SOCCER:ONE OF the beauties of league football is supposed to be encapsulated in the truism that, come the end of the campaign, the table never lies. In Ireland, though, the problem is it rarely tells the full truth either and explanatory notes are generally required to bridge the gap between perception and reality.

Needless to say, as the new Airtricity League season kicks off tonight, supporters of all clubs will harbour the usual ambitions for their sides – the title, promotion, a decent cup run – but it says a great deal about the ongoing troubles of the game here that what will once again unite even the most bitter of local rivals is a common desire for the campaign as a whole to run its course without the by now usual economic car crashes.

Of course it would be unreasonable to expect that the wider financial climate wouldn’t take its toll on the club game here and as FAI chief executive John Delaney never tires of pointing out, people in newspapers shouldn’t throw too many stones. But football has had few equals over the past few years for the scale of its difficulties and it would be hard to imagine the leaders of any of the contenders – building and perhaps travel agencies or even publishing – publicly hailing the fact in the presence of the industry’s workers, as happened at the launch of the league this week, that wages have been slashed to a fraction of what they were just a few years ago.

Setting aside the more ludicrous end of things, one of the better players at a good club three years ago could expect to earn €80,000. This time, at least two top-flight sides have budgeted to spend around that on their entire squads while earnings at Bohemians will be capped at just €500 per week until the end of the campaign at which point the pay cheques will stop every bit as suddenly as the football.

At the heart of the problem is the fact football is a discretionary spend at both ends of its financial spectrum with borderline fans giving games a miss when times are tight and benefactors putting their chequebooks away when there are far more pressing demands on their resources.

The loss of Sporting Fingal and the enlightened long-term plan espoused by Liam Buckley and John O’Brien is another serious blow to the game here but the club courted disaster by seeking on-field success years before the foundations on which the club was supposed to be built were in place.

The league as a whole, though, stored up trouble for itself in much the way the last few Ministers for Finance did for the State over the last few years. Taking money from builders was, the FAI said, viewed as an acceptable business model by Uefa but once the cash ran out and the club found itself on life support, then more than once it became a question of which was more likely to kill the patient, the illness or the medicine.

The scale of the problems in the league has been truly remarkable. Barely a top-flight club has got through the last few seasons without defaulting on wages at some stage, none has been relegated from the Premier Division for sporting reasons in the last two seasons and it is 2004 since a league table did not require an explanatory text because points had been docked or at clubs that had done well enough had suddenly vanished to a lower league by the following year.

Apart from last year’s side you have to go back further to find a year when the team that finished top didn’t subsequently go off the rails financially.

Fran Gavin talked the other day at the Aviva Stadium of the progress made in Europe in recent years with the league having risen to 29th in Uefa’s ranking list. But much of that headway was made from a change in the timing of the season and a transformation in the club revenues. We will discover how well clubs do when only one of those factors applies.

Somehow, so far, the standard on the pitch has held up remarkably well and games are routinely entertaining with many talented players as well as some of the most capable managers of the last few decades still giving it their all for less financial reward.

They, like everyone else, are sure to be relieved the games are about to start with the focus shifting to results and performances on the pitch rather than off it. That it appears to have the potential to be a particularly competitive campaign is a significant bonus with games like tonight’s at Tallaght and the Brandywell looking particularly interesting.

Rovers, Shamrock and Sligo, start as most people’s favourites for the silverware. Regardless of who lifts the trophies and how the league’s entrants do in Europe, however, if, come November, the players have been paid and the look of the table has been shaped solely by what has transpired on the field then quietly perhaps, the people who run the game will be entitled to hold the campaign up as some sort of success.