish in 2018 should have meant a return to European football for the first time in decades. UEFA refused the licence under their three-year rule, ruling that the 2016 corporate restructuring made the club too new an entity. The European place went to St Patrick’s Athletic.
Power sold to Richard Forrest’s R&S Holdings in June 2021. The club was relegated to the First Division within months. By summer 2022, Waterford needed another buyer.
August 2022: Fleetwood arrives
Andy Pilley, then owner of Fleetwood Town in League One, completed the takeover in August 2022. From the outset, the deal was framed as part of a group structure rather than a separate investment. Fleetwood’s own announcement described Waterford as joining the Fleetwood Town Football Group’s worldwide portfolio. Steve Curwood, Fleetwood’s long-serving CEO, joined the Waterford board the same day. Jamie Pilley joined alongside him.
In May 2024, ownership transferred to Jamie Pilley via The Willows 96 Holdings Limited. Curwood remained in place and his role continued to expand. By late 2025 he was describing himself publicly, on the Don’t Forget Your Tickets podcast, as Chief Executive of both clubs. The connective tissue between Fleetwood and Waterford runs through one person now managing both operations day to day.
Speaking to the Waterford News & Star in February 2025 at a fans’ forum on Bank Lane, Jamie Pilley described the model in his own words. “Sometimes it’s almost as if you were playing Football Manager, but you’re taking it to another level, quite literally.”
That quote is the project in one sentence. To understand why Fleetwood are in Waterford, you need to take the Football Manager metaphor seriously.
What Fleetwood actually get from Waterford
The first thing they get is a talent pipeline that English League One clubs cannot easily replicate. Curwood himself has spoken publicly about how Brexit reshaped Fleetwood’s recruitment strategy. Irish-eligible players do not need GBE points to play in England, which makes them disproportionately valuable to clubs operating below the Premier League and Championship. A Fleetwood-Waterford structure gives a club the size of Fleetwood access to Irish scouting networks, trial pathways, and a senior professional environment in which young players can be developed and assessed inside the EU.
Pilley named the names himself in his February 2025 interview. Stephen McMullen, performing for Waterford against Sligo Rovers. Tommy Lonergan, on loan from Fleetwood, scoring goals in Ireland. Ronan Coughlan, contributing for Fleetwood until injury. Phoenix Patterson, still featuring in the Fleetwood team. Ronan Mansfield, over from Waterford with Fleetwood’s U20s. The pipeline is real, traceable, and producing minutes for players moving in both directions.
The second thing Fleetwood get is an infrastructure asset. When Lee Power arrived in 2016, he said the RSC’s facilities were better than Swindon’s. He was not flattering. The Waterford Regional Sports Centre has a 5,154 capacity, hosted the 2019 UEFA U17 European Championship, and remains one of the better grounds in the League of Ireland. Most Irish top-flight clubs play in venues they do not control or develop. Waterford’s stadium situation is, by domestic standards, an asset rather than a liability. Fleetwood’s investment has added to it. Off-pitch improvements, an alcohol licence so fans can buy a pint at Friday night games, and a continuing programme of stadium development have all happened under the current ownership.
The third thing Fleetwood get is shared back-office economics. Sports science, analytics, commercial frameworks, and executive expertise scale across two clubs more efficiently than across one. Curwood’s EFL board background and his role on the European Club Association’s youth working group represent administrative seniority that a club of Waterford’s revenue could not realistically hire on its own. Pilley’s Football Manager line captures both halves of the value: a single recruitment vision applied across two leagues, and the operational coherence of a small group of decision-makers running both clubs as one talent ecosystem. It is how smaller clubs in modern football survive.
What relegation would mean
The asset value of Waterford to the Fleetwood group depends on Premier Division status. That is the part of the equation the Daly sacking now puts under pressure.
Premier Division Waterford means LOITV exposure, a European pathway via cup runs or league finishes, transfer-market visibility for players Fleetwood develop, and credibility with the FAI and other clubs. First Division Waterford is a different proposition. The 2022-23 season, when Pilley was still owner and the club was in the second tier, came close to breaking the integration logic before the November 2023 promotion playoff against Cork City rescued it.
A second relegation in five years would change the calculation. Loan moves from Fleetwood become harder to justify when the destination is the second tier. Commercial partners like Puma, WhiteBox Group, and the Hess Sports Group who back the women’s team that joined the Premier Division in 2025, all signed up to a Premier Division Waterford. The brand work that has clearly been invested in over the past two seasons, including the new Puma kit launched ahead of 2025 with its Waterford Crystal-inspired pattern and the new roundel crest, all assumes top-flight visibility.
The Daly exit, in that context, can be read more than one way. Read sceptically, it is decisive ownership acting fast. Read fairly, it is the kind of intervention historic Waterford regimes failed to make when results turned, leaving problems to compound until the situation became unsalvageable. The next appointment will tell readers a lot about how the group is thinking. An experienced League of Ireland head coach signals one strategy. An appointment from inside the Fleetwood network signals another.
Waterford in 2026 is in a better position to recover from a 13-game winless run than the club has been at almost any point in the past two decades. The infrastructure is real. The academy has been continuously rebuilt, with Daryl Murphy still involved as forwards coach and a structured age-group programme from MU14 upwards. The women’s team has launched. The stadium is improving. The kit deal with Puma is serious. The ownership has demonstrated it will act when results are not coming. None of that existed in 2016, when the club was passing the hat for €80,000.
Premier Division football, though, is the foundation everything else stands on. The next 14 games will determine whether the project Jamie Pilley described at the Bank Lane fans’ forum, where he told supporters “we’re really trying to build the football club”, gets to keep building, or whether the conversation has to start again from the First Division.
For Fleetwood, Waterford is a serious football asset most English fans do not know they have. For Waterford, Fleetwood is the structural reason the worst stretch in years is not an existential crisis. For the wider League of Ireland, it is a model that nobody else has copied.
Which leaves the question worth putting to readers: is the Fleetwood-Waterford project the future of how clubs like this survive in modern football, or a one-off shaped by circumstances that will not repeat?
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