Qualification will ensure £1.75m for Irish players

Ireland's players and technical team could be in line for an aggregate bonus of not less than £1.75 million if they reach the World Cup finals. As in other years, the players have declined to enter into bonus discussions with the FAI until such time as they qualify. But based on previous years' figures, the total may be the highest ever on offer for an Irish team.

A sum of £1.25 million was paid out in bonuses by the FAI after the 1990 World Cup finals in Italy and that figure had climbed to £1.46 million in America four years later. Now as then, the players' bonuses will be based on the number of games they played in the qualifying series in addition to those in the finals.

Members of the players' committee met FAI officials in Dublin last Saturday to review the arrangements already in place for the qualifying series. Bernard O'Byrne, the FAI's chief executive, said: "We talked mainly about the preliminaries but we will, of course, be delighted to resume discussions if we qualify for the finals in France."

O'Byrne confirmed that the number of tickets returned unsold by the Belgian authorities for today's game is closer to 1,300 than the 800 originally mentioned. Because of the Belgians' failure to deliver on an earlier agreement to market the seats in sequence, it is now deemed impractical to sell them to Irish fans, because it would undermine the crowd segregation plans being implemented this evening.

"It's infuriating that with so many people looking for tickets, we will have the spectacle of 1,300 empty seats. But having discussed the matter with Garda authorities there is, regrettably, no way that we can make the unsold seats available to our supporters," said O'Byrne.

An invitation for the Republic of Ireland to play Brazil in New York on April 29th next as part of a Nike series has been turned down with some regret by the FAI. Before doing so, they took the advice of Mick McCarthy on the feasibility on being able to assemble a strong team.

McCarthy's view was that the managers of Premiership clubs in particular were unlikely to release players at that stage of the season and he was loath to travel to New York with anything other than a strong squad.

"It's an offer we would be delighted to accept at another time but the manager was rightly concerned about the possible consequences if we put a weakened side in the field against the best team in the world," said O'Byrne.