Niall Quinn by Jon Berkeley

It feels like I might have stumbled into some Irish version of MTV's Cribs as I walk up the long driveway to Niall Quinn's country pile. Set in Kildare countryside so verdant and horsey that, my driver notes, "you can almost smell the money".

Last week Quinn and his wife Gillian took it off again. "We wanted to get a place for about a million in Dublin," the footballer-turned-businessman tells me when we meet in his candlelit den. "And with the Carlow thing (he wracked up debts of some €2.5m in a property investment there) we could put the other million to good use. There are six ensuite bedrooms here. We were caught up in that 2002/2003 Ireland. The bank has been fine. They know I have a certain repayment capacity."

Naturally, given his celebrity, the Quinns had their share of curious snoopers and spurious offers. One person, who offered in excess of a million under the asking price, told the estate agent that he heard Niall was broke and would take anything.

"I told him to ask the man to read the papers tomorrow and he'd see about Lawlors" - back in August Quinn was one of a group of investors who came to the rescue of the popular hotel in Naas.

Perhaps the former footballer was trying to put things in local perspective but, were he so inclined, he might have gestured toward any of the other pots he has in the fire. His media company Niall Quinn Media Services (NQMS) posted profits of €200,000 last year and his satellite broadband company Qsat is on track to record profits of €300,000 this year.

The Carlow debts, are, you sense, a bit of a tiresome millstone, but he's won praise locally for not attempting to walk away from the debts and he's magnanimous about them: "You win some, you lose some. I sleep easy at night."

Roy Keane - who we'll get to presently - famously called Quinn "Mother Teresa" for donating his testimonial proceeds to charity but while the moniker stuck, it didn't sum up the Dubliner exactly. There's no calculated virtue about Quinn, but he's always seemed like the boy next door made good - well spoken, grounded, down-to-earth, a family man.

In a sport replete with love rats, ragged wild men and preening pretty boys, these qualities might well qualify him for Keane's sneering sanctification but Quinn was never some colourless good guy. His is a Great Expectations-tinged epic that begins in a smokey working men's club in London and ends in the wide open plains of Africa. He is one of the few footballers to transition from a successful playing career to the business big leagues.

His family have all moved away from Perrystown - the small working class area in Dublin 12 where he grew up. His sisters all married Tipperary men and his parents, who both came from the county, followed them back home. Quinn himself was gone by the time he was seventeen, over to stay with his auntie and uncle in London while he played for Arsenal's third team.

"I made my debut in 1985 on £150 a week", he recalls. "At the end of the season, the contract was up and with the Bosman rule it was a free transfer anywhere in Europe. But the clubs had so much power then and I was told I had two years to prove myself so I got no pay rise from junior team to senior team. But I was thrilled. I was getting loans out of guys in building sites."

He was let go to Manchester City in March 1990 and the money situation improved - he made £1,000 a week in the first year, steadily rising to £12,000 in the third, with a £23,000 signing bonus; chump change by today's Premiership standards but a fortune to him then and he showed his gratitude on the pitch, firing in 22 goals that season. Still he felt the need to supplement his wages with gambling winnings.

Then he met Gillian who "put manners on me", although not enough to stop him buying a racehorse after getting into a long and alcohol-fuelled (from Quinn's end at least) discussion with trainer Jim Bolger at the 1991 Texaco Sports Awards in Dublin.

What seemed like a rash decision would turn out to be a wise investment. The horse turned out to a champion though and "we sold him in America for £250,000 tax free." Suddenly the Quinns were able to put an offer in on a London house that they had previously only longingly admired. It was also the player's first inkling of the money that could be made outside football. After injuring his cruciate ligament he put together a syndicate which ended up buying twelve horses - all Coolmore sires ("I figured these would be the best value") - and everyone ended up making money out of it.

Jack Charlton soon put a stop to Quinn's gallop however, telling the footballer that his obsession with horses was affecting his play. He got out of the syndicate and refocused on football, but was soon faced with a dilemma. Manchester City wanted to get rid of him but he was reluctant to take the enormous pay day that a move to Kuala Lumpur would have brought. In the meantime an offer came through from Sunderland. It was less money but he and Gillian decided it would be better for their children, Aisling and Mikey, to grow up in England and they bought a farmhouse in Sedgefield and finished out his career.

I wonder if he ever ruefully wondered how much he could have made had he come to the game later. "Nothing would replace what I experienced in terms of fun, the dressing room, the national team, the pride - money was never the primary driver."

He and Gillian put everything they owned into a horse box and moved back to Ireland and it was then that Niall took "a six-month nosedive into depression. Financially I was fine. I had the money to build this house. It also felt like Ireland felt like the right place to be, things were taking off in terms of the economy. But I felt like I didn't really have a purpose any more.

