Many League of Ireland fans would be quite happy to see the back of UCD, as they believe the Belfield club has no place in the top tier of Irish football. And now it looks like these naysayers will never have to set foot in Belfield Park again as the stadium is about to become consigned to history thanks to the ever-expanding campus - this time a biotechnology centre or some such.
Having spent three glorious years in UCD during the nineties, it marks a sad occasion personally to watch the old ground disappear, all in the name of education. In fact, every year since I have left I have noticed the playing fields disappear one by one, so it was only a matter of time before the college authorities got their hands on that 'half a rood of rock' that is Belfield Park.
But UCD AFC has a tradition of survival and the current stadium issue is testament to the few dedicated souls that run the college club. The team will move to the recently developed Belfield Bowl on the other side of the campus and share the ground with the AIL rugby team. The Bowl has 1500 seats - hopefully progressing to 4,500 over the coming years - and is located between the sports centre and the hockey pitch, or the National Hockey Stadium, to give it its full title. The move makes sense as it brings the football team over to the more populated side of UCD and will be much more accessible than Belfield Park, which was quickly getting lost beneath a swarm of newly-built student residences.
So while many fans want to see the back of UCD, the reality is that the club is very much alive off the pitch, and is comfortably maintaining their Premier Division status year after year on the pitch despite their limited resources and low attendances.
So how can a team with a couple of hundred supporters and no serious financial backers survive in the top division in a league that is becoming ever more professional in its set-up?
I believe that UCD are a very good barometer to gauge how well the league is doing and how high the standard of football is within the league.
With some of the budgets that teams - and not just the top teams - are operating on, the fact that a team with limited resources is still competing speaks volumes about the league itself.
UCD have, since the mid-nineties, been more or less a constant in the country's top division. League players Ciaran Martyn, Glen Fitzpatrick, Barry Ryan and Shay Kelly are all products of the UCD machine and looking at the current crop, there are several players within the squad who would get a game on most other sides in the league, Ireland Under-21 players Shane McFaul and Darren Quigley for example.
But as long as UCD - in their current predicament - survive in the Premier Division, it tells me that there is something wrong with the league itself. An Irish team will never qualify for the Champions League group stages or regularly compete with Danish, Dutch and Swedish teams in European competitions as long as teams like UCD, in their current guise, remain in the top division.
For a nation the size of Ireland and with the love of football that is present within the nation - or perceived love of the game - there is no reason why ten or twelve teams shouldn't be getting 6,000-10,000 supporters through the gates on a regular basis. As things stand, Cork are the only club coming close, while a strong Derry or Sligo side always give hope that they are close to achieving these sorts of attendances as well.
The Dublin clubs, it has to be said, are far from reaching those numbers, although with investment evident in Inchicore and new stadia on the horizon for Bohs and Rovers - I'm being as optimistic as possible here - there is hope that Dublin could get three teams with the required support to justify full-time football. Drogheda, meanwhile, will need to bring a successful side to their new stadium when it's built and, to be fair, they are going in the right direction.
But that's only half the quota required. So where does the rest come from? Waterford and Galway have been developing so hopefully the more comfortable environments will lead to increased attendances, but again we're relying on hope and not facts.
The match-day experience is vital for every club in the country to improve and while a lot of strides have been made - it's worth going to Tolka Park or Dalymount just for the Leo Burdock's experience - there is a long way to go before any of the nation's other football fans will come out and support the domestic league.
From a personal point of view, I'm holding out for an all-Ireland league with two or three strong Belfast sides and a couple of others making up what is needed for a fully professional, successful competition. I can't see it happening over the next few seasons but the Setanta Sports Cup has shown that it is possible and has definitely sown some seeds of thought in a lot of Irish clubs, if not yet the respective associations.
The fact that this column has those two dreaded words 'eircom' and 'League' contained in the title automatically turns a huge percentage of Irish football fans away with their hands covering their eyes and ears. So there's no point writing 'the league is great' and 'you can't beat live football' because most of the readers are those that trawl the country week-in, week-out following their team of choice.
And as much as I despise teams like Sunderland coming over and trying to sell the club as being Irish, the arrival of teams from England will always bring the Irish public into the Turner's Crosses or the Terryland Parks. So it's up to the clubs in question to do everything they can to get them to come back. Cork's performance against the Mackems was encouraging as was Drogheda's against Henrik Larsson and Co, so although the signs are that things might be on the up, there's a long way to go.
But where does that leave UCD in this fully-professional eircom League of the future? If any club in the country has the potential to generate huge sponsorship and sizable crowds to their games then it's UCD. That may sound bizarre but the brand UCD is one of the most recognisable in Ireland with thousands of graduates annually adding to the hundreds of thousands in their alumni records.
The football club has over 70 teams playing in the college league throughout the academic year as well as being the only league club in a catchment area that covers most of south Dublin. If UCD could manage to attract even the tiniest percentage of that brand to support the football team, they would be on to a winner.
Back to my college days and to a certain FAI Cup tie with Finn Harps. Myself and some more of the lesser players in the club convinced the powers that be - in those days that meant the Doc (Tony O'Neill RIP) - to stage the fixture on a Thursday night to attract the students to the game. Helped by the fact that we procured a large amount of drink for the post-match party - it helps when you are sponsored by Budweiser - we rallied a very sizeable crowd to come out and watch a game of football on a very wet January evening.
The experiment was a one-off but it showed there was potential. Hopefully UCD's move to the Belfield Bowl is the first small step to achieving that potential and moving into a new era of Irish football and not granting those begrudgers their wish by falling fowl to the professional age. Crowds of 80,000 regularly watch college football in the USA. Why not UCD? Go College!
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