The Club With No First Team and 240 Internationals

Real Betis. Atlético Madrid. Captaining Leicester City. Spending a World Cup knockout game trying to keep Lionel Messi quiet.

They’re some of the places Belvedere players have ended up.

Troy Parrott joined Real Betis this summer after leaving AZ Alkmaar. Matt Doherty had his spell with Atlético Madrid. Paddy McCarthy, another Belvo graduate, became Leicester City captain in his early twenties. And in July, former Belvedere defender Roberto ‘Pico’ Lopes was regularly the Cape Verde player closest to Messi as they took Argentina to extra time at the World Cup. Lopes even produced a goal-line clearance to keep the world champions out late in normal time.

They’re a Dublin schoolboy club.

Belvedere say 240 former players have represented Ireland at some level, more than 350 have played professionally, over 80 are registered with League of Ireland clubs and 100-plus have received US scholarships. Their website still lists 16 senior internationals, although Josh Keeley’s Ireland debut in May appears to have taken that to 17.

There has never been a senior Belvedere team waiting for any of them.

For more than 50 years, getting good enough at Belvo has usually meant getting good enough to leave.

Fairview, Mosney and Two Buses Home

Belvedere entered the Dublin and District Schoolboys League in 1971 with four teams. Other local football sections merged into the club, experienced coaches arrived and within five years they were represented across every Premier age group from Under-12 to Under-18. Residential coaching trips to Mosney started in 1974 and continued until 2002.

That extra football came before academies had GPS vests, analysts and enough job titles to make finding out who actually coaches the Under-15s surprisingly difficult.

Noel O’Reilly became one of the defining figures around Belvedere before later working with Brian Kerr and Ireland’s European Championship-winning underage teams. Former Ireland manager Stephen Kenny was among the players he coached.

Kenny’s description of training in Fairview says plenty about the resources involved.

“No dressing rooms, no showers, nothing - just a pitch.”

He travelled across Dublin by two buses and made the same journey home.

The football stretched beyond the sessions too. Darren Berrigan grew up around Croke Villas and has spent most of his life around Belvedere. His memories are of younger and older kids mixing whenever somebody found a ball.

“You’re picked on whatever side, and you fend for yourself.”

Belvo took players coming from that environment, put good coaches around them and kept making the football difficult enough that the better ones had to adapt.

The Big Numbers

Putting Belvedere directly above Benfica, Barcelona or Ajax in an imaginary academy league table would be great fun for about five minutes and fairly useless afterwards.

The measurements are different.

CIES classifies a player as club-trained when he has spent at least three seasons there between 15 and 21, then considers playing level and minutes. In its 2025 study, River Plate had 97 academy-trained players active across 49 leagues, Benfica 93 and Barcelona 76.

Belvedere’s 350 professionals is a lifetime club figure and its 240 internationals include youth levels.

The figures still put the scale into perspective.

Across the 20 seasons to January 2025, CIES counted 166 Real Madrid-trained footballers who appeared in Europe’s big five leagues, 156 from Barcelona, 103 from Manchester United and 73 from Ajax.

Belvedere have been producing professional players without the part of an academy system that normally makes the whole thing work financially: the senior team.

There’s no first-team debut, no sell-on clause from your own professional contract and no €20 million transfer to fund the next training ground.

The player leaves. Belvo starts again.

And somehow that process has kept producing completely different careers.

From Hoolahan to Parrott

Wes Hoolahan grew up around Portland Row and St Mary’s Mansions and spent most of his schoolboy football with Belvedere.

“There was always someone there with a ball waiting to play a game.”

He wasn’t the prototype for an English academy move. His size counted against him, so his route went through Shelbourne, Livingston and Blackpool before Norwich City and the Premier League.

Matt Doherty had already been with Home Farm and wasn’t a regular Ireland underage international. Wolves eventually spotted him playing senior football for Bohemians.

Cillian Sheridan remembers another Belvedere side where going to Britain for a trial was almost normal.

“Most of the fellas in that Belvedere team went over before me.”

He ended up at Celtic.

Parrott was different again. He arrived at eight, regularly played above his age and left for Tottenham in 2017. Nine years later, Real Betis signed him on a contract to 2031 after his spell in the Netherlands.

Pico Lopes didn’t leave Ireland at all. He went through Bohemians and Shamrock Rovers before Cape Verde eventually found him, rather famously, through a LinkedIn message. This summer he was standing beside Messi in Miami at a World Cup.

There isn’t one Belvedere career to copy.

There are just a lot of them.

What Does Belvo Become Now?

The pathway Belvedere spent decades feeding has changed.

Brexit stopped Irish players moving to British clubs at 16, while League of Ireland academies now take far more responsibility for elite development. St Patrick’s Athletic formalised a partnership with Belvedere back in 2017 as the national underage leagues were expanding.

Ger O’Brien, now St Pat’s sporting director, described exactly what Pat’s were inheriting.

“Belvedere FC has had a fantastic tradition of developing some of the best young players in the country.”

Keeley later went from Belvedere to Pat’s before Tottenham. More young players will now take similar routes through League of Ireland academies rather than going directly to Britain.

Belvedere have another problem to solve at home.

Chairman John Hayden said in 2023 that the club had around 350 children from 43 nationalities while paying €51,500 every year in rent. He warned that continuing like that wasn’t sustainable.

In November 2025, Dublin City Council approved a 99-year lease of land at Alfie Byrne Road to Belvedere and East Wall Bessborough.

For a club that has spent half a century preparing players for their next home, having one of its own feels like a decent place to start.