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On Soccer It is just about 10 months now since Fran Rooney sat upstairs in Jury's hotel in Ballsbridge and spoke at some length of the many ways in which he envisaged the Eircom League benefiting from its greater integration with the FAI.

Brendan Dillon, an opponent of the merger, had just resigned and a subcommittee was established shortly afterwards, amid much optimism on the part of the leading clubs, to review the chief executive's plans for improved structures, funding and administration. It is a measure of how little progress was made that when he was down but not yet out a couple of weeks ago the clubs did their bit to hasten Rooney's departure by issuing what amounted to a statement of no confidence to the departing CEO.

The league has, of course, many problems but it has never quite been clear to those who have the interests of more than just the country's biggest clubs at heart just how the league might benefit by surrendering its independence.

Rooney hinted in January that, as part of a single body, progress could be made towards the goal of raising the funding needed if the domestic game was ever to transform itself. But the reality is that even then the league was struggling to secure the sort of backing it had previously enjoyed thanks to internal deals that had been done down the years.

Not much has gone right for it since, with the talks between club representatives and Rooney disappearing into a now abandoned cul-de-sac and many of the other issues on which the league was supposed to make progress, including licensing and government funding, slipping down the agenda because of the distractions facing the FAI's leadership.

One area in which Rooney assumed total control after January's reshuffle was television rights and the result is that league officials find themselves worse off than they were immediately prior to Dillon's departure when they were about to sit down to hammer out an arrangement with RTÉ.

The National broadcaster has been particularly supportive of the league when it comes to its radio division and the hope was that television sport might be interested in an arrangement that would involve one game a month being broadcast live on a Monday night.

Instead, Dillon's resignation meant that the league's a.g.m. was preoccupied with electing a successor and the rule changes aimed at smoothing the way to such a deal were never considered. Wider political considerations were critical to the election, as chairman, of Donal O'Luanaigh who certainly couldn't be accused of attempting to challenge either Rooney's authority of his media profile.

The result was that RTÉ continued to plan their coverage on an ad hoc basis and only got enthusiastic about Shelbourne's European games and while TV3 continued to give plenty of late night time to the league, almost all of it came in a programme that is three-parts pundit panel discussion, one-part punter home movies.

Briefly, there was excitement about Setanta's entry into the market but the new station seems to have lost interest swiftly, having made an initial commitment to cover three live games but having screened just one. Its sponsorship of the new all-Ireland competition is still potentially very significant even if the proposed February seems far from ideal.

In several other areas, particularly sponsorship and marketing (where difficulties over the association's Eircom deal hampered it severely), the league has also been handicapped by its inability to pursue its interests independently. With the FAI set to be led on an interim basis for anything between five months and a couple of years that needs to change now if professional football here isn't simply to become an increasingly peripheral part of a much bigger game.