Emmet Malone gives the background to how Drogheda United have bounced back from the verge of financial disaster and the men behind the revival

Few things in life epitomise the concept of boom and bust quite like your average Eircom League club. One minute they're up, the next down. Flush then flat broke.

The precise causes vary from case to case but there are fairly common themes. Investors, for a start, tend to come then go while managers and their teams taste success then failure and crowds vary accordingly. When the wheels come off, it is standard practice to struggle through some tough times, dust yourself down and start all over again.

At Drogheda United, things couldn't have been much more bust two years ago. With the club on its knees financially, the team was on the verge of disintegrating because of unpaid wages. Even after a rescue package was put together the FAI, spurred on by a couple of clubs that had been in the same boat previously only to come back from the brink the hard way, insisted all debts of the previous regime were paid and the new owners put up a €100,000 bond before the competitive on-field action was allowed to resume.

That sum alone would have deterred most but the new consortium was led by Vincent Hoey, a man with around half a century of involvement with United in its various guises.

Hoey is a successful businessman from the town and had been involved in rescue missions more than once before. What was different this time, however, was that he came to the boardroom table accompanied by Chris Byrne and Eugene O'Connor, two more businessmen with strong groundings in the local community and enough money between them so that the burden of sustaining a top-flight senior football team wouldn't quickly become a pain too great to bear.

According to those close to the club Byrne has, in many ways, been the driving force behind the revival at United Park. The Louthman has had a lifelong involvement with sport, both soccer and Gaelic football having played with and managed teams in both codes. He made his money in label printing, starting small and ending up as one of the industry's major players.

His passion for United is a more recently-acquired thing, the result, most people believe, of the tragic death of his son Ronan, a young man who shared his father's love of sport.

Ronan played both with United's reserves and the town's most successful Gaelic football team, Newtown Blues. The 22-year-old was killed in a car accident on the way home from a day at the races in July 2003.

The father's determination to build the club into a genuine force on the national scene is, close observers believe, fired by his devotion to the memory of his son who was a lifelong United supporter.

In two years, a great deal has been achieved. Paul Doolin was hired to manage the first team and was provided with resources as good as any available at any club in the country. His budget is reckoned to be second only to Shelbourne's and the club's backroom and administrative staff have all been expanded considerably.

More importantly, United's three main backers, all of whom have experience in the property game, along with other board members who possess related expertise, have vigorously pursued a plan to relocate the club to a green-field site a mile and a half or so outside of the town.

There have been setbacks along the way with a previous scheme to move to a location on the south side of the town falling through on planning grounds. But only last week there were suggestions a major announcement regarding the current plan, which involves a substantial piece of land just off the M1 motorway, might be made in the run-up to the cup final.

The Health Service Executive, in any case, will view the current ground next week with a view to purchasing for an expansion of the Lourdes hospital and the announcement may well come soon after that.

Details are vague at present with the men most involved in the scheme reluctant to give much away but the basics seem to involve the development of what would initially be a 7,000-seat stadium, designed from the outset to be expandible as required further down the road, on a site that would also be developed commercially.

All revenues generated from other aspects of the venture would, it is said, be directed to the club, thereby guaranteeing its revenue streams into the future and allowing it make further progress both on and off the pitch.

It is, by the standards of the league, all seriously ambitious stuff but after a week in which interest in the club has soared around the town, the men behind the plan appear to be more certain than ever that their vision of the future can and will be realised.

A first major trophy for the club tomorrow would help to silence the few determined sceptics who still remain.