Premier gains may lead to long-term fall

Emmet Malone On Soccer: Brian Moore, the long-time Big Matchpresenter who died almost a decade ago, used to express regret that the introduction by ITV of the Sunday afternoon highlights programme at the start of the 1970s contributed much to the decline of the League of Ireland.

The process, needless to say, was helped along by quite a few people here at home with the kamikaze business models employed and utter lack of vision displayed by most of those running League of Ireland clubs helping to ensure they fell ever further behind their English counterparts.

The three decades or so that passed with virtually no capital investment in the game here would have been bad enough but since the early 1990s the English game has almost completely reinvented itself with dramatic improvements funded by previously unimaginable levels of television and merchandising rights.

Things have started to change within the Irish game over the past couple of years but the scale of the task facing those who believe they can move the league here substantially forward is evident in parks and schoolyards up and down the country with English and Scottish jerseys routinely outnumbering those of local clubs.

Still the popularity of the game these days is driven by the Premiership, making the relationship between clubs here and there rather complex, something that was well illustrated by the Sunderland bandwagon as it made its away around the country.

In contrast to the visit by Tottenham to Richmond Park last month, Sunderland's tour offered a little more to the host clubs that a nice little earner. Traditionally, these games have provided the visiting sides with a run-out that is a little more demanding than a training game and the Irish side with a profit that can be, by their standards, fairly significant.

Dignity can be a casualty along the way, though, as when Manchester United played to packed houses at Tolka Park a few years back and the announcement of the Shelbourne team before the game was booed by many of the 10,000 Irish attendance.

In a similar vein, tickets for the sold-out Spurs game changed hands outside the ground that night for a multiple of their face value as Irish supporters of the London club sought to grab a rare opportunity to see them play here.

What they got for their money was never impressive and almost petered out completely over the second half amid a string of substitutions. Pictures in the newspapers the next day of two international players sitting on the Tottenham bench - one sending a text message, the other listening to an iPod - pretty much said it all about what the night meant to the visiting players.

That the game was still seen as more attractive by the public here, however, than the visit of a decent Danish side in Odense for a Uefa Cup game a week later was underlined by the empty seats at the latter match.

Sunderland's attraction, of course, is very much based in the club's recently-acquired Irish connections. There is clearly some logic to people here taking an interest in a side that is Irish-owned, has high-profile former internationals in its key management roles and a handful of players from the Republic of Ireland in its first-team squad.

For the three Irish clubs who played Roy Keane's men, the enterprise was something of a "no brainer". The club charged a rather modest fee, around €20,000 per game plus cuts of the gate and television money in return for which Bohemians, Cork City and Galway United got full houses plus the services of Niall Quinn for corporate events which also raised substantial amounts.

TG4 paid €100,000 for permission to broadcast the three matches while Setanta chipped in almost €40,000 more for the international rights. Galway United charged €50 for the better seats at the game itself and €3,000 a table for the accompanying bash. All three will have raised over €100,000, an important boost to turnover at a time when rules limiting the amount spent on wages to a percentage of cash generated are about to come into force.

Sunderland's reasons for building their pre-season around a week in Ireland have hardly been entirely charitable, however. The club has been relentlessly targeting both the business community and ordinary fans here since the takeover by the Drumaville consortium was completed.

Quinn played down the importance of gaining individual Irish supporters while here, pointing out that the club gets only the same admission money from supporters who had flown from Dublin, Cork or Galway for a match as it does from locals.

Already, however, they have added one Irish company, Boylesports, as their main sponsor and been backed by another, Aer Arann, on their travels here.

In a fine piece in this paper on Saturday Michael Walker outlined the social and economic context in which the club operates. Sunderland FC, he made clear, is vitally important to the identity of a community that has suffered many setbacks in recent decades but its support base is not one that can afford the sort of ticket prices that would enable the club to better compete with wealthier rivals nor is the local business sector in a position to contribute anything like what will be raised by rivals in better-heeled areas of Britain. In the circumstances, Ireland provides a highly attractive and potentially lucrative secondary market.

They are quite entitled to target it and clearly there are those who currently feel there is the potential here for benefits to flow both ways. Already, though, we have seen last week's tour do much to overshadow the involvement of Irish clubs in the Uefa Cup which has, in recent seasons, helped to generate a good deal of positive publicity for the league here.

Saturday's Sunderland piece in The Irish Timeswas the first in a weekly series that will run over the course of this Premier League season and the club is bound to have sizeable numbers of column inches devoted to it in all of the main newspapers. It will be interesting to see how much of that space comes at the expense of top-flight rivals.

And it will be interesting too to see whether, in the event that firm evidence emerges that Sunderland's activities are stifling the belated attempts by the league here to reverse its decline, Quinn and his partners come to be seen in a few years' time as friends or foes of the "Irish game".