Details OF an £18 million sponsorship deal, quite the biggest in the history of Irish sport, were disclosed yesterday at the end of protracted negotiations between the FAI and Telecom Eireann.

Under the agreement, Telecom, soon to be re-branded as Eircom, will pay £11 million for the name rights of the new multi-purpose stadium which the FAI hope to have in place by the autumn of 2001 at a site adjacent to Citywest Business Park outside Dublin.

The proposed stadium, tentatively titled the Arena when the project was first announced last January, will now be known as Eircom Park for the first 10 years of its existence.

A further £6 million will go to sponsoring national teams at all levels for the same period, when the current arrangement with Opel Ireland Ltd expires on the completion of Ireland's involvement in the 2002 World Cup championship.

The remaining £1 million will be on the National League over a four-year period beginning next month. In recent years, the National League has been sponsored by Bord Gais.

It marks Telecom's entry as a major player in sports sponsorship and provides the FAI with the ideal solution in their search for a partnership with a blue-chip company to underpin their ambitious pans for the start of the new millenium.

With yesterday's announcement, the football organisation will have dissipated at least some of the scepticism which greeted the original announcement in January that after many years of indecision it was ready to proceed with plans to build new headquarters.

At this point, the most significant omission is the lack of planning permission, but Bernard O'Byrne, the FAI's chief executive, said that it is hoped to submit a formal application to South Dublin County Council by the end of next month.

"For several weeks now our project team of planning advisers has been working to fine-tune the final submission to the local authority," he said. "In a parallel development we have also established a working group in the local community, comprised of residents groups, public representatives and local community organisations, to advise on the project."

As a result of those discussions, the overall height of the towers in the original blueprint have been reduced by 18 metres, but in every other respect the plan remains intact.

O'Byrne revealed that with yesterday's announcement £48.5 million of the £65 million needed to fund the construction of the all-seater stadium, designed to accommodate 45,000 spectators, has now been secured.

In addition to the Telecom deal, separate sponsorship packages have been negotiated with a range of firms whose interests range from banking to alcohol, from soft drinks to sports outfitting.

Robust marketing of corporate facilities has also yielded significant revenue and a further £10 million is expected to come on stream from advance sales of tickets to the general public. This would leave the FAI with only a small deficit to meet at the time of the official opening, planned for just over two years' time.

"Any doubts that may have existed among a minority of people have now been well and truly dispelled and we stand vindicated in our original statement that the project, one of the most ambitious ever undertaken in this country, is self-financing," said O'Byrne.

The timing of the upbeat message, just a matter of weeks after Minister for Sport Jim McDaid indicated that he was prepared to plough £11 million of taxpayers money into football if the FAI abandoned its project in favour of the National Sports Stadium recommended by the Government, was scarcely coincidental.

O'Byrne indicated that in the light of Dr McDaid's statement he will now be approaching the Government for funding of up to £20 million to assist in the development of ancillary facilities at the Citywest site, including the construction of a national coaching centre and a sports injuries clinic.

Without mentioning either the GAA or Croke Park and their £20 million grant from central government specifically, he said: "We don't begrudge them their good fortune, in fact we admire them. But if we come with a genuinely viable proposal for a stadium, we deserve to be treated equally well.

"There is a precedent to back our case which, we believe, will enjoy not just the support of those involved in football, but of sports people generally."

Paying tribute to the contribution of Opel for their role in the development of the game in this country in recent years, O'Byrne said: "If they ever get to write a book on sporting sponsorships, the partnership of Opel and the FAI deserves to be mentioned as one of the most successful of them all."

Alfie Kane, group chief executive of Telecom Eireann, said it was the concept of a stadium capable of providing a home for general entertainment as well as sporting events which attracted his company in the first instance.

Referring to their decision to buy the name rights of the stadium for 10 years, he said that it was in line with US trends States where this form of marketing had taken off in recent years.

Telecom chairman Ray McSharry, mildly startled to discover that he was being wrongly fingered as the one attempting to scupper the Grand Plan with that £11 million inducement to clubs, also attended yesterday's briefing.

From the world of football came FAI president Pat Quigley and national team manager Mick McCarthy, who truncated an American holiday to endorse yesterday's announcement.

"This is a great confidence booster for people involved in Irish football for we'll now have a stadium of which everybody can be justly proud," he said.