Numbers game misses big picture

On Soccer: In Britain it's still safe to assume that when the winter of discontent is mentioned they're talking about the one 17 years ago involving industrial-relations mayhem and a three-day week. Should the phrase come up in the context of the national league, however, you'd be hard pressed to be so specific.

And not even summer soccer, it seems, will prevent a row flaring up in the game here once the nights begin to close in. This year's skirmish is still in embryo but the battle lines may well have been drawn by next week when the deadline passes for the 22 senior clubs to submit proposals on how the league should be run in 2006.

The thinking is that if the recommendations of the Genesis report - the focus of which is the creation of an elite 10-team league with a regionalised first division involving another 20 teams - are to be implemented in 2007, as some would hope, then there is little need to stick with the 12 and 10 format for next year.

The net effect is that clubs are free to propose whatever format they desire by next Monday, after which the league's agm in January will be entitled to decide which one is employed for the new season two months later.

None of it will matter, of course, unless a serious move is made toward the implementation of "Genesis II" in 2007, but of course if that Genesis target is met then we may be in for a further rerun of the great Premier-Division-numbers debate.

It's all fairly familiar stuff, with various clubs expressing their usual preferences for a 10-, 12-, 16- or 22-team top flight. The formulas are numerous, and just about the only thing the clubs can ever actually agree on is the idea that when you're talking about football league divisions size really does matter.

One of the more curious aspects of this latest edition of the debate, however, is the strong suggestion there is support within Merrion Square for a flirtation with a single-division, 22-team league. Some work has even been done on how the league might work and, needless to say, it's not as simple as it might be. For the competition would in reality be a regionalised league of two 11-club sections leading to some class of two-tier structure in the second half of the season.

The theory, presumably, is that allowing everybody to start from scratch in the season before such a major upheaval will provide a fairer basis for selecting teams for the so-called "elite league".

The difficulty is that on-field success should, according to Genesis, just be one of several factors in deciding who makes the cut. Issues like financial stability and infrastructure would presumably be seen as rather more important if the spirit of the report is not to be lost, though it would be a huge surprise if the precise selection formula is worked out by the time of the league's agm in January.

Without it, it will be impossible for clubs to work out whether they should be spending heavily on achieving a high position in the league or slashing wages in order to meet other, very different, requirements.

Crucially, though, precisely the same points are likely to be raised in relation to the conduct of the season just ending if any remotely serious reorganisation is proposed.

Are Sligo Rovers, for instance, really going to be told they have spent heavily on their squad for absolutely nothing because all of the teams they finished above in division one this season are going to be playing at the same level next year? It might just strike them as a little, er, harsh.

Similarly, if relegation is quietly dispensed with in a hotel function room sometime in late January, we can probably expect an adverse reaction from those Premier Division outfits who have scrambled clear of the drop zone.

And that is before we even get into discussing how the country's leading clubs will react to the prospect of facing its lowliest ones when they manifestly detest the idea.

The reality then is that too many clubs will (as usual) see themselves as potential victims of the changes for the proposals to be passed. And there is unlikely, no matter what is proposed, to be any substantial change until the FAI is ready to drive through the broader findings of Genesis.

For all its good points, however, even the report would appear to be missing the point at this stage. It is not so much that its answers to the game's ills are flawed but rather that its authors were commissioned to ask the wrong questions.

Most significantly, the idea that a blueprint for the long-term development of the club game here would be drawn up without even seriously exploring the idea of an all-island league seems incomprehensible.

Pretty much everything - political developments, the willingness of the leading clubs on both sides of the Border, the success of the Setanta Cup and the simple mathematics involved in the division of support, investment and playing talent on an island of just 5.5 million - points to it being the way forward.

In the long term an all-island league might not greatly change the line-up of "elite" clubs here, for after an initial period of something approaching numerical equality it would take a considerable step forward for any Northern club other than Linfield, Glentoran and Portadown to prosper on such a stage.

Planning without even those three now, though, looks like a serious miscalculation.