FAI chief executive Bernard O'Byrne will again be forced to justify his persistence with the Eircom Park project when the association's Board of Management meets in Merrion Square today in the face of renewed claims that the money is running out.

To date, the FAI has spent some u £3.2 million on the proposed stadium, of which only u £600,000, the returnable deposit on the site, is recoverable in the event that planning permission is not obtained. Last December the association set an upper limit of u £3 million, excluding that deposit, on its expenditure on the project.

The latest difficulties arise in connection with an expected u £380,000 VAT refund, which some senior officials believe may not now be paid. If that were to be the case then the FAI would have virtually no cash left with which to continue their campaign to obtain planning permission.

In his financial report accompanying the accounts of the year ended March 31st, which will be presented to delegates at the association's AGM this Saturday in Citywest, Dublin, the FAI's honorary treasurer Brendan Menton warns that spending on Eircom Park for last year, which amounted to around u £1.8 million, left the organisation with only u £2.2 million in cash reserves. "In the event of planning permission being refused," he says, the association will be left "in a financially precarious position, as all the cash reserves generated during the late eighties and early nineties will have been spent on the stadium project".

O'Byrne, meanwhile, insists that there are no insurmountable problems with the project. As it happens there is a growing belief that the association will be successful in its initial attempt to gain planning permission from South Dublin County Council. And if permission is granted, the process could be completed by the middle of September.

After that, however, there is An Bord Pleanala to come and, even assuming that everything goes their way, it is difficult to see the association being in a position to commence work at the Citywest before the start or middle of next summer. If fighting a planning appeal meant expenditure returning to the levels at which it ran last year (roughly u £35,000 per week), then O'Byrne would be forced to have the u £3 million cap raised substantially.

"I don't see any point in jumping three steps ahead here," said O'Byrne yesterday. "The important point is that we remain on course to build Eircom Park and that it continues to be what 98 per cent of people involved in football in this country want us to do. This isn't a case of me dragging people along."

Still, there are clearly misgivings on the part of some people who are heavily involved in the game. Of the 21 members of the Board of Management, at least six now appear to be in favour of abandoning the project and joining forces with the government who have plans to build an 80,000 national stadium at Abbotstown.

Shelbourne chairman Gary Brown, who is not on the board but whose club has consistently questioned the wisdom of going ahead with Eircom Park, said yesterday that in the event that the stadium ends up costing closer to u £100 million than the u £65 million originally stated, "there is no chance that the association will own the ground in its own right. There's talk of an equity partner as it is - all we're asking is why can't that equity partner be the government?"

Along with FAI president Pat Quigley and Michael Hyland of the National League, O'Byrne clearly continues to believe that the potential rewards of going it alone are too great to ignore. The difficulty is that, having halved the cash reserves last year, he risks landing the association in a situation in which An Bord Pleanala could kill off their plans next year, leaving them with no ground, no cash and very little credibility.

In the meantime, he is expected to be criticised about his handling of an offer by property developers Dunloe Ewart to provide a 50 acre site for a stadium in Clondalkin to the association free of charge. The offer was conditional on the FAI's plans not conflicting in any way with those of the government. However, given that the pursuit of a separate stadium to the one being considered by the government even at the time of the FAI's talks with Dunloe Ewart in late 1998 was always likely to mean a clash, it is hard to see how the association could have gone any further than they did with the Clondalkin proposal.