"Then, six months in, Sky rang me. I went over for one game. I went and it was alright. My confidence was down, I thought people would laugh at me and that I was a footballing leper. I signed a contract and the money was ok. I got confidence back."

He felt sufficiently emboldened to put together The Drumaville Consortium, several of whom had been involved in his horse racing syndicate, to buy Sunderland AFC. "Patsy [Byrne, property developer and owner of Byrne Bros] was one of the influential people in terms of driving me on to Sunderland. He introduced me to Denis Brosnan who had done the same thing for JP McManus and Dermot Desmond at Man Utd."

"I became the manager and the chairman. I had to ring the clusters of small shareholders to persuade them to let our bid to go through. The club had broken its own record as the worst club in the premiership. And the first three players I met handed me transfer requests. Things weren't looking great."

Then Roy Keane came on board as manager. He and Quinn had diametrically opposed personalities and a long history together, with Quinn writing of the Saipan incident that the Corkman had "punished himself more than any of us by walking out." For Quinn, however, Keane's effectiveness at Sunderland more than obliterated any historical bad blood: "I hark back to him walking in the door and commanding the room and the club with his presence.

"We played Barnsley away and we had bought six players on transfer window day. The Christmas window came up and we got three more players. The [syndicate] boys were all flying over. The PR person told me that the three guys at the time were late for the bus and they sent them home. We brought up three young players and won anyway. The crowd sang for twenty minutes after the final whistle; that was the day he was at his absolute f**king best."

Then the economic crash happened and the consortium wanted to sell the club. Quinn returned home again and became involved with QSat, a satellite broadband company, ploughing his own money into it.

The company's biggest problem has been "that the Government continually announced that everyone was going to get fibre. If that happened it would cost more than the bank bailout - it's not going to happen. We support people who are right out in the sticks."

Quinn says the majority of QSat's engineers will now move to Netcelero. "Netcelero commercialises an offering from an Irish company called Multipath", he explains, "we have created a portal to visually monitor what Multipath does [combining DSL, Cable, 3G, 4G, Cell Phone, Mi-Fi into a single super fast connection]. It has no need for call centres or callouts - people buy a box and through that we multiply their broadband speeds."

Quinn has ambitions to tap into the telecommunications boom in Africa and initially planned to move into Kenya and travelled there several times with the then Kenyan ambassador to Ireland, Catherine Mwangi, on the basis that QSat might be able to improve the country's mobile offering.

Then, the Westgate shopping mall massacre happened and Mwangi's son, Mbugi, who had picked Quinn up from the airport when he visited the country, was murdered during it. Since then the company has refocused its efforts in Tanzania.

Now 48, he exudes a quiet self-belief: "I think when I look back the thing I'd like to say is that I got the most out of myself," he says. "I got the most out of myself as a footballer. I got the most out of myself with Sky and now I want to get the most out of myself in business."

Visit:www.qsat.ie

'Roy Keane getting Sunderland promoted erases Saipan and all that'

The most valuable business advice I ever got was… "to be a promoter, not a hustler. Meaning to show that I could do things for people and deliver and that it wasn't about my ego. Patsy Byrne taught me that. He also came out with the pearl, if you can't convince them, confuse them."

The scariest moment of my career was… "after I had dinner with the local press in Sunderland on the first night after the takeover. I went back to my hotel there was a copy of the Sunderland Echo there and it had my picture and a picture of the other 17 chairmen of the club since its foundation, with their big long Charles Stewart Parnell-style beards. And above my picture was the headline, 'Can This Man Deliver?' And that frightened the sh*te out of me."

My vices are… "I love a greyhound. We always have them as pets here after they've raced. I also love a few pints and live music."

The best present I received recently is... "for my last birthday we went to Whites in Wexford and got bed and breakfast and tickets to a concert for €75. That was brilliant fun."

My attitude to Roy Keane is… "my friends give out that I haven't had more of a go at Keane over the years, but I will always remember what he did at Sunderland.

"It stands above Saipan for me. It stands above Holland where he got us to the World Cup - not quite singlehandedly, but close to it.

"What he did for me with Sunderland, to give us the success and platform that he did and getting us promoted and getting the city back in love with its football club - that erases all the rest."

For pure entertainment... "I'd prefer to watch Dermot Desmond on the television than Ronaldo. I think I have more to learn from Dermot."

I get my suits… "In Jermyn Street in London. It sounds very fancy, but it's only because they have TM Lewin, who do 38 long in the sleeve. That was unheard of all my life. I was very proud of finding them."

Sunday Indo Business