Serious changes are required

With the distraction of Europe safely out of the way another domestic season has kicked off for the leading contenders in our National League. Once again we can console ourselves with a string of plucky performances by local sides but like so often before they counted for little as the first-round draws for the major European competitions took place in Geneva without a single Irish club - from either side of the Border - in the UEFA hat.

Last Friday, as the league got under way here, the various draws featured 120 clubs from 34 countries. Yugoslavia, Armenia and Iceland were all represented while Israel, Cyprus and Latvia all boasted two or more entrants apiece.

In Ireland, meanwhile, the national team's FIFA rankings decline has been more rapid but no more disappointing than our clubs' performance on the UEFA ladder.

As the associations of the newly independent countries have signed up to UEFA during the 90s, the National League's decline has been solid, steady and orderly. Each season another couple of places have been lost and this summer we stood at number 43 in the 48-strong list.

Lithuania, Wales, Estonia, Malta and Liechtenstein are amongst the 42 countries ahead of us on the list while only Armenia, Luxembourg, the Faroe Islands, Albania and Azerbaijan trail behind.

This year our representatives fared worse than in any of the previous five on which our score is calculated with just one draw in six games (the Inter-Toto Cup does not count) with the result that Armenia, having one representative in the first round of the Cup Winners' Cup, will now pass us out, while Azerbaijan is catching up.

Pretty grim stuff and more than a little bizarre that our decline occurs at a time when everybody keeps slapping each other on the back about how much our league is progressing.

While well known clubs in some parts of Eastern Europe have adapted to economic upheaval, far greater player mobility and the loss of state funding, others have found themselves competing at international level after years of being buried away in the lower divisions of the old Yugoslavian or Soviet leagues. All seem, however, to have been more adept at coping than our teams.

Many of the main figures in the game here will point to the fact that our season starts long after the European tournaments now do and few could disagree, whatever their general opinion on the issue of summer soccer, that it would benefit our teams when they play in Europe.

Others point out that full-time players will, in general, always enjoy an edge over their part-time counterparts. Nevertheless, given the potential rewards, it seems astonishing that more is not being done to reverse our decline.

Had Derry City beaten Slovenia's Maribor Branik last month they would now either be in a Champions League group with IFK Gothenburg, Bayern Munich and Paris St Germain or, more likely, where Branik are, facing a UEFA Cup first round tie against Ajax.

The reward for earning the Champions League spot, even if they had lost every game, would have run to about £2 million while a meeting with Ajax, between additional prize money and television rights (presumably even RTE would have come up with a few quid for that one and the Dutch would have paid handsomely), should have been worth at least £250,000, while the rights to the second qualifying round match against Turkish champions Besiktas would have brought another substantial six figure fee.

From next season, when all spectators at UEFA games must be seated, such income will become an even more crucial part of the economics of playing in Europe as virtually every club will face the prospect of turning away supporters and losing out on gate receipts.

Despite all of this City manager Felix Healy admits that for most clubs European success remains relatively low on the overall list of priorities and without a switch in the season sees little prospect of substantial progress being made.

UCD's Dr Tony O'Neill, on the other hand, a regular UEFA observer at club games in recent years, feels that in other countries a different approach within part-time setups has paid off with, for instance, most of the lesser known clubs who have made an impact training five or six times a week compared to the two or three that is the norm here.

Whoever is right, and both have strong points, there is so much more at stake than the annual humiliation of UEFA's new ranking list - for instance our declining status undermines the credibility of our contribution to the debate on the future of European club football.

In the circumstances surely some serious consideration should be given to turning things around before - and the day may not be far off under the current structures - it really is too late.