Originally Posted by Emmet Malone
ON SOCCER: WHILE MOST of us who attended Sunday's FAI Cup final are gradually defrosting, the country's 22 senior clubs will be bracing themselves this week for a prolonged financial chill that may extend well beyond the winter break.
The economic downturn combined with the failure of the league as a whole to stay on course for its long-term growth targets has hit pretty much every club with many now looking at implementing budget cuts for next season.
The problems at individual clubs have been widely reported but Sunday's cup final went a fair way towards summing up the league's broader predicament. The quality of the game between Bohemians and Derry City at the RDS provided further evidence of the extent to which the "product" has improved in recent years but the fact just 10,281 ventured out to see what was arguably the most attractive pairing possible contest the final highlighted the problem of dwindling attendances.
The FAI continue to claim crowds jumped significantly last year and held steady over the course of this season but it's difficult to find a club director who will privately endorse the official line.
Then there is the assertion that about a third of the league's clubs are profitable. In fact, FAI chief executive John Delaney admitted last week some that make substantial trading losses are being counted as profitable as long as somebody makes good the deficit by the end of the financial year. It had to be pointed out to him the norm elsewhere - he brought up Chelsea which is a good case in point - is simply to consider the club to be loss making.
Delaney has also said recently he sees the league as being able to sustain no more than three or four fully professional teams, a major step back from when he was hailing the growing number of clubs going full-time at the start of this season as a sign of the real progress being made under the association's stewardship.
Consistency, though, is not exactly the leadership's long suit. Over the weekend, league director Fran Gavin was quoted as insisting "wage difficulties are not unique to the League of Ireland", before going on to insist "everybody running a business", is experiencing problems just now, it's just the papers make so much fuss over those encountered by clubs.
Setting aside for a moment the fact somewhere short of half of businesses generally have at some stage failed to pay, or still owe substantial back money to their employees, it's interesting to note back when he was head of the players' union, Gavin once observed being a professional footballer in Ireland is "about as insecure a livelihood as anyone could have".
His major change of role has, of course, required Gavin to look at things from a different angle. However, it still stands out that when dismissing out of hand a major initiative like the attempt to launch an All Ireland league by a credible third party this year, he observed that as "salary cost is the single biggest issue facing the League of Ireland", any proposal that "fails to mention the matter, let along tackle the problem, cannot be taken seriously".
In September 2005, on the other hand, when reacting to the initial proposal by Genesis a salary cap be introduced the then PFAI chairman said, "I have to laugh because the people proposing a wage cap are never the ones who are going to be affected by it".
None of which is to suggest in any way that Gavin and Delaney don't desperately want the league to prosper. Rather, it is to contend that their determination to stick to what is widely perceived an overly positive line is chipping away at their credibility, both amongst clubs and the wider public.
Over the coming weeks beleaguered club officials are going to be looking for reassurance from the pair that they can deliver a good deal more next year than repeated assurances that the problems currently being experienced are merely the inevitable upshot of a period of transition.
Sure, wage costs may be about to be addressed as 80 per cent of players find themselves out of contract and clubs take the opportunity to revise their spending downwards but if that, as many feel it inevitably will, has a negative impact on the quality of play, then crowds will be harder than ever to attract to games.
As it is, examples of the scale of the problem, both real and perceived, are everywhere. The well resourced highlights programme everybody had been crying out for all those years has, for instance, been attracting just 40,000 viewers in recent weeks. Despite narrowly missing out on promotion, Shelbourne's biggest single night's income this year came not from their largest league attendance against Limerick last Friday week but rather, by quite some distance, from their cut of the gate for a game between Liverpool and Manchester United "legends" staged at Tolka Park.
And now, in the first year of the trumpeted "pyramid system" Mervue United are pondering whether to accept the place in the league they have earned by beating Kildare County. Who could blame them? The fact is it's a chilly world out there for League of Ireland clubs just now and the FAI are increasingly perceived to be preoccupied with telling everyone how much colder it would be if it weren't for them.
