SOCCER:As the new season prepares to kick off next Friday, EMMET MALONEtalks to a player, a manager and a supporter about how the league can cope in the current recession

THE PLAYER:WITH ALL the competition for school leavers these days, colleges are forever trying to make their courses sound more relevant to potential students but when Stephen Paisley decided to combine a League of Ireland career with a specialised business degree, Property Economics, the people in the DIT might well have been sold it to the Dubliner as a detailed study of the writing on the wall.

For Paisley, education had always been a priority and when he came home from Manchester City at the age of 20, it was as much to return to school as to reignite his professional career.

The League of Ireland, he recalls, “seemed to be just kicking off” and there were opportunities to do both, first with Longford Town, then St Patrick’s Athletic and Sporting Fingal, all three of whom allowed him to pursue full-time education even when he was ostensibly playing the game full-time too.

He left the first two after they hit the buffers financially. Sporting Fingal’s demise, he says, saddened without greatly surprising him. By then, however, he was, unlike so may of his friends, no longer so dependent on the game, having opted to pursue a career in, of all things, banking while dropping down a division to play part-time with Shelbourne.

“For me personally,” he says, “it’s not that great a surprise the way things have gone, but I’d experienced the harsh realities of football at an early stage. I saw the possibility for things to go the way they did so I started to put a Plan B in place and I’ve been fortunate with the way that has worked out.”

Football didn’t feature really on his college course but it was easy to make the connection.

“I knew the property bubble was beginning to burst and it wasn’t hard to see how dependent a lot of clubs were on that bubble. Even back at Longford I thought it was unsustainable to be fair but I was only too happy to be earning a decent wage.

“When Garrett Kelleher got on board (at St Patrick’s) I didn’t know too much about him but then I did a bit of background work on him and realised he had a vast amount of money behind him so I did think for a while that it might all kick off.”

Briefly, it seemed he might be right although the reaction to the news that the club had offered Cork City’s midfielder Joe Gamble the equivalent of more than €4,000 a week to sign was generally negative outside the club with few able to see how such spending could be sustained.

Gamble, as it happened, didn’t sign, and barely three years on, there is not one player earning even €1,000 per week according to the players’ union, the PFAI.

“I suppose I’ve been lucky really in that I’ve known from an early stage that football has a habit of letting you down at key times,” Paisley observes without any hint of bitterness. “Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved if it had all worked out, to have got to play in big European games and all the rest of it, but I knew enough to be planning for that not to be the way it would work out.”

Having gone on to complete a Masters in DCU during his time at Sporting, Paisley spotted his opportunity to make the move he had been waiting for when just the sort of job he wanted in the financial sector came up. It would mean a significant cut in money but playing part-time would address the shortfall.

“To be honest with you, getting it was a relief,” he says. “I had identified the job as something that I really wanted to do. If I didn’t get it I had thoughts of moving abroad. But I did and the feeling was mainly relief that I wasn’t going to be dependent on something so precarious anymore.

“It’s a great thing to get paid for playing football but the reality is that you’re only as far from not getting paid as your next injury or the next club going under. I know a lot of players who have had no income from anything else since they were 18 or 19 and they’re married with kids now. By and large they did well over the last few years but it’s not as if they were earning such mad money that they managed to put much away.”

For all of that, he insists, the league offers opportunities that are to be seized if just a little caution is exercised. “Really, I don’t want to paint too bleak a picture of it all because I know lots of people who have done very well out of football here and I know that I wouldn’t be where I am or have the lifestyle that I’ve had without it.

“But if you look at the other sports here, the Gaelic players and rugby players pursue their playing careers hand in hand with something else. It’s common sense.

“The standard in the league has been superb for the last few years and if all of those players are going to be part-time now and the standard is going to drop slightly – which is all I think it will be, slightly – then for me that’s a price worth paying for something more much more sustainable.”