As the new season prepares to kick off next Friday, EMMET MALONE talks to a player, a manager and a supporter about how the league can cope in the current recession

THE MANAGER:WHEELING AND dealing has always been central to the role of a manager at League of Ireland clubs but the changed financial landscape has resulted in the budgets most get to work with collapsing and the players hoping to be signed having to reposition themselves, however reluctantly, in what has become a very big bargain basement.

At Galway United, a club that only held on to a top flight status after a successful licensing appeal, Sean Connor can’t even afford to make too many of his signings there. The club is reckoned to have had a budget of €15,000 or more per week a few years back but he has just a tenth of that for the coming campaign.

By the time it is finalised, the northerner estimates, the new United squad will contain 10 amateurs and three players on loan from St Mirren. The rest will be modestly paid with the club’s top earner likely to be on no more than €300 a week, that’s comfortably less than a 10th of what wages reached elsewhere in the league at the height of the boom.

Connor remembers those times well enough. Having done well with his first League of Ireland club, he was handed the Bohemians job at the time that the Phibsborough club was brimming with confidence.

He was handed something over €20,000 to work with and set to work. Spending was going up at nearly every club but problems had already started to appear in a business model the core principle of which seemed to be “Spend, spend, spend!”

Shelbourne, for one, had almost collapsed under the strain of securing their 2006 title and the pursuit of Ollie Byrne’s European dream, and Connor found that being known to have deep pockets as he sought to pick some of the club’s departing players was something of a mixed blessing.

“The whole mindset was wrong,” he recalls, “players had a strange take on it all. I remember at one stage I was talking to a player who was telling me what he’d been earning at Shelbourne. I was saying to him, ‘yeah, but you didn’t get that, did you, because the club ended up owing you 30 or 40 grand so if you take that off then we’re in the same ballpark’ but it dragged on and eventually one of the directors just told me to do the deal.”

His time at Dalymount proved to be short in the end but even then he was concerned about whether the club would manage to deliver on its ambitious plans.

“When you were at Bohemians and you realised that the whole future of it all depended on the ground being sold but then a whole year could go by without anything happening then of course, it made you wonder,” he says.

“But at every club really, you know deep down that there’s a problem. You look at the size of the crowd, see the gate receipts and wonder whether this is going to pay the wages for the next two weeks.”

With things cut to the bone now at Galway, that shouldn’t be such an issue. More practical considerations are, however, with Connor resigned to the fact that his squad will only train together twice a week with the few Dublin-based players making it across for only one of those sessions.

The club’s infrastructure still needs to be improved while bridges need, once again, to be rebuilt with the local community, all at a time when historic debts need to be taken care of.

“My job is to put a team out there that can stay up and be competitive and I like to think I’ll manage that as I always have before. The debt situation, though, must be particularly hard to take for the fans.

“At clubs like Drogheda , Shelbourne and Bohemians they spent too much and ran into trouble but at least they won things and their supporters will remember those days for a long to come. Here, there is nothing like that to show for the money.”