Developments AT Oriel Park, where the League's most successful club of recent times will attempt to sort out its dire financial problems, will be watched from around the country this week.

By midweek the directors hope the way to stability will be clearly visible with a combination of cost savings and improved generation of commercial revenue finally starting to help the club emerge from what has been a long and steady period of decline.

Quite where Dundalk's troubles started is difficult to pinpoint, but the club's attendances were fairly dismal even when they last won the league under Dermot Keely in 1995. Even before then it had been exceptional factors such as the sale of Steve Staunton, a well-structured deal that brought revenue into Oriel right up until the player moved to Aston Villa, and some successful friendlies that had helped to offset the declining interest among the local population.

From the time the Staunton well ran dry and a couple of high-profile friendlies, against Liverpool and Manchester United, were so poorly handled they generated a very disappointing financial return, the cracks started to appear. Even after the company had been dramatically restructured on a couple of occasions, last week's announcement that the entire squad was up for sale is merely the culmination of a series of events that began at the start of this decade.

Still, very few people feel that the patient is beyond saving.

Chairman Phil Flynn, a man who built a career on maintaining that the gloomy talk of others was merely a bargaining position, insists that drastic action is required if bankruptcy is to be avoided. He has, however, also conceded that even in the worst-case scenario there will be a National League club playing out of Oriel Park this time next year.

Elsewhere, too, there is confidence that Dundalk's fortunes can be restored if the lessons of the past are heeded. This afternoon Pat Dolan, the St Patrick's Athletic chief executive, will meet one of the club's directors to offer whatever advice he can provide. Dolan believes that the bad times are a recent enough feature of his club's existence for the Dubliners to be able to provide some useful pointers.

"There are always things to be learned," he says. "A year after we won the league in 1990 we went to the wall and we learned some very hard lessons from that. I think we've shown that it's possible to pick yourselves up and move forward from that, though. If people take responsibility and accept that things have to improve then there is enormous potential for clubs here to be successful and make money." His own club, he insists, has generated profits for the last three seasons. St Patrick's are certainly one of the clubs from which others can draw inspiration. But for Dundalk just now, the case of Sligo Rovers may seem to have more immediate relevance.

It is 10 years now since the people who ran Rovers considered abandoning their senior status and returning to the Sligo and Leitrim league. Luckily, enough people thought that things could be turned around for the club and 100 supporters came together to take over the debts. They also established a trust that would safeguard the future of the Showgrounds, like Oriel a crumbling stadium but, like Oriel too, one well situated in a town with huge interest in football and one with enormous potential for redevelopment.

Since then, says club chairman Ray Gallagher, Rovers may have moved forwards slowly but they have never once looked back. The long-awaited building work at the Showgrounds is now about to get under way and improved training facilities, a school of excellence and a new clubhouse are all at various stages of planning.

Much the same, of course, could be said at Dundalk where, as at Sligo, young local talent is finally breaking into the senior side as a result of their own school of excellence. A key difference between the two clubs, though, is that a decade ago it was decided at Sligo, recalls Gallagher, that the club would never again spend more money than it had. It's a decision that has given them the underlying stability which has allowed them to plan for the longer term.

Gate receipts are, he admits, a third or so of what they were at their height (even now, however, they are around twice Dundalk's current average), but a turn in the team's fortunes will help to remedy that. The club has also become more professional over the years at raising money from other sources. Crucially, though, if it doesn't come in, says Gallagher, it doesn't go out.

"It used to happen that, like a lot of other clubs, we would simply say `well, God is good, so something will come up' but we've learned the hard way that you just can't run a club like that anymore."

Last Thursday, Flynn and his fellow directors admitted publicly that the same lesson had now, in painful circumstances, been learned at Oriel Park and it is to be hoped that Dundalk's troubles may focus minds at any other clubs who have been slipping down the same slope.