Fanciful economics will be the debt of clubs

On Soccer: With the FAI revealing out at Citywest they had recorded a surplus of €4.2 million for last year it should have been a good-news weekend for Irish football and its governing body.

Instead, media coverage of the game in almost all of the papers centred on the shock departure from the Eircom League of Dublin City and the continuing troubles at Shelbourne, whose inability to pay their players on time over the last few months appeared to threaten the stability of the Irish game's biggest club.

At Tolka Park yesterday all was sweetness and light, Ollie Byrne and the PFAI confirming the wages issue had been successfully resolved and the club's chief executive offering guarantees to his staff there would be no repeat of the difficulties that had prompted squad members and backroom staff to take limited industrial action in recent weeks.

Despite the problems Byrne remains bullish about the club's future, insisting (as he has done for a couple of months now) a multi-million-euro investment is close to being finalised. Talks are also well advanced in relation to a move to Santry stadium, where the club expect to secure a lease long enough to allow freedom to develop the stadium into a home capable of generating considerable revenue.

Clonliffe Harriers and Athletics Ireland have received assurances their access to the stadium will be unaffected, which means the Fingal County Council-backed redevelopment will have to be staggered over a number of years. Byrne, however, now believes an application to rezone Tolka Park will be made by Christmas.

There is a certain urgency about it all given a consortium led by Ossie Kilkenny has already paid for first refusal on the site. The deal was struck several years ago but the group has since made a number of payments that have allowed Shelbourne to make up their annual trading deficit, and with each passing year, it is feared, the final sale will be worth significantly less in real terms.

Given their problems this season, few would now argue that Shelbourne have any real option but to sell up and set up shop elsewhere. The details of the Santry deal, if and when it is concluded, will be interesting though, because the club have already toyed with two agreements that would have resulted in moves to green-field sites as well as the proposed ground-sharing deal with Bohemians.

And while many neutrals who wish Shelbourne well from afar because of the club's importance to Irish football would respect Byrne's ability to keep the show on the road in what have often been difficult circumstances, it would surely be preferable if the likes of Finbarr Flood, Colin Murphy and Shay Weafer - all highly respected within the game - had not resigned from the club's management committee just when such fundamental decisions in relation to the club's future were about to be taken.

Shelbourne do at least have a major asset to work with and so reports of their imminent demise always seemed exaggerated.

Dublin City, on the other hand, had only the obsessive central figure working day and night to make an unlikely dream come true.

If Ronan "Rocky" Seery has managed a smile at all since deciding that Dublin City had reached the end of the road in the middle of last week then it must surely have been prompted by the irony of his former manager Roddy Collins lecturing on the subject of honour via the national media.

It says something about the way Seery did his business that, even after the club went wallop and so many of the players Collins claims to feel so much concern for found themselves out of work, people bearing the club's former chief executive any ill will remain so thin on the ground.

The club is said to have folded after a pair of investors who had committed at the start of the season to putting in substantial funds (rumoured to exceed €200,000) failed to come up with the cash. Total debts are estimated at between €1 million and €1.2 million, with Seery himself reckoned to be personally liable for something in excess of €600,000.

Sympathy for the man whose father was one of the founders of Home Farm is almost universal even if many brand the entire venture as foolhardy.

Still, while only a handful of the players have found new clubs so far, their PFAI representative, Keith Doyle, observed yesterday that even as he was telling them they were out of jobs most felt sorry for a man whose explanation for finally admitting defeat, delivered before he left the meeting in tears, was that the time had at last come to put his family and health ahead of the club.

The club's failure, though, is hardly victimless. Aside from the players there are a number of substantial creditors who have no chance of seeing their money and a league that has, once again, been thrown into turmoil by its inability to clearly anticipate a situation that was hardly unthinkable.

A High Court action over the issue of points won and lost against Dublin City remains a possibility because, in no small measure, while quitting the league is against the rules no allowance is made for what might be done when clubs with nothing left to lose just go ahead and do it anyway.

All one can hope for in the circumstances is that some important lessons will be learned but the fact is that just anyone who is anyone in the game here has been around long enough to have learned them already.

And, sadly, nobody has yet expressed the belief that the fanciful form of economics so long dominant in the majority of Eircom League clubs will go out of fashion now just because of what happened at Dublin City.