National League champions Shelbourne stand to make at least £150,000 from next week's Champions League second qualifying-round tie with Rosenborg following their defeat of Macedonian side Sloga Jugomagnat.

Despite the exceptionally high costs involved in preparing for their first-round tie, as well as travelling to Skopje where they stayed five nights, the club has made around £100,000 from their involvement with the competition so far.

Club official Ollie Byrne has travelled to Switzerland for today's third-round draw where the hope is that a significant sum can be secured for the Norweigan television rights to next Wednesday's game at Tolka Park.

Together with prize money from UEFA (the club is currently guaranteed a figure of around £190,000 in total) and gate receipts (this week's match grossed in excess of £30,000 and next week's should improve on that figure), the overall value to the Drumcondra club could end up exceeding a third of a million pounds before player bonuses are paid out.

While the figures so far are very substantial in an Irish context - Shelbourne would normally expect to turn over around £1 million a season - they would be greatly overshadowed by the windfall that would come the club's way in the event that they upset the Norweigan champions.

It's a tall order, for Rosenborg's recent record in the competition is impressive, particularly last season when they topped a group that also included Feyenoord, Borussia Dortmund and Boavista in the initial roundrobin stage.

Since then, they have lost several of their leading players to overseas clubs but remain strong favourites to progress to the third round at which stage clubs such as the two Milanese sides, last year's finalists Valencia and UEFA Cup winners Galatasaray enter the competition.

Ironically, the fact that Rosenborg, along with Rangers and Leeds, have been seeded for today's draw means that if Shelbourne were to win through and take on the Norwegians' seeding, they could not be drawn against any of the competition's biggest names.

Among the unseeded sides who they might draw are the likes of Hamburg and 1860 Munich from Germany, as well as Turkey's Besiktas, any of whom would be likely to bring substantial television revenue with them to Dublin.

Also included, though, are tough, but far less glamorous sides, such as Slovenian champions Maribor and Moldovan outfit Zimbru Chisinau, who last season beat St Patrick's Athletic 10-0 on aggregate.

"To be honest," said Shelbourne chairman Gary Brown yesterday, "we haven't really thought ahead that far.

"We haven't even figured out what next week's game will be worth to us and it would be a fairly major upset if we were to get any further because, hard as they were to beat, Sloga were no Rosenborg."

A win would, he happily concedes, though, represent a "very heavy financial windfall" not least because "it would mean that we would have at least two more ties to play, one of which would be in the UEFA Cup".

The fact, meanwhile, that both Leeds and Rangers have been seeded means the prospect of a repeat of the so-called "Battle of Britain" tie of eight years ago - which Rangers won 6-3 on aggregate - has been avoided.

For United, there is the added relief of having avoided a potential rematch with Galatasaray, although a third-round tie against Besiktas, who are also from Istanbul, the city in which two English fans were murdered in April of this year, remains a possibility.

"We will have to take whoever we are drawn against and, if it is Besiktas, then we will take the necessary and appropriate steps," said Leeds secretary Ian Silvester.

Republic of Ireland Youths manager Brian Kerr has been forced into making six changes to his under-16 panel for next week's Milk Cup tournament in the north following a decision by Leeds United, Manchester City and Wolves to withdraw their players from his squad.

With City's Stephen Elliott and Glen Whelan, Robbie Shields and Stephen Maguire of Leeds, Ian McGrane from Wolves and the injured Dean Buckley of Coventry all out, Kerr has called up Michael Byrne (Notts Forest), Denis Behan (Abbeyfeale), Stephen Maguire (Belvedere Boys), Robert Milner (Tramore Athletic) Killian Brennan (Home Farm) and Dean Buckley (Leeds FC, Cork